Wooderbeen said:
Before Lee came along the club's off-field management was incredibly poor and from day one he set about building the City brand and he dragged us kicking and screaming to a place where most other top European football clubs already were. His work on the business side, continued by Bernstein, got our house well and truly in order at a time when things were going pear-shaped on the pitch.
This is right. Swales's legacy was really very poor in terms of the off-field state of the club, and we were heading in only one direction if he'd stayed.
Before Lee came, the club shop and merchandising rights were licensed to a third party (bloke called Eddie Phillips) for a flat fee of GBP 60k per year on a long-term deal. The same year, United were turning over GBP 8 million and Newcastle GBP 6 million from merchandising, generating profits in the millions. Lee got us out of that deal and started to put in place a commercial structure that vaguely resembled something befitting football in the 1990s as opposed to the 1970s.
He also, as someone says, did a lot of work with the Commonwealth Games bid team with a view to moving us to the Commonwealth Stadium after the Games. And don't forget the Academy. We got the newly invented Academy status with the first batch of applicants in 1998, but the decision to go for it, the planning and the overhaul of the Platt Lane facilities necessary for our application to be accepted were all down to Lee's regime.
(Credit also to the board after he left. After relegation in 1998, we had to make all kinds of cuts to compensate for the anticipated drop in revenue - turnover eventually fell from around GBP 15 million in 1997/8 to GBP 12 million in 1998/9. With the Academy expected to cost GBP 750k per annum to run and money still to be spent to complete the Platt Lane upgrade, shelving creation of the Academy for a couple of years would have been seen by many as a sensible decision at the time to alleviate a short-term crisis. Thank heavens they took the long-term view).
As everyone says, where he fell down was, ironically given the way he kept saying what a plus his football background represented, on the football side. Ultimately, whether a club is badly run or well run, the biggest effect on the bottom line is the success or otherwise of the team.
Lee horribly mishandled the managerial situation - not only in appointing Ball, but also undermining Brian Horton, who spent a season and a half with the press telling everyone he was two games from the sack when Lee should either have backed the manager properly or sacked him earlier if the chairman didn't feel able to offer the appropriate support. And Lee also dictated transfer policy, resolving to sell high earners (who happened to be the best players).
He didn't ever, I believe, impose on a manager an unwanted player, but he did also play an active role in identifying targets along with the manager, and he also insisted on approving every deal at the time (that changed later, and didn't apply under Frank Clark). So when people talk about the unwise decision to trade Walsh for Creaney, that was a joint decision between Lee and Ball, not Ball's decision alone.
