I see we have a few 'Swales was a big blue' posts appearing in this thread. I despair. Swales was out for Swales first and foremost. He was a local businessman who'd have been anonymous but for the profile his role at City gave him and loved the limelight.
He repeatedly turned down offers that would have seen serious money invested in the club, from relegation in 1983 onwards. There was a share issue in 1985-ish when Stephen Boler came in as a shareholder, and Swales used to love quoting this as the point at which he'd given people the chance to invest in the club but "no bugger was interested", as he'd say. In fact, plenty of buggers were interested, but not with a condition that he stayed as chairman and main decision maker. Boler was his mate and wasn't interested at all in being involved in the running of the club.
Swales took a lot more out of the club than he put in. He managed to pick up shares on the cheap in the seventies and in 1981, as soon as the FA/FL changed the rules to allow for paid directors was in there taking a salary that made him better paid than the highest earning player for much of the 1980s. (After that, he'd only have been one of the top squad members in pay terms!). And he ended up making a hefty profit on his shares.
All of which would have been fine if he'd run the club well. Unfortunately, he had no understanding whatsoever of the way the football business was developing in the eighties and nineties and, long before he left, to borrow Elliot Rashman's line, we'd become a "corner shop in a world of supermarkets".
Swales left in 1994 with City the only club in the PL (apart from Blackburn, who were being bankrolled by Jack Walker, and Wimbledon, who relied on player sales because they got tiny crowds) to make an operating loss. That year, our turnover was less than that of those traditional football financial giants Crystal Palace, Norwich and Leicester. Yet we had the third biggest wage bill in the PL, a heavy debt and all that before we even started the redevelopment of the Kippax, which, Parliament had decreed, was required to be completed by 1994.
Then there was the way he'd appointed all kinds of mates and people who'd bung him a few quid onto the board or into honorary positions at the club. Created the basis of the so called 'fifth column', which used to be much talked about - people on the periphery of the club who would snipe in the background to try and protect their own positions.
And yet, on here, we have people saying, "Oh well, good old Swalesy - may have f**ked up, but only because he was such a big blue and wanted the best for the club!" What a load of b0llocks. He was an incompetent, self-serving idiot who screwed up MCFC good and proper.
Francis Lee's tenure as chairman proved disastrous, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, and despite the promises of his acolytes in the 'Forward With Franny' campaign, he didn't have enough money, so: (i) he and his associates never owned more than 29.9% of the club - this left many of the old guard under Swales in and around MCFC, always happy to undermine him; and (ii) we had to wheel and deal to try to improve the team, success on the pitch being key to improving the dire financial situation. He unwisely inflated expectations with bold public promises, and alienated some within the club by running it as if he owned it lock stock and barrel despite 70% of the shares being in other hands. Most of all, his judgement on the football side, ironically in view of his background, was utterly woeful.
But the biggest reason for his failure was the legacy of the utter buffoon who preceded him. Lee, making many mistakes of which some were pretty crass, failed to turn around a club whose previous incompetent management had set it on a course for disaster. But most of the blame for the failure should be placed with the person who set it on that course in the first place. The naive excuses offered by some, including on this thread, in mitigation just don't wash.
