Fowlers Penalty Miss said:
M18CTID said:
A bit biased? I'd say you're being a lot more than a bit biased lol. We're all entitled to our opinions of course but I couldn't disagree more with your post. It actually worries me just how much leeway some blues are prepared to give Swales compared to Lee, especially as Swales had far longer at the helm and fucked up time after time after time. Lee was by no means perfect but I wouldn't mind betting that if he hadn't come in when he did, we could've been staring at administration or worse as Swales had run us into the ground. And to say Lee was only in it for the money and Swales wasn't is bizarre. Swales was obsessed with money - why else would he routinely fiddle attendance figures to the extent that he did?!!!
I wouldn't say I hated Swales though - in a way I pitied him but he could've done us all a favour including himself if he'd fucked off a lot sooner than he did. On the one occasion that I did get to speak to him, he didn't come across as too unpleasant and the one time I really felt for him was when City were away at Luton and we were the first club to play there after Luton imposed their ban on away fans. Swales was on Grandstand beforehand debating it with Luton's utter c**t of a chairman David Evans. Swales was sticking up for those City fans banned from entering Kenilworth Road and I do believe he was showing genuine empathy but because Evans was an MP and a better orator, Swales was struggling to get his points across.
It doesn't really matter now, but come on. Lee
was only in it for the money.
It's not bizarre to me. It was an eye opener when I read the book' Richer than God'.
As I said, Swales, though misguided in his judgement, did have the club at heart. We have both written faint praise of him, after all.
I met him as well, on many occasions, and I liked him on a personal level.
I remember meeting him in Hale, not long before he died, when the campaign to oust him was probably at it's fiercest. Maybe it was after, I can't recall the exact moment in that context, but he looked dreadful. Deep red face, huge bags under his eyes, struggling to breath. It wasn't nice to see him like that, but we exchanged pleasantries, and it was the last time I saw him.
Yes, I am biased, because I know from speaking to him, he loved City and it's supporters. He was a blue.
I'm not convinced Lee was was a Blue at heart, but like you wrote, it's just my opinion.
I think your opinion of Swales is rather rosy. In British football, directors couldn't receive a salary from a club until 1981. As soon as that practice was brought within the rules, Swales became the club's highest paid employee and remained so until he was ousted. He never put a penny of his own into the club (he bought up shares gradually on the cheap to gain a major shareholding, but that money went to the previous owners of the shares and not the club), and when the club behaved extravagantly under his stewardship, it did so entirely with borrowed money, crippling itself for years afterwards through vast capital and interest repayments.
Notwithstanding the need for the club to be refinanced, he boasted about rejecting any approaches he had to buy him out, preferring to use his position at the club to further his ambitions within the FA. Finally, when he did leave, Swales made a handsome profit on his shares.
Like him you may well have done. I met him once and he was pleasant. I also recall that when my sister was doing some school project or other for her GCSEs, she chose a football-related one and wrote to both City and United with a questionnaire. To be fair to United, they responded and gave helpful answers, but Swales sent back an incredibly detailed, handwritten reply that he'd obviously spent a long time over. I'm not saying he was an ogre, but he took a huge, ill-advised gamble that left our club hopelessly unable to compete with similar resourced rivals; he prized his own personal position over looking for investment that would help the club address that issue; and all the while, he took plenty out of City over the years, putting nothing in.
As for Francis Lee, well, as a young solicitor in Manchester in the 1990s, I had access to the files Lee’s legal team were given as part of the due diligence exercise over the club. I did work relating to the club both for the club itself and for significant shareholders in it (not Lee). There was a lot of discord and bitterness and I spoke to people who didn’t like Francis, but I don’t think any of them would allege that he didn’t care about the club. He had the best times of his life as a player at City, was idolised by the fans and it would be odd if he didn’t retain an affection for it based on that. He certainly continues to attend matches, take an interest and evince enthusiasm for the club on social media, long after any chance for him to make any money out of City had passed.
I knew you were going to quote David Conn when I saw your view of Lee. I’m afraid that my view of Conn is that his analytical skills are weak, and he’s too readily drawn to narratives that support his view of events, without examining whether they actually correspond to the reality. And this is what he’s done with Lee.
Now, let’s look at what Conn says about Lee in ‘Richer Than God’. The following is taken from an interview that City fan The Paris Angel did with Conn (see here - <a class="postlink" href="http://www.weststandbogs.co.uk/category/interviews/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.weststandbogs.co.uk/category/interviews/</a>):
What set David on this journey of investigative journalism was an interview with the then newly appointed Chairman of MCFC, Francis Lee, which he was sent to do by North West Business Insider magazine in1994. The whole idea behind the story was the rapid transformation of football from a professional sport into a business. The following is taken from David’s most recent book, Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up:
“We got into talking, and as I waited for Franny to articulate an affection for the club and inspire me with his intentions for it, it crept on me gradually that he was talking about money, and the club’s need for it”
Now, when Lee took over City, we were in the relegation zone and had just been knocked out of the FA Cup by a side from the fourth tier. A previously brilliant youth policy was in tatters. Maine Road was a scruffy shadow of the fabulously atmospheric stadium that, a decade or two before, had several times been picked over Old Trafford as a neutral venue for prestige fixtures.
However, this was only the half of it. The Deloitte survey of football club accounts in 1994 will show you that, Wimbledon aside (whose tiny gates meant that they relied on developing and selling players to survive at that level), we were the only club in the nascent PL to make an operating loss. We had comfortably the largest borrowings of any club in the PL. Our income was lower than that of Norwich, Leicester and Crystal Palace, yet we had the second highest wage bill in English football. Whereas Manchester United and Newcastle were starting to make significant cash out of merchandising at this point, Swales had franchised our operations in this area for an annual flat fee of, IIRC, GBP 60K. And none of this took account of the fact that we were about to lose 50% of ground capacity because the Kippax Stand would have to be rebuilt.
In other words, he inherited a complete fucking shambles and had to try to turn it round. The popular phrase at the time was that City were a “corner shop in a world of supermarkets”, and it was obvious that City did need too be run in a more business-like fashion. So, North West Business Insider sends someone to talk to Franny Lee about this and that’s what he discusses, assuming quite reasonably that a magazine with the phrase ‘Business Insider’ would be interested in that. It’s utterly facile to use that as the basis for a conclusion that he lacked an affection for the club.
Now, Conn sees the 1990s as marking a watershed in English football, with wealthy men becoming involved in the game in order to make money on the back of the TV rights boom. And he’s drawn to a narrative that even his first boyhood footballing hero was just a “businessman” (a word Conn uses with venomous distaste) who had no real affection for the club he’d served with such distinction. However, whether consciously or not, I think Conn shapes this fact to fit the narrative rather than the other way round, and such a policy often leads to deficient analysis.
As an aside, Conn seems unaware that rich men were involved in football for their own ends long before the 1990s, even if those ends weren’t always to do directly with making money directly from the club. Look at John Houlding’s role in the formation of Liverpool or Henry Norris’s involvement at Arsenal, those two clubs being regarded by many as two of the grandest in the English game.
Moreover, if Lee had been successful in turning City round, would people have begrudged him making a few quid in the process? After all, I believe he got involved at City after he’d sold a business of his. That gave him the money to buy a significant stake in City and to make available to the club the money to sign Peter Beagrie, Paul Walsh and Uwe Rosler. Without those signings, we’d almost certainly have gone down in 1994.
Conn clearly regards football as too pure to be sullied by the notion of making a profit (someone who once worked with him said, “His constant inference that anyone who has made a lot of money must be a bad person did get a bit tiring!”). However, I’d argue that by making available money to City to improve the team, he deprived himself of the chance to invest in other business ventures. If that had then allowed the club to turn round, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have benefitted alongside the club (and note the last three words – if Lee was to prosper, the club would have to prosper, too, so we’re not talking about a Glazer-style situation where their personal interests cut across those of the club).
But the most compelling points against this view of Lee as a cold-eyed profiteer with no emotional attachment to the club lies in his stewardship of the club and the fact that he regularly took decisions that inhibited his likelihood of making a quick buck. For instance, he could have sat back, waited for the club to go down, and taken full control for a much lower price four months later (it would probably have been in administration). Someone who had purely business motives would have done that. Lee opted to get into the club while he could act to prevent relegation.
Fast forward three years or so, and clubs such as Villa and Newcastle were floating on the stock market. The former were valued at GBP 120 million, the latter at 50% more. City had been refinanced by a share issue in which Boler and the JD Sports pair of Makin and Wardle invested. If we’d made the PL, we were certainly a club of a size that meant we could have looked to capitalise on the stock market listing bonanza, too. At this time, Lee personally drive through a project, at a cost well into seven figures, for City’s youth system to gain Academy status. Someone in it for the money would have spent that cash on players with a view to winning promotion in the short term.
Now, I’m no apologist for Lee. I think he made mistakes during his time at City and I thought, given the divisions between board members and key shareholders towards the end of his tenure, it was really time for him to go. But I think he deserves a lot better than to have his motives for involvement at City in the 1990s impugned and misrepresented in the way they have been.
