The Road To Nowhere

It couldn’t happen to a nicer club, could it? Leeds United are rooted to the floorboards of the Premiership after a string of savagely heavy defeats, burdened with virtually an entire starting XI of cheap-as-chips loan signings who won’t try a leg, crippled by the worst set of financial results in football history, and facing the spectre of administration if, as seems increasingly likely, they fall through the trapdoor in May.

Can it get any worse? Of course it can. This is Leeds. So then they announce that, despite selling most of their star players in the 12 months up to 30 June 2003, their wage bill has actually risen by stg£3 million, defying all recorded laws of economics.
And then their idiot of a former boss, one of the two individuals primarily responsible for burying the club up to its eyes in shit in the first place, is linked with the newly-vacant manager’s job.
And then comes another announcement, that the club’s star striker, one of of their few remaining players worth a damn, has been arrested on the same day as his first England call-up in twelve months.
Down, down, deeper and down, as Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt used to bellow at Castle Donington every summer.
Those loan signings are something else, all right. Leeds have a hell of a lot of them, and with the exception of Jermaine Pennant, they all appear completely incapable of playing professional football. Watching their performances recently, one could be forgiven for assuming they aren’t trying because they know they’ll be heading off again when the transfer window opens and they don’t want to get injured. In fact, the opposite is true. If you get a player on loan for a season, you’re stuck with them.
One shudders to contemplate the kind of money some of them are on, especially the woeful Roque Junior, who last year usurped Stephane Guivarc’h and Felix as the worst player ever to pick up a World Cup winner’s medal, and then added a Champions League winner’s medal to his ill-gotten haul six months ago. Even in the severely underwhelming context of Leeds’ current side, watching this guy would make your eyes bleed.
Irrespective of whichever lunatic takes over from Peter Reid, can anybody realistically expect to save Leeds from the mire of flaming snot that awaits them in the Nationwide? They have Paul Robinson, a good keeper who seems to be slowly turning into Kevin Pressman; they have Alan Smith, whose peerless impression of a blue-arsed fly is occasionally offset by a goal here and there; and they have Mark Viduka, sort of.
Ah yes, Viduka. There is a very good reason why the portly Australian has downed tools this season. It is because it has finally dawned on him that he is stuck at Leeds United for at least the rest of this season, and quite possibly the next, even if (especially if!) they somehow manage not to get relegated.
The other week, the London Independent — the financial pages, of course — carried a quite staggering story which revealed that Leeds’ half-dozen best players are effectively mortgaged to a very small finance company. (The story contained the aside that Robbie Keane was bought for stg£12m and sold for stg£7m, which presumably left Leeds continuing to pay for outstanding debt after he had been sold to Spurs.)
This situation affects Viduka more than any other player at the club. Leeds have very little incentive to sell him, because they only bought him from Celtic on one of those lease arrangements. The entire transfer fee of stg£6m was paid not by Leeds United, but through the good offices of Registered European Football Finance. In return, Leeds pay back an agreed sum every month. If and when Viduka is bought by another club, Celtic will get something like two-thirds of the transfer fee. So, essentially, he is trapped at Elland Road, which is why he has behaved like a four-year-old for the past few weeks in a successful attempt to get the hapless, clueless Peter Reid fired.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, nor a nicer club. Down down, deeper and down…