James Lawton: How dream of Ridsdale turned into a nightmare

'The real problem goes back to that trial - that's when David O'Leary, the manager, and the chairman got it all wrong... They lost the plot'

Peter "Thunderfoot" Lorimer's eyes glazed over somewhat yesterday as the latest details of the decline (£17m working loss, £79m debt) and the quite likely elimination of the football club he helped make great were accompanied by the parting platitudes of the resigning chairman, Peter Ridsdale.

Nor was he enraptured by the appointment of Ridsdale's successor, Professor John McKenzie, by the faceless plc which kept its collective head well below the parapet while the hapless former chairman "lived the dream" which was really a nightmare. A nightmare made of borrowed money and fatal hubris. "Who's he?" asked Lorimer when told of the arrival of a new man.

Lorimer's old team-mate John Giles was similarly underwhelmed. "Another puppet, presumably," said Don Revie's old field general.

While the fans rage and wonder what happened to the grand plan fronted up by Ridsdale, the old players shake their heads at the latest underlining of an old truth. Football isn't business. It isn't academics like Bill Gerrard, of the Leeds business school, a lacerating critic of the club yesterday but willing enough, back in the great expansion of the club, to act as an "expert" consultant valuing the players for the benefit of the money lenders fuelling, under bizarre lease-loan arrangements, the spending spree of David O'Leary and his grandstanding public backer, Ridsdale.

As we have said here before, the method of financing of the Leeds "dream" would long ago have been investigated by a Premiership which had any serious concern about the future of the national game – as opposed to systematic lunging into the bottomless gravy bowl football so recently promised to be. But all those off-shore deals have been done now, and back in Yorkshire the club that Revie built so surely, if at times with somewhat questionable ethics, contemplates the possibility of relegation, and such sickening consequences as going into administration, if not full-blown bankruptcy.

It is a story without the whiff of a hero – a few victims perhaps, but no heroes. That is the point to which "Thunderfoot" keeps returning.

"If you want to be kind you could say Ridsdale gambled and lost," says Lorimer, "but that's letting him off the hook a bit, isn't he? He was happy to take all the cheers and parade the new players. He lapped all that up. The point is I know the club and I live in the town and naturally I've followed events quite closely. You want to know why Leeds are in their current position. The real problem goes back to that trial – that's when David O'Leary, the manager, and Ridsdale, his mate, got it all wrong. That's when O'Leary the football man and Ridsdale the businessman lost the plot.

"I shall never know why O'Leary published his book – how much money did he make, who knows, but it can't have been a fraction of what he was on from the club – we know Ridsdale got £650,000 last year when the club was falling apart. I dare say quite a lot of ordinary folk would be ready to take a bit of stick for that amount.

"Whatever the rights and wrongs of the behaviour of Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate, they had one trial and then the club put them through another. They did everything in public. O'Leary said it might have been better if the lads had gone to jail. He talked about how they had dragged the club into the gutter. That's something to tell the boys, not the world – and they went public with the fines they were administrating, they were trying so hard to look good but what they were doing was guaranteeing they lost the dressing-room.

"O'Leary still claims he didn't lose the dressing-room, but how do you explain going half a season with just two wins when you have one of the best and most expensive teams in the land? What's the other reason? Maybe they thought Bowyer and Woodgate were just two lads... but two lads have between them half a dozen mates. The Leeds dressing-room went into a big sulk – and no one can sulk like players."

Giles says he feels mostly for the fans. "To be honest, Leeds is part of my past life – it's not my life as it is to a fan, and really it is quite disgraceful what has happened. It was pretty unbelievable that David O'Leary published that book.

"You just had to shake your head when you heard about that, but then it was also sickening when the club leaked out the fact that they were 'probing' transfer deals conducted by O'Leary... that came out just before they were due to settle his contract dispute. Really, that was so bad.

"There is no doubt O'Leary had a young team playing brilliantly. I loved their approach, their aggression, but if you want to make a football dream come true you have to have everything right. You have to have an instinct for heading trouble off at the path. Ridsdale banged on about "living the dream" but whose dream was it? The fans bought it, of course, but the real dream was that the people behind Ridsdale thought they were going to make oodles of money. Football was never meant to be like that.

"What happens now? Unless Peter Reid can come up with something dramatic, relegation is what happens. The team is locked into a dive; pulling players out of that can be the toughest job in the game.

"And if Leeds do go down, what happens then? You have to believe the club could easily go under."

Back when Leeds were one of the real powers in the land, when Giles and the late Billy Bremner were running matches like inspired, ruthless puppet-masters and Lorimer was banging in goals of thunderous quality, one lion of the boardroom was heard to inquire unhappily: "Why is it around here that Don Revie and the players get all the praise?"

It was because they were doing the job. One unhindered by businessmen who talked dream and thought profit.