James Lawton: Leeds master the art of incompetence in game without honour

None of this should be a surprise. Supporting a football club is quite different to investing in IBM or BT. It is about speculation of the heart

In all the bleakness of the Leeds United affair, it seemed like a touch of light relief. But that was before you gave it a moment's thought. The Daily Express "scoop" announced: "Terry Venables pledged to stay yesterday – but he will be forced out at the end of the season and his successor has already been discussed."

Oh yes. Sure. Now who is this football son of lunatic destiny, this utterly desperate individual who would willingly put himself in the hands of the board of a football club which has spent the last six months defining everything that is wrong with the business operation and the working morality of our national game?

Could he possibly exist? You bet he could. At a rough guess there are about 200 versions of him, itching to walk into the shoes of Terry Venables, just as Glenn Roeder occupied those of Harry Redknapp at Upton Park. Roeder knew all about West Ham and the reason for his own appointment – an unwillingness to spend the money which might have landed someone with a genuine body of achievement.

No, Roeder did not make any morality calls on the treatment of his predecessor, who before the moment of opportunity had been his benefactor. He just pointed out a few of the problems he had inherited, sucked up the appalling behaviour of Paolo Di Canio, and hoped he would get lucky. Some hope.

Solidarity in football, even among career-long friends, is like honour in politics. It is subject to the next phone call. When Brian Little was fired by "Deadly" Doug Ellis, his successor and friend John Gregory called to check out the lie of some extremely rugged land – before signing up for his own precarious stint at Villa.

Anyone who takes over from Venables, you might say, is entitled to expect the same fate as Roeder, which is to say a lingering professional death, but of course football resists such simplicities of right and wrong.

However much you admire Venables as an exceptional football man – and acknowledge that his predecessor, David O'Leary, after displaying some brilliant promise, made some appalling errors of judgement after the Woodgate-Bowyer trial – it is still valid to ask how many enquiries the new manager made about the way the club were handling the departure of the man they had just fired. Probably none.

Ostensibly, O'Leary went for no greater offence than publicly questioning the impending sale of Rio Ferdinand to the club's leading rivals. But he had to wait until yesterday for settlement of his contract. This would be bad enough even if Leeds had not waited until yesterday to disassociate themselves from stories that O'Leary's role in transfer deals was being probed – deals which the chairman, Peter Ridsdale, had always been at pains to claim he had conducted.

But then who cares about anyone but themselves in today's football? Who is the sainted figure who announces a lonely passion for the spirit of the game, and the warmth of the old relationship between a club and its following that probably reached its apex in Manchester at the time of the United tragedy at Munich, when someone wrote that "even the sky wept for United" when the club began to bury their dead?

Who would weep for today's Leeds United? Perhaps the odd business analyst. The problem at Leeds goes beyond the inevitable gap between plc values and the old imperatives of a football dream factory... a gulf that can never be closed. Plcs are about making money. Football clubs will always be about winning trophies and fuelling glory.

Leeds behaved badly, not just as a traditional football club who, as their former player John Giles pointed out at the weekend, sold some of the most expensive season tickets in the land on an entirely false basis, but as a public company. If the Premiership, as its chief executive, Richard Scudamore, recently declared, is happy with self-policing, can this also be true of the business community in the City?

Leeds season-ticket holders did not think they were paying for a midfield peopled by such as Paul Okon and Eirik Bakke and a defence so loosely held together in the centre by Danny Mills, who had created quite enough alarm in his time as a full-back. If Venables can fairly claim to have been misled by Ridsdale, so too can the season-ticket holders.

None of this should surprise anyone who understands the dynamics of supporting a football club. It is quite different to investing in IBM or BT. It is about speculation of the heart. Brian Clough probably would not have lasted five minutes in a plc. But his effect on clubs like Derby County and Nottingham Forest was brilliant – even surreal. He was adored by the fans and his players were so incensed by his dismissal at Derby that one of them got hold of an axe and took a lot of persuading not to chop down the boardroom door.

There is not much point in going down that old road. The dice has been thrown and, in Leeds' case, the wrong numbers. But if we do have plcs, if we do have the tyranny of the balance sheet, is it asking too much for some basic efficiency?

Indignant Leeds fans at tonight's FA Cup replay against Gillingham should not really be complaining about the death of pride and honesty. That went went some time ago. They should be protesting bad business. Incompetent business. Business that will never take a football fan to the stars, never have anything to do with the kind of genius displayed by Matt Busby or Jock Stein. Indeed, it is business whose only achievement at Elland Road is that a lot of feeling for the club has been damaged beyond repair.

Naturally, there has been no detailed information about the means of payment used by Newcastle when they bought Jonathan Woodgate from Leeds United last week. But, you have to suspect, bags filled with silver pieces would have done well enough.