100 Owners: Peter Swales at Manchester City

On the fifth of May 1996, a funereal silence fell over Maine Road. Manchester City supporters, moments away from a match against Liverpool that would confirm their relegation from the Premier League, paused to remember a man who had died three days earlier. That man was Peter Swales, the chairman ousted two and a half years before, a figure who came to embody the two decades of decay that led City to this point. He never saw the final fall from grace, but for many on the terraces, his fingerprints were all over it.

Swales was, in many ways, an easy target for the Kippax. A self-made businessman with what Malcolm Allison once described as a “scrape-over hairdo and a blazer with an England crest on it”, he seemed an anachronism even before the Premier League money began to flow. The campaign to remove him was one of the most sustained of its time. Yet in the years after his departure, as City lurched from one disaster to another, some might have wondered if they had been too hasty. But in early 1994, with Francis Lee’s supporter-backed ‘Forward With Franny’ movement in full voice, forcing Swales out felt like the only way forward.

The Right Place at the Right Time

His arrival at the club in 1971 had come at a very different time. Manchester City, not United, seemed to hold the city’s footballing future in their hands. While their rivals were in a post-1968 slump, City had won the league title that same year, followed by the FA Cup in 1969 and a League Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup double in 1970. Swales, a man full of ambition, stepped onto the board of a club at its peak.

His own story was one of shrewd timing. He and business partner Noel White had started with a sheet music shop in 1951, diversifying into television and radio rental just as the market exploded in the 1950s. They put money into their local club, Altrincham, and were instrumental in forming the Northern Premier League, but non-league football was never going to be enough. Having sold his business to Thorn for £500,000 in 1968, Swales had the capital City needed as transfer fees began to spiral. He presented himself as a peace-maker between boardroom factions and, by the end of 1973, he was chairman. He would later admit his naivety. “I was 38, and full of myself,” he said. “I went into this pub and saw two City directors sitting there and I thought, ‘This is an opportunity.’ So I went over to them, and I said, point blank, ‘You know all this trouble you’re having, I could sort that out for you.’ I had no bloody idea, none whatsoever.”

A Golden Age Squandered

The early years brought a trophy, the 1976 League Cup, and a second-place league finish behind Liverpool in 1977. But the seeds of decline were being sown. Manchester United, relegated in 1974, bounced back immediately and their support held firm. City, meanwhile, began to falter. The decision in 1979 to replace manager Tony Book with the returning Malcolm Allison proved catastrophic. Allison’s first spell as Joe Mercer’s assistant had been part of the club’s golden era; his second was defined by calamitous spending. Proven players like Peter Barnes and Gary Owen were sold off, replaced by expensive flops. The most infamous was Steve Daley, signed from Wolves for a British record £1.45m. Daley became a byword for a failed transfer, his struggles symbolic of a team that could not gel. They finished fifteenth, then seventeenth, and suffered a humiliating FA Cup exit to Fourth Division Halifax Town, all captured by Granada Television for a documentary called ‘City!’.

Allison was gone by October 1980, but the managerial revolving door was just getting started. John Bond led City to the 1981 FA Cup final, losing a replay to Spurs, but it was a false dawn. Swales sacked him in February 1983 with the team sitting ninth in the First Division. His replacement, assistant John Benson, oversaw a complete collapse. City won just three more games and were relegated on the final day after losing at home to Luton Town. It was a staggering error of judgement.

The Long Goodbye

The club spent most of the 1980s lurching between the top two divisions, employing seven different managers in the decade. By the time the Premier League era dawned, Swales looked like a relic. Across town, Manchester United were ending their 26-year wait for a league title, building a dynasty on local talent. When Swales sacked Peter Reid just four games into the 1993-94 season, the supporters’ patience finally snapped.

Francis Lee, a hero of the club’s great past, fronted the takeover bid. Swales clung to power for months, an increasingly isolated figure who claimed to be receiving death threats as the battle for control turned bitter. He was finally forced out in January 1994, leaving behind what Lee claimed was a mess of long, expensive contracts. His health, it was said, was broken by the ordeal.

The two and a half years between his departure and his death saw City’s decline accelerate into freefall. Lee’s own chairmanship ended in failure, with the club tumbling into the Second Division. One manager from that era, Frank Clark, would later describe the club as “a rat-infested place.” The promise of the late 1960s had been utterly squandered, and while pinning the blame for decades of failure on one man is perhaps too simple, Peter Swales’ name remains inextricably linked with the long, dark years when Manchester City fell apart.