Day: September 14, 2012

It can be astonishing how quickly fortunes, both in business and in football, can be lost. Reputations can be won or lost in what seems like the blink of an eye, with adulation turning to derision on the basis of the slimmest of margins. Bradford City, throughout the decade from the middle of the 1990s on, lived through a full roller coaster of emotions, ascending to the Premier League and then, to general astonishment, not getting relegated straight back to the Football League. That remarkable first season in the Premier League, however, turned out to be the beginning of the start of a downhill slide for both the club and the chairman that had got it there in the first place, and the clubs subsequent fall from its previously lofty perch became somewhat iconoclastic in itself, even earning itself a motto which came straight from the horses mouth itself. Bradford City Football Club was undone by ‘six weeks of madness’, and the architect of both that phrase and the undoing of the clubs success was Geoffrey Richmond. In the middle of the previous decade, Bradford City had become tragically synonymous with the frightening decline of professional football in England. The club became, in 1983, one of a rash of mostly lower division clubs to enter into receivership in the early 1980s and differing insolvency laws and Football League rules...