Peter Ridsdale: Chairman as a Repeat Offence

On November 26th last year, as a new Malaysian investor joined the board of Cardiff City, the South Wales Echo broke the story: the taxman was taking the club to court. Chairman Peter Ridsdale, speaking from Malaysia, dismissed it as HMRC just “rattling our cage” and confidently predicted a judge would find “Cardiff City have been good boys.” Yet on February 10th, the club will be back in the High Court fighting that very winding-up petition, and the picture Ridsdale painted of a rosy financial future has completely disintegrated.

The chairman has form for this sort of thing. His name became synonymous with the financial excesses of the football boom that straddled the millennium. At Leeds United, his policy of “living the dream” led to ruin. Ken Bates, his successor at Elland Road, had a willing audience when he laid the blame for the club’s 2007 administration squarely at Ridsdale’s door. While it was a convenient diversionary tactic from Bates, the image stuck. Ridsdale personified an era of reckless spending, right down to the infamous hiring of goldfish for his office at a cost of £20 per month. He later argued, correctly, that very few of the creditors on Leeds’s list when they entered administration were from his time. But the damage was done. His brief, ill-starred year as owner and chairman of Barnsley also ended with financial questions, even as his successor offered polite praise.

The Hero Turns Villain

For a time in South Wales, it seemed Ridsdale had successfully reinvented himself. He arrived at a club crippled by the £30m debt left by his predecessor, Sam Hammam, and the mysterious Langston Corporation to whom Cardiff owed £24m. Ridsdale was cast as the hero, fighting off what was eventually revealed as a clumsy power grab by Hammam. He secured local authority backing for a new stadium, a project that had stalled under Hammam, and after a painstaking legal battle, he successfully argued that the Langston debt was not due for immediate repayment. He steered the club to an FA Cup Final and into a shiny new home. The fans had their saviour.

That image has now shattered. The new stadium, meant to be the solution, has become part of the problem, with fitting-out costs spiralling from a budgeted £3.5m to between £7m and £8m. Throughout 2009, as Ridsdale’s own consultancy firm went bust owing the taxman £374,000, his credibility began to erode. He dismissed the story as “misleading” but had signed a sworn affidavit confirming his company was insolvent. He announced imminent Malaysian investment on television in November, standing beside property tycoon Dato Chan Tien Ghee. But the big money never materialised. A winding-up petition first dismissed in December returned with a vengeance after the club reportedly missed its first tax repayment date just before Christmas. Ridsdale’s response was to claim the story could only have come from “stolen” documents, inadvertently confirming its truth.

A Betrayal of Trust

The final straw for many supporters came this week. An innovative season ticket scheme had been launched to fund signings in the January transfer window, raising £3m from fans on the promise of a refund if the club won promotion. Ridsdale has now announced that “investing in new players in the transfer window… will not be possible… in the absence of new investment.”

He offered an apology of sorts, but qualified it by stating, “we do not apologise for ensuring that the viability and financial health of the club is the ultimate priority.”

The reaction from supporters has been furious, with words like “betrayal” and “lied to” being used widely. The Supporters Trust has called for an EGM, confident it has enough shareholder backing to force change. The man who once fought off Sam Hammam has failed to deliver the investment he promised, and has spent supporters’ money designated for players on plugging other financial holes. The BBC website chose to illustrate the story with a picture of Ridsdale holding his head in his hands.

He may not resign. But after the goldfish at Leeds and the financial issues at Barnsley, Ridsdale’s time as the good guy is definitively over. One wonders what new director Dato Chan Tien Ghee, who invested a reported £200,000, makes of it all. Ridsdale remains a “fit and proper” person to run a football club, and if he could get two jobs after Leeds, there are surely other clubs out there. Cardiff City, meanwhile, have a date with the High Court on February 10th.