Rhodes warns of second season syndrome for clubs chasing dream

This riches to rags story has been a tortuous one for supporters and one that, but for the considerable financial backing of Julian Rhodes and his father, Professor David Rhodes, would have already had an unhappy ending.

Estimates vary as to how much the pair have poured in to prop up City with Rhodes junior offering only, “We had everything in at one stage that we owned plus a bit more” when asked about the sums involved.

Considering the high price paid to keep professional football alive in Bradford, Julian must surely never want to hear the words ‘Premier’ and ‘League’ ever again?

“Not at all,” replies the 42-year-old when asked if he rued the day in May, 1999, when City ended a near eight-decade wait for a return to the top flight by clinching automatic promotion on the final day of the season.

“I love watching the Premier League. I record ‘Match of the Day’ every week along with the ‘Football League Show’, but it is always ‘Match of the Day’ I watch first – mainly because the other one is so depressing due to us having usually lost that weekend!

“Seriously, everyone wants to watch the best players and the best League. The buzz and the adrenalin from our time up there is something I will never forget.

“Sport is about dreams and watching their own team in the Premier League is what every fan dreams about. My first City game was in 1978 against Port Vale so when we went up (in 1999) it was the fulfilment of a dream.

“That was the great thing about when we won promotion as fans who had been coming here 50 years finally got the chance to experience what they had dreamed about.

“Our problem was the club failed to manage it right. The big lesson we learned is don’t let someone else spend our money.”

Rhodes’s final comment is a reference to the deal he and his father struck with Geoffrey Richmond in 1997, when they paid the then chairman £3m for a 49 per cent shareholding.

In the few years that followed, the Rhodes were effectively silent partners as Richmond got on with running the club on a day-to-day basis.

This set-up initially worked well as City won promotion in 1999 and then stayed up a year later, only for what Richmond has since described as “six weeks of madness” – when the likes of Benito Carbone, David Hopkin, Dan Petrescu and Ashley Ward arrived on lucrative contracts – to send the club into meltdown once relegated in 2001.

As the club subsequently slid into administration twice, Rhodes was left to pick up the pieces. A decade on, he reflects on what went wrong with a shake of the head.

He said: “The wage bill in the year when we stayed up was £5m, probably one of the lowest the Premier League ever had.

“It was certainly manageable if we had gone down at the end of that first season. By the following year, it had trebled and we had a worse team.

“Relegation made everything ten times worse. We were due two parachute payments of £5m but by the Christmas of our first year back in the Football League we had already discounted the second payment and borrowed against it to keep the club going.”

Asked if City’s plight would have been easier had the parachute payments a decade ago been similar to today’s £48m spread over four years, Rhodes replied: “I don’t think so.

“If they had been £48m back then, our wage bill would probably have been two times or three times what it was.”

The road City have followed over the past decade may have been a rough one but Rhodes insists vital lessons have been learned – at least in Bradford.

He said: “A lot of clubs go up and say, ‘We won’t do a Bradford’. But we still see clubs get in trouble and it is usually the ones who stay up longer than one season.

“They are prudent in that first year but once survival has been assured then the belief is that the club can progress.

“As for Bradford City, we have had major problems and, right now, we are struggling to stay in the Football League. But, financially, I would be surprised if there is a better run club than us.

“We run things very well and, as long as I am involved, never again will we go down the road of what happened before.”