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Warnock is another story. True that Bates stripped the club bare then sold to a bunch of chancers from a boiler room operation in Bahrain (who had managed somehow to get in on a much bigger deal that might have seen us bought by PSG level owners, but cocked it up so much the dare to dream prospective owner walked away leaving us with the brokers not the money). To be fair it started out ok with Warnock, and he seemed to get on with the fans. But it quickly turned sour as he refused to travel up to Leeds a lot of the time, preferring his cottage in Cornwall, spending only 3 days a week with the club and leaving the rest to the likes of Keith Curle to run for him. He brought in some of his old mates - Michael Brown, Paddy Kenny, Michael Tonge - and played them regardless of performance (there were lots of rumours as to why), whilst neglecting the youth who were the talent at the club. We - somehow - managed to loan a young Ross Barkley for a season and Warnock left him on the bench in favour of his abject mates. Final nail in the coffin was a deeply dodgy deal in which he swapped club icon/hero striker Luciano Becchio to Norwich for Steve Morison. After Becchio had scored 20 goals for the club by Christmas. Morison scored almost none for us, and we struggled for the rest of the season, with the crowd on his back, and him doing his best to alienate all those around him. He probably hated it at Leeds. He was recruited, then what remaining talent we had (Snodgrass, etc) were sold from under him, he didn't have much cash to spend on assembling a side. But he didn't help himself, and encountered a fanbase who thought he should feel honoured to be allowed to manage the club, whilst he thought we should be grateful for being blessed with his genius. Given that only months before we were chanting "Warnocks a ****, his wife's a s**g" in his previous jobs, this may not ever have been a marriage that would have worked. FWIW Leeds succession was Ridsdale - crashed the club by overspending Professor Mckenzie (from Leeds business school) - out of his depth, saw us relegated Gerald Kranser "konsortium" - Leeds based consortium, headed by insolvency specialist, sold the ground, nearly got us out of trouble then lost their nerve and sold to Bates because he was willing to take the mess off their hands without inspecting the books (because -0 presumably - that didn't matter to his plans for financially engineering benefit to himself) Bates - evil vampire. A whole book could be written of the sickening stuff he inflicted on us, including dodgy admin, split fanbase, points deduction, numerous dodgy building deals, asset stripping, failing to buy back ground, relegation to third tier, selling off all our talent shortly after promotion, condemning us to more time in championship when others - Leicester, Norwich, etc leapfrogged us, eventually extracted all the cash he could ran the wreck into the sand. Indescribeably unpleasant and evil. Had his own weekly radio show (on his own radio station) which he used to denounce the fanbase for being trouble makers, etc. GFH - gulf based spivs who it first appeared were fronting for proper money and then grabbed us with no money and no plan beyond trying to "flip" us to the next bunch of marks. No-one would buy us as we were a basket case, so they got their cash back by forcing us to pay them "management fees" for owning us, using money borrowed at high interest from partner companies of theirs. At one point things were so bad, our CEO/MD who was an employee of theres was paying bills using his personal credit card (he was a problem case himself, what with Walter Mitty delusions, his own takeover games, spy cameras in the toilets, etc....). They screwed things up so badly they were desperate not to sell to anyone sane, and managed to find and groom a mad italian who bought without doing sufficient due diligence. Cellino - genuine lunatic - whether it was cocaine or mental balance issues was never wholly clear. Sacked all the staff of the club. Employed David Hockaday as manager, bought appalling italian journeymen into the club and split the dressing room, cultivated a cult of personality using social media that split the fanbase into violently opposing factions, brought Verne Troyer into the club. Ran out of cash and was eventually run out of town selling to Radrizanni - our first competent owner (it seems) since 2002/03. Appears to have stopped the rot and appointed a decent manager (after a first season in charge fiasco). But - for now - jury is out. Writing it all down (and its only partial) brings the full horror of my adult life as a football fan into perspective. I've pretty much never known a successful Leeds United whilst of age. If even half of what appears to be happening to you turns out as it might, you may have a long tunnel ahead.

If you want a proper laugh about terrible owners out of their depth. When GFH - the skint dishonest Arab bank owned us, one of their hapless senior executives Salem Patel - joined Waccoe, our equivalent of VillaTalk under the very secret username “Melas” pretending to be an ordinary fan asking questions like “if you were the owner of the club what sort of players do you think you would buy?” They were too cheap to employ people who knew anything about football so we’re reduced to asking a messageboard what they should be doing... Oh how we laughed...Of course within a year when they couldn’t pull off the flip they were hoping for post takeover they were stripping cash and assets and sending them back to Bahrain. But we did laugh at the time... Wonder if Tony has a secret account on VillaTalk? And which poster he might secretly be.

Its not clear why anyone thinks that Xia has significant cash. It’s like the stupid arguments that were had at Leeds about how much cash Massimo Cellino when loads of the fan base took as fact he was “a billionaire” and therefore “knew what he was doing”. When simple observation and a bit of basic fact checking suggested that - at most - he had a few million to his name. But even at the end when it was clear he didn’t have the cash to take us forward (let alone the sanity) there were those who bought into the myth of his supposed amazing wealth and thought things would work out ok. The same was true with the gulf bank that bought us that turned out to be bankrupt sharks. But loads just saw Arabs and wouldn’t believe they were as dishonest and skint as they turned out to be (essentially running a sharia Ponzi scheme as far as could be worked out). As far back as 2016 serious people were warning about Xia - like this bloke, a staff writer on Forbes https://www.forbes.com/consent/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2016/05/24/aston-villa-and-tony-xia-are-looking-like-ac-milan-with-mr-bee/ A better question is why did any of you ever think he had sufficient money to run you (as opposed to run you into the ground)? How did so many of your fan base buy into the delusion that he has much cash at all. Mind you, the same happened with us. Humans and hope and all that... But why do some people continue to believe in the face of black and white evidence that you are facing a cash flow crisis (at the very least) at a time when it turns out getting cash out of China isn’t actually a big deal.

To be fair as a relative expert in seeing a much loved club fall apart, doing a deal to bring forward £1m of cash from 5 July to mid June suggests that you are in very serious trouble. This isn’t normal behaviour and suggests you’ve maxed out overdrafts (or had facilities suspended) and already spent the season’s season ticket cash. Given high season ticket sales your match day walk up income will be lower. Meaning even more problems through the autumn. Another fun experience we had with the incompetent vampires who wrecked out club.

This is the Companies House document most recently filed. It isn’t an overdraft. Rather it’s confirmation you’ve sold your future rights to income from Carlos Sanchez Moreno transfer to Macquarie. https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02502822/charges/wJGR7sRMqGKJRm9YT_T8bQEcIHw I’m not sure this is news anyway, is it? Cash must have been tight this month-end as it doesn’t look like it brought forward significant cash. Basically signed over the right to £1m expected on 5 July 2018 and £750k due on 5 Jan 2019. Of course that leaves you £1m down on expected cash flow for July. And who cares about January. Even before you consider the sort of fee Macquarie will have extracted for advancing you the cash. Eerily familiar from a Leeds perspective. If there is any consolation, Ken Bates did much the same at Leeds stripping out pretty much all releasable cash before he finally flogged the club. So you might be about to sell. Mind you so did GFH before nearly taking us into another admin because there was no money left to pay our bills. Have you had any reports locally of contractors not being paid? We ended up with half of our training pitches out of action when we had enough money to get them dug up but not enough to get them relaid... Presumeably your brilliant season ticket sales (compared to us) won’t help as you’ll have spent it already, meaning that at the one point in the year when you should be swimming with cash you’re already skint and things can only get worse. Although iirc at Leeds the finance company doing the loans to fans for our season ticket sales only paid out in tranches as the season went on to avoid any liability if we went bust mid-season and were unable to fulfil our fixtures. That was comforting at the time...

You are speed running what happened to us. Exactly the same behaviour by the more deluded/smug/complacent sections of the fan base. No evidence. Oh there is evidence but actually it proves everything is ok. Those worrying are the problem not the heroic owner/leader. Those to blame are the leakers. And the press, just recycling old stories and hoping Leeds Villa fail. Whatever, I’m willing to give Ken David Massimo Tony (why do those idiots always refer to them by their first name? Do they imagine some sort of personal relationship?) a chance. Repeat until the season is wrecked before it begins and the club sliding towards being bought by the next one in line willing to buy without due diligence because they are (1) another lunatic or (2) an even bigger crook. Best of luck. A good rule when you’re in this sort of hole is that it’s always worse than you first thought. That owners who claim to be billionaires with little external evidence to verify it usually have closer to zero cash. That the owner who got you into the mess almost definitely shouldnt be trusted to get you out of it (why would anyone rationally think this?). And that white knights don’t tend to swoop in to buy clubs haemorrhaging cash when they could wait until someone else cops that loss. A lot of Leeds fans watching this forum from Waccoe with jaws dropped at the extent to which some of the deluded on VillaTalk are almost carbon copies of the “no problems here, move on, move on, stop causing trouble by worrying” idiots in the Leeds fan base during our endless car crash. Feel for you as a lone voice who seems to actually get what is happening to your club.

Nowt, mate. Villa are a decent club, steeped in history like ours is/was. Down on its luck like we were. Frankly think its shocking that community institutions that are vulnerable can be bought by chancers and borderline crooks and then senselessly trashed. Just sharing insight from our plight - we've gone through three owners who should never have been let near us and wasted fifteen or so years at the bottom of the pile. Lots of clubs go through difficulties, but few become laughing stocks/pity cases like we ended up. Looking from the outside, it looks like you guys are being lined up to be the next big club shafted by bad owners (the only question outstanding is how bad), so offering views from a fanbase thats been there. Happy to leave you to it, if you'd prefer.

You see this is the stuff that “sensible” voices kept saying at Leeds. And then it turned out - repeatedly - we were way more ****ed than even the worst worriers were worried about. Looking back those saying “no proof so far”, “too early to be certain they are lying crooks”, “it’s all conjecture and conspiracy”, “I’m willing to give them a chance” were as wrong and as damaging to fan unity as those who cynically threw in their lot with the varied ****ers who were ruining us. It made ramping up the pressure to move the scum who wrecked us on much harder and allowed them to get away with degrading our club for that much longer. It also fed the idea that those who wanted change were somehow disloyal to the club - “just causing trouble”, “support the club or **** off home” and the idea that somehow journalists teasing away at the truth had an agenda to damage the club (when often the reverse was the case), etc. Im sure those “sensible heads” got a whole load of satisfaction from showing how much more mature and stable they were than those desperately worried about the future of our club. Looking back, they were the idiots getting it very wrong. Although as ever these types in time move on without shame to find other things to be smug and superior about on their forums of choice (though hopefully in our case with our crises seemingly over, stuff that is less important to the future of our club).

Sorry to continue to pop by. But its fascinating seeing you guys go through pretty much all the stuff we've done multiple times in the last 12 years. Bottom line is that you have - at best - a chancer of an owner who looks like he gambled more than you could afford to lose and now cant dig you out of it. With a fair likelihood that the reality of the situation is far worse than what has yet been publicly revealed (in our experience it almost always is). Given that, it seems laughable that any of you are sticking to defending your owner and suggesting blame doesn't ultimately lie with him for the state you are in. He owns the club, chooses the senior employees, is responsible for your clubs financial health. And has clearly messed it up so severely you're going to have to sell your best players, and probably half of your car parks just to get to the end of the year. Unfortunately, for some fans its like stockholm syndrome with owners. No matter how objectively terrible, crooked, incompetent or evil, a section of the fanbase (unfortunately for us quite a large one when we were dealing with the likes of Bates, Cellino and GFH) will continue to find excuses for them or even support them even when everything is falling at part. At times seeming to value loyalty to the idiot wrecking owner than to club or fellow fans. Making it harder for decent and sensible fans to push together to get them out and the club able to start to rebuild. Of course from the outside its darkly funny to see others being lined up to suffer as badly as us (or even a fraction as badly as us). But if you really love your team, you'll learn from all the crap we went through, and at least try to stay united as a fan base, and recognise that if there is blame for what is going wrong it sits fairly with the guy who made the decision to buy your club and who has for whatever reason (idiocy? criminality? walter mitty delusions? money laundering? utter incomptence) left you on the edge of what could be a very deep hole. Oh yeah, and if your owner is lying to you about small things, it usually means he is lying to you about almost everything else, including the really important stuff. If an owner starts lying to you about anything, however trivial, alarm bells ought be going off all over the place.

The irony of you lot being hailed in front of that A-grade **** Shaun Harvey to explain yourselves when the jumped up postman presided over the wrecking of Scarborough Town, two insolvencies at Bradford City and years of enabling Ken Bates to asset strip and ruin Leeds United. One of the most disgusting men in football and now running to EFL. A brief summary here https://sabotagetimes.com/football/leeds-united-forget-cellino-the-football-league-needs-to-look-in-the-mirror. But any decent Leeds fans could tell you stories far worse. Shameful really.

Laughing now. If we end up with the fat faced failure, wont be laughing then. The look on his face at Elland Road when we all started singing about him... "Jimmy Saville...he's fingered Steve Bruce..." If it started to go wrong, it almost certainly wouldn't end well as relationships go.

Leeds' fan base were split in two during the reign of the most lunatic of our recent owners. So many idiots believed the myth that Massimo Cellino was "a billionaire" that they couldn't imagine him doing anything wrong by the club and they reacted violently against those of us who saw from the outset that he was a fake and a fraud, with at best a few million to his name. The worst of the Cellino defenders even set up their own "organisation" IMWT (In Massimo We Trust) which took the lunatic at his word and harassed and threatened those who questioned some of what was going on. Our forum - Waccoe - was probably the only place properly safe from the quislings and collaborators who went above and beyond in sustaining belief in the fake wealth and capability of a bloke who was out of his depth and - very quickly - running the club even further into the ground than we were when he arrived on the scene. Cant believe there are still folk on your forum pushing the idea that Xia has billions, when what evidence there is out there suggests he has a few businesses that aren't particularly successful and that he might not himself fully control. It seems laughable looking from the outside that Xia will deliver you anything but more misery, or that - when he sells - his intent will be anything other than minimising losses to himself, regardless of the impact on your club.

Some rumours that if Leeds don't get Bielsa, we'll end up with your fat dinnerlady in our dugout. Wouldn't be popular - a dinosaur of a coach who seems to need lots of money to deliver and walks away too easily from failure.

Aye. Was just slightly surprised by the happy story told in the post I was replying to. Its pretty horrible being on the end of where you are at the moment. Frankly criminal that big clubs who have roles as community institutions and sources of identity can be bought and wrecked by idiots, criminals and chancers (we’ve had all of them, not sure how many of those boxes you can tick yet).

Having been through multiple fire sales at Leeds United don’t assume getting rid of fringe players to free up wages is easy. Particularly when they and the clubs they might go to know you are desperate. Who for example would buy Ross McC given his recent record? If you want him off your books you won’t get a fee and might need to find most of his wages for the remainder of his contract. At this stage of his career and with his history getting in the £££ will be a priority. So expect to have to buy some out of their contracts at some big cost. And others you might sell down the league who’d be willing to go, you might have to either let them go on a free or agree to pay a proportion of their wages going forward to get the deal done. As they/their agents won’t want a pay cut just to bail out the club that is selling them. We ended up paying most of the wages for the likes of Danny Mills even after we’d sold him to Manchester City. It barely made financial sense but we were desperate so it happened. Remember at the time Mills was playing for England and what you would have thought was a saleable asset. But our desperate situation let to us being totally screwed over. This site takes a while to load but gives the basics on the history of that shambolic deal and us doing the same for Nick Barmby and Robbie Fowler. https://web.archive.org/web/20061020080048/http://www.givemefootball.com/display.cfm?article=8390&type=1 Finally, there will be some players - the ones you could get real money for - who will stitch you up because they/their agents can. Read this story from back during our first meltdown https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2407449/Leeds-fury-as-Kewell-pockets-4m.html. Would Grealish or Chester do the same to you that Kewell did to us? Have a read of this as well https://www.theguardian.com/football/2003/jan/17/newsstory.premierleague200203 - if I were you I’d focus on the wages off the books and halve that saving for the first couple of years. Assume you’ll be paying a lot of departing players wages for a while hitting your wage budget for next season and the one after that. And reduce your expectations on transfer income. Experience at Leeds is any deals you do will be gut wrenchingly worse than you could ever imagine.

Money. And the chance to play in the Premiership. Leeds lost Delph, Milner, Smith, Danny Rose, Byram, Cook, Taylor, Howson, all our youth with potential over the course of our disaster. Probably a full team of premiership quality players. I’m sure they all loved to play at Elland Road. But as professional footballers with short careers and no certainty of ever seeing premiership stadiums or wages if they stuck with us, they all went. Perhaps with tears in their eyes but definitely with wallets fat with signing on fees.

OK, I'll stop now But there were times when our forum was pretty much just filled with this sort of stuff, week after week after week. The football became almost irrelevant, in the face of the appalling stuff happening behind the scenes...

The problem isn't Xia and his naive gamble. Thats just firing the starting pistol on the potential meltdown. Its how you emerge from what might be a period when he wants to sell, but cant afford to, the sorts of people who are willing to swoop in in those circumstances, and what comes next. We went through 2-3 incompetent owners in quick succession after the meltdown after Ridsdale plunged us into crisis before Bates bought us "saved us" because he was the only one there willing to put cash on the table without checking the books, because (as it turned out) our financial situation was in fact irrelevant to his plans. He then took us through a botched/fixed admin which left him in charge still, didn't sort our debts but did see us into L1 with a points deduction. Before sitting on us for years in the third tier and a few back in the Championship simply extracting cash because he could. It was only when the corpse was almost dry that GFH bought in to squeeze out the last drops. And they then sold to a maniac - Cellino - who didn't have the money or the mental capacity to manage the club and gutted it even further. Its only now with - finally- an owner who appears competent and is fixing a lot of the damage (although not yet on the pitch) that there appears bright lights on the horizon. You are in a weak position. Made worse by having a big fanbase that crooks out there will know they can exploit to extract cash for much longer than smaller clubs that would fold much more quickly. What happens next very much depends on (i) whether Xia is willing to cut his losses and sell at a value that reflects reality (ii) whether its a white knight waiting to buy you or the likes of Bates, Cellino or GFH out to make money out of your misery. Hope it goes well ?

One of the first things our first sane owner in fifteen years did was buy his way out of our catering mortgages contracts. Its been a long, indescribably awful fifteen years

And then there is the stuff you’ve already clocked like selling the rights to future transfer instalments at a discount to buy immediate cash. Next will be mortgaging the next three seasons season ticket income which might get you through your current hiccup (a good way to realise quick cash but you pay the price for seasons afterwards). Then there will be the running short on pies at half time as there isn’t the cash to get stock in for matchdays. Has that happened yet? What happens next as your catering isn’t making any money as you’ve not got enough to sell is you sell the catering rights to the likes of Compass for 3-4 years. A great way to find quick cash to pay one months wage bill or a pesky tax demand. But then you’ve got no matchday income at all. So when the next cash pinch comes your ****. So then you sell the training ground and lease it back. Seems sensible. Big up front payment, an opportunity to restructure, afford those pay-offs etc. A few loan fees. A fresh start. But then the nice bloke who bought it (sometimes a mate of the owner, sometimes someone hidden behind a BVI Trust) exercises the right to jack up the rent year on year until it’s bleeding you dry. And then the same happens to the ground. Then some business restructuring experts or maybe a minor middle eastern bank buy you with a “rescue plan”. Probably with a nice guy front man. But it turns out they are charging millions in “management fees” which they make you take out a loan from another company they own to pay them out of. Doubling your debt in record time (of course when they bought you they flipped the debt back into the club). And that’s before the dwarves, David Hockaday, Sardinian criminals and Big Fat Steve Evans arrive....

The thing about loss making football businesses is that some of the black holes go on for miles. Start checking for “interesting” companies emerging with familiar names as directors as some of those with an interest in such things try to shuttle money out of the club to themselves before the music stops. At one point LUFC cancelled Radio Leeds’ commentary rights and was paying another part of the web of companies associated with our then owner to broadcast our games. Actually foregoing real cash in for broadcasting rights in order to create a conduit for yet more funds to be funnelled out of the club. Some of the pricing on building projects was “interesting” as well... the stories that could be told... of course at the time our CEO was the bloke who now runs the EFL, Shaun Harvey....FFS

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More advice, turn off your swear filter and change the rules about allowing foul language. With what you might be about to suffer you’ll need all the opportunity to vent that you can.

There are lots of lessons, none of them hopeful. One bit of advice - looking on here, you see lads taking sides, suggesting more time should be given to the owners; cheering on or jeering the bloke who was your CEO. Our experience is that if you think the worst of all of those ****s you will always be closer to the truth. The sorts of evil, incompetent or exploitative ****ers who are doing to your club what they did to ours think nothing of splitting and dividing the fan base to their own ends. All of them are different sorts of evil and in it for themselves. Particularly when you are right up against it. Don’t believe anything they tell you and when stuff is leaked focus less on why it is true and more on why it has been leaked. Also (and this is tough) recognise that the strength of the fan base is what makes you vulnerable to these people. If you (or Leeds) didn’t have a fan base who would stick with the club thick and thin there would be no cash flow to leech off as you die a slow death. And find value in engineering solutions that enable them to profit from your corpse. If we’d had less fans we’d have been wiped out and reemerged as a phoenix club and probably made it back to the premiership faster and in better shape than through the endless attempts by crooks and incompetents and crooked incompetents to “save” Leeds United. Hopefully your nightmare will be shorter than ours. We lost our ground, all our decent players, our training ground, our dignity, everything. We’re only now starting to rebuild. It’s been shit for us one way or another since 2004 give or take. Kids have grown up in Leeds - their entire childhood without a successful local team to support. Damage and a lost potential fan base that will never be mended. If you haven’t been there you can’t understand. But maybe you soon will...

Alright lads. Come over from Waccoe - the main Leeds forum. We've suffered pretty much everything a club could. Admin, crooked owners, relegation, points deductions, more crooked owners, vultures, overseas owners ruining us, Trevor Birch, celebrity dwarves, the entire lot. For some of us its overwhelmed the (admittedly often very poor) football for much of the last fifteen-twenty years. If you've got any questions about how bad it can get, the amount you learn about finances very quickly as a fan of a broken club, warning signs, the usual, feel free to come onto waccoe, take the abuse and ask us. Or alternatively, happy to pop by this forum occasionally to offer sympathy. Supporting a football team wrecked by a succession of reckless, evil and incompetent owners has ruined most of my adult life. All I can say is brace yourselves lads. Its **** horrible. Just pray Ken Bates is too sick to fly over from Monte Carlo to "save you". That would be the worst