What Went Wrong at Bristol City Football Club?

What Went Wrong?

(A Good Article for Those Days)

It may seem hard to believe, but it was only five years ago that expectant Bristol City fans were living the dream.
More than 36,000 thousand made the journey along the M4 corridor on a gloriously sunny day in May 2008 in the hope of seeing their team beat Hull in the Championship play-off final at Wembley and ascend to the Promised Land that is the Barclays Premier League.
It was not to be; with one swish of his right foot, veteran striker Dean Windass scored one of the most memorable goals of recent times to deliver top-flight football for thousands of success-starved football fans on Humberside.
Defeat was gut-wrenching. Yet when the dust settled and City fans reflected on a second successful season in as many years, it was apparent all was well both on and off the pitch. At that point, the wage bill stood at £8m, the second lowest in the Championship, and revenues were increasing on the back of 13,000 season ticket sales.
In Gary Johnson, the club boasted a good manager, one who had built an affordable and close-knit squad and taken it to within 90 minutes of a place in the Premier League. Arguably, City had it right in 2008.
Although it would not have been apparent at the time, things started to unravel from that point onwards. Represented by hard-nosed agents and feeling as though they proved their credentials in the Championship, the players requested and were granted pay rises and contract extensions that set in motion the process of spiralling wages.
When Johnson was unable to emulate his achievement off reaching the play-offs in his first season in the second tier and began to seek recourse in expensive loan signings, the die was cast.
A drop-off in results activated a corresponding downturn in revenues from gate receipts as average attendance dropped from in excess of 16,000 in 2007/08 and 2008/09 to nearer 14,000 in 2009/10.
At the same time as wages were rising and the losses were becoming bigger, so results took a dip and Johnson, having departed from the formula that brought him success in the first place, began to panic.
A series of expensive loan signings came and went, among them the ineffective but hugely costly Alvaro Saborio and Evander Sno, and the sale of Nick Carle to Crystal Palace for a profit of almost £1m stood out as a rare example of sound business practice.
When Johnson and City finally parted company in March 2010, he had to be paid off and the losses began to mount dramatically, culminating in City announcing a club-record annual deficit of £10 million. Once again, deteriorating performance on the pitch was accompanied by increased spending and falling revenues.
In hindsight, the crisis point was reached when then-chairman Steve Lansdown, eschewing all other candidates and refusing to consult fellow board members, appointed Steve Coppell as manager in the summer of 2010.
Unfortunately, the former Manchester United and England winger did not arrive behind his desk until July 1, by which time Jamie McCombe had left to join Huddersfield Town and Bradley Orr was already on his way out the door to Queens Park Rangers.
Realising he needed a right-back and a centre-back with time fast running out before the start of the season, Coppell panicked and lavished big money on Nicky Hunt and Damian Stewart, expensive players who were already past their best.
But it was the signing of David James that finally tipped the balance. Although Coppell was in favour of bringing the England goalkeeper on board, he was probably not aware that the club had agreed to pay him in excess of £20,000 a week in wages.
When it became clear there was little or no money left to make additional signings and strengthen other areas of the team, Coppell became disillusioned, feeling he had been appointed on false pretences. His resignation just two games into the season rocked the club to its foundations.
By signing mercenaries, who represented the very antithesis of what Gary Johnson had preached during his early years at the helm, Coppell created an untenable situation that Keith Millen was then asked to manage.
Although his appointment represented another knee-jerk reaction on the part of the majority shareholder, Millen did well to keep City in the Championship during his first season in charge.
Yet Millen was hamstrung in terms of who he could sign, having inherited players on expensive, long-term contracts who were not of his own choosing.
Meanwhile, valuable resource was being poured into the proposed Ashton Vale stadium project, Steve Lansdown had relocated to Guernsey and was no longer hands-on in the way he had been and results on the pitch nosedived at the start of the 2011/12 campaign. Millen was sacked and left with another sizeable pay-out in his back pocket.
Just as City reported a record annual loss of around £14 million, the wage bill peaked at £18.6 million.
Like Millen, his successor, Derek McInnes, did well to keep City up after spending his first eight months in charge battling relegation. But the Scot faced many of the same problems that had defeated Millen and, unable to move certain players on, had limited funds available to build his own team. In the end, he struggled most of all to deal with the Ashton Gate hierarchy. Confronted by a board of directors with no clear definition, he did not know who to confide in and who to go to for help.
If he wanted to ask for money to sign a player or simply to sit down and chat about team affairs, should he go to the new chairman, Keith Dawe, or managing director Jon Lansdown? Should he talk to board members Doug Harman and Ernie Arathoon or trust in Mark Ashton and Martin Griffiths, men who were becoming increasingly influential behind the scenes at that time?
During McInnes’ reign, City’s spending finally became unsustainable. Against a backdrop of spiralling debt and falling revenues (disaffected fans were voting with their feet and staying away), severe cost-cutting measures were introduced along with a new long-term strategy based on the five pillars of Academy, recruitment, facilities, community and financial prudence.
Given that the Robins now find themselves at the foot of League One just months after being relegated from the Championship, suggests the changes may have been implemented too quickly and are too drastic to afford head coach, Sean O’Driscoll a realistic prospect of halting a decline that has been gathering pace like a runaway train for years.
By definition, owner Steve Lansdown must still be pouring a sizeable amount of his personal fortune in the club. But structure rather than finance is emerging as a key issue and the debate is moving away from the relative merits and shortcomings of the various managers who have come and gone and onto the way the club is run at the top.
Given the prevailing culture, it is certain that O’Driscoll will be relieved of his duties as head coach sooner or later. Unfortunately the current obsession with his position seems to have blinded City fans to the more pressing issue of boardroom accountability.
When people begin to discuss leadership, football knowledge and business acumen among the men responsible for giving Bristol City direction, we can begin to find a way clear of the mess that is threatening to engulf the club.

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