Football is from the players
I would have welcomed Sol Bamba as the chairman of Leeds United, and not just because he was a lovely guy with a solid baseline of decency. But because he was a player, a footballer.
It was halfway a joke in my article about Sol Bamba that it was worth considering, in the mid-2010s, whether he had the funds to buy Leeds United from Massimo Cellino. The other half was serious. Bamba was already, as he told BBC Radio Tees, as heavily involved in decision making at the club as the CEO, if Leeds United even had one at the time, or anyone else that Cellino wasn't listening to. Not only was Bamba dealing with the ordinary duties of a club captain, he had Cellino coming round his house at all hours of the night, begging advice. From captain to chairman wasn't an unimaginable leap, and I wonder whether Bamba's conversations with Cellino led him towards the path he was taking after playing, of sporting director — the same path Daniel Farke was taking after his playing days ended at Lippstadt.
Business is an increasingly important part of football and more players are studying for qualifications reflecting that, choosing business badges over coaching badges. Cellino, back in 2015, was probably willing to give Bamba a chance before he was ever qualified, even if only to give himself a break. I can easily imagine some morning, as dawn was breaking over Sol's kitchen table and conversation gave way to the sound of Terry George snoring in the corner, Massimo throwing the boardroom keys across to the captain and telling him, 'You take these, you run the place, you'll do a better job than me.' Then grabbing them back when he remembered what was in all the boardroom cabinets.
I would have welcomed Bamba as the new executive chairman of Leeds United Football Club, and not just because he was a lovely guy with a solid baseline of decency and a clear idea of what was going right and what was going wrong. But because he was a player, a footballer. I've been wittering along these lines from time to time, but I don't enjoy the way football has been reshaping itself, as a sport, until the focus is everywhere except the pitch and the players are either an afterthought or a social mediated punching bag. In some ways, dragging Bamba from the penalty box to the boardroom would have been emblematic of that problem, forcing a shirt and shorts guy into a suit and tie, to save us. But I would have trusted Sol to do the job well.
Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
A lack of trust has a lot to do with how I feel things have changed, developing from a lack of responsibility. And when I talk about things changing, I'm going back a long way before I was around. There was a time, probably before the mid-1960s, when football managers were the least interesting people at the game, and the people in the boardroom just didn't come into it at all. The game was about the players, and the players were led by their captain, in ways that are hard to imagine from the 2020s but are best explained by remembering that coaching from the sidelines was against the rules until the 1970s.