Leeds United

Former Leeds United captain lifts lid on leaving – Cellino to blame

There’s one thing that you don’t need to remind Leeds United fans of, and that’s just how mad times were under the Cellino regime.

The maverick Italian arrived as owner of Leeds United having bought out the massively ineffective GFH Capital, a Bahraini investment bank. He came with both a reputation and a nickname – il mangia alenatori (the manager eater).

Cellino got the latter through his liking of sacking managers/head coaches on a whim when results didn’t go the way that he liked them to. He was a source of real division at the club, fans more often than not falling into black and white groupings, with little grey in between.

He was involved in a number of court appearances over things such as import tax evasion and staff unfair dismissal cases. He was certainly divisive, and Leeds United fans could breathe a sigh of relief when his fellow Italian Andrea Radrizzani initially took a 50% ownership of the club, before becoming the Whites sole owner.

Yes, Leeds United fans knew things at the club were mad under Massimo. Now former captain Stephen Warnock has confirmed just how mad some of the incidents were that were happening at Elland Road, incidents that drove him away. Speaking to The Express, Warnock said that the arrival of Massimo Cellino “just changed everything for the worse for me.

Elaborating on this, adding a little colour to proceedings, Warnock went on to add: “We had to bring in packed lunches in. It was embarrassing. For a club of Leeds’ size. We used to pay for our meals at Leeds and he stopped at everything, even that! He wouldn’t hire a chef that we were paying for. He wouldn’t have one come in. He told us to bring our own lunches instead.”

This was an incident that was well-known and widely circulated amongst Leeds United fans at the time, an incident that Warnock now seems to confirm. It was at a time when Leeds United were a club running at a huge loss, Cellino’s supporters saying that such measures were needed to trim to fat from a club that was over-reaching its budget.

Warnock goes on to say that the situations at Elland Road at the time were “comical” and also added, cryptically, that “there’s lots of things that went on behind the scenes that people don’t know about.”

Stephen Warnock, who made his first breakthrough in football at Liverpool, made 67 appearances for Leeds United (three goals/five assists) and admitted to The Express that his overall experience at the club was good saying: “I loved it. It was brilliant.

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