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"Doing a Leeds" is an English football phrase which has become synonymous with the potential dire consequences for domestic clubs of financial mismanagement, following the rapid demise in the 2000s of Leeds United A.F.C., a Premier League club that invested heavily to reach the semi-finals of the lucrative Champions League European competition, but in the process built up large debts. The club suffered a "financial meltdown" after failing to continue to qualify for the competition, and subsequently dropped down two levels of the football pyramid, into the third tier, Football League One, for the first time in their history. ==The demise of Leeds United== As champions of the final First Division season, Leeds United were one of the inaugural 22 clubs of the Premier League, the breakaway top division league competition formed in 1992. Leeds had sustained success in the league in late 1990s, and ultimately reached the semi-finals of the 2000–01 Champions League. Their level of spending to do so however had exceeded all other clubs, and the club's debt level rose annually from £9m to £21m, £39m, £82m and peaked at around £119m, much of the money having been spent on transfer fees and players' wages. After the club failed to qualify for the 2002–03 Champions League by only finishing fifth in the Premier League, it had to make drastic savings by selling players as it could no longer sustain the debt repayments, which relied on the ticket sales and television income from the European competition.〔 At the end of the 2003–04 FA Premier League season, Leeds United were relegated to the Football League Championship. The financial effects continued, and with one game to go in the 2006–07 season, the club voluntarily entered administration, incurring a 10-point league penalty, resulting in relegation to League One, the first time the club had ever been in the third tier of English football.〔 Subsequent breaches of financial rules in the summer nearly resulted in the club being expelled from the Football League altogether (a fate which coincidentally had befallen the club's predecessors, Leeds City), but they were ultimately re-admitted with a 15-point penalty to apply to the 2007–08 season. Despite further appeals, the penalty stood and ultimately cost the club promotion that season. At the end of the 2009–10 season, the club was promoted back to the Championship after a final day victory. Leeds United's decline was not entirely without historical precedent, as Wolverhampton Wanderers had suffered a similarly high-profile decline in the 1980s, finishing 6th in the old First Division and winning the Football League Cup in 1980, before eventually dropping into the old Fourth Division by 1986. However, the decline of Wolverhampton Wanderers was widely seen as the culmination of decades of financial mismanagement rather than an extreme amount of short-term spending as was the case with Leeds. Contemporaneous to Leeds, Luton Town, who were relegated from the Championship alongside them in 2007, suffered an even more severe decline and underwent three consecutive relegations, ending up in the Football Conference by 2009; they too had been hit by financial problems. Swansea City, who climbed from the Fourth Division to the First Division between 1978 and 1981, finished sixth in the 1981-82 season, having led the league several times that season. However, they were relegated a year later and went down again in 1984, suffering a third relegation in four seasons in 1986 after they had almost gone out of business. Wimbledon, who matched Swansea's record of climbing three divisions in four seasons in 1986, survived in the top flight of English football for 14 years and won the FA Cup in 1988 before being relegated from the FA Premier League in 2000. They were relegated from Division One four years later, after which they were renamed Milton Keynes Dons following their relocation to Milton Keynes. The renamed club suffered relegation to the league's fourth tier in 2006; and would have gone down a year earlier had it not been for a 10-point deduction imposed on financially-troubled Wrexham. In 1998, Manchester City's relegation to Division Two made them the second former winners of a European trophy to be relegated to the third tier of their domestic league (after 1974 Cup Winners Cup champions Magdeburg in 1991); they had been European Cup Winners' Cup winners in 1970. Seven years later, Nottingham Forest became the first former winners of the European Cup (which they had won in 1979 and 1980) to be relegated to the third tier of their domestic league. In 2004, Carlisle United became the first former members of the English top flight to be relegated from the Football League; their solitary season in the top flight was in the Football League First Division in the 1974-75 season. Two years later, 1986 Football League Cup winners Oxford United became the first former winners of a major trophy to be relegated from the Football League. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Doing a Leeds」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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