The death of Ken Bates last month resurfaced some old wounds, old arguments and memories of a divided fanbase. A reminder that us, as fans, must always, always question our football clubs owners.
Bates arrived at Elland Road in 2005, declaring himself a saviour, promising stability after the financial collapse of the Ridsdale era. He left seven years later following relegation, administration and having split the fanbase more deeply than at any other time in the club's history. There were supporters on one side who credited him with saving Leeds United, and others who never forgave the way he ran the club, the secrecy over ownership, the offshore trusts, the running battles with journalists and fans alike. It is why his time as chairman still matters now, long after he sold up to the potless chancers that were GFH. The lesson that Bates taught us as supporters, whether we wanted the lesson or not, is that the only sensible position for a Leeds fan to take toward whoever owns the club is one of caution and watchfulness.
That instinct feels is still as relevant and needed today as we continue our pre-season with a friendly against RB Leipzig at Elland Road on the 8th of August. On paper this should be a glamour fixture, a Champions League side finishing third in the Bundesliga making the trip to Yorkshire, a decent test before the Premier League campaign starts. Leeds and Leipzig already have history of course. The Jean-Kevin Augustin transfer left the two clubs in a legal dispute that dragged on for years. But there is a bigger reason to watch this fixture with something more than casual curiosity, and it has nothing to do with what happens on the pitch. RB Leipzig exist solely because Red Bull wanted a club and Germany's fifty plus one ownership rule stood in the way of buying one outright. So they worked around it.
In 2009 Red Bull bought the playing rights of a fifth tier side, SSV Markranstädt, and remoulded it from the ground up in their own image. They couldn’t call it Red Bull Leipzig, not officially, so the club became RasenBallsport Leipzig, a name engineered specifically so the initials would read as Red Bull to anyone not fully in the know. The crest borrowed the shape and the colours of the Red Bull logo as closely as the rules allowed. Membership, which under fifty plus one is supposed to be the mechanism by which ordinary supporters retain control of their club, was kept deliberately small and expensive, limited for years to a tight circle of people connected to the company. The effect was a members' association in name only, a formality observed on paper while every meaningful decision is made by Red Bull in Salzburg.
It worked. Leipzig rose from the fifth division to the Bundesliga and the Champions League in barely a decade, funded and directed by an energy drink marketing company that had identified football and sport in general as a good space to promote their product and set about acquiring it with the same ferocity it applies to everything else. What got lost in that rise was Leipzig itself, the city's own footballing identity, built instead as a vehicle for advertising a soft drink. It’s a fate some people think Leeds United are also destined for. Red Bull are not just Leeds United's front of shirt sponsor, since the summer of 2024 they have been a minority shareholder in the club with persistent rumours about plans for a complete buyout somewhere down the line.
So far an increased stake for the beverage marketing company has not materialised, and the death of Dietrich Mateschitz four years ago may result in a different strategy. But the Leipzig project shows precisely what this company does to the soul of a football club once it has real leverage inside, and precisely how patient it is willing to be to get there. It bought a fifth tier team nobody outside Saxony had heard of and turned it into a super club built entirely in its own image, badge, colours and all, inside eleven years. A ten per cent stake and a shirt deal is not that. It is, however, a foothold, and footholds are how this always starts.
Leeds United's history is not something Red Bull built and it is not theirs to remake. It belongs to the fans who have stood on Elland Road's terraces through relegations, revivals and Ken Bates, who kept turning up regardless of who was signing the cheques or making the promises in the boardroom. That history is precisely what made Leeds fans the way they are, the beaten and the damned, it should make us difficult to win over, whoever is doing the courting. Watch the Leipzig game for the football if you like, but watch it too as a look at where the road can lead if a club's supporters stop asking questions of the people who own its club.
Bates taught this fanbase to ask those questions of our ownership. Leipzig is a reminder of what happens to a club when nobody is asking the questions anymore.
