On this week's Balls.ie Football Show, we were joined by Balls editor and beleaguered Aston Villa fan Mick McCarthy, who regaled us with tales of Villa's positively mental owner and chairman Dr. Tony Xia, whose tweets to concerned supporters had the lads in raptures.
It got us to discussing the more charismatic, eccentric and craziest football club owners from recent memory.
Naturally, there was only one place to start.
You can listen to/download the podcast in full here.
Sam Hammam, Cardiff City/Wimbledon
Cardiff City truly have had an awful run of it when it comes to owners. Whatever about Vincent Tan, his jersey-over-suit antics, and his exceedingly woeful approach to both management and recruitment, he had absolutely nothing on Sam Hammam.
The Lebanese investor is life president at the Welsh club, but it was Wimbledon who fell further foul of his gobshite behaviour in the '90s.
For one thing, he tried to move the club in its entirety to Dublin, a manoeuvre which you can read about extensively here. For another, he reportedly once forced his Wimbledon players to eat sheep testicles due to their being a delicacy in his native Lebanon.
He also burned his players' clothes on more than one occasion, and once scrawled offensive messages on West Ham's away dressing room wall in an attempt to motivate his visiting Wimbledon side.
He remains a reviled figure in Wimbledon since selling Plough Lane and leaving the club homeless - a decision which culminated in Wimbledon moving not to Dublin but Milton Keynes.
Aldo Spinelli, Livorno
The former Genoa manager became president of Livorno in 1999, and for 17 years before his resignation, the proverbial was never too far from the fan.
Spinelli threatened to 'sell up and fuck off' on a yearly basis, constantly throwing tantrums about the city of Livorno, the club's fans, and Italian football generally.
He once addressed Livorno's dwindling attendances by snarling that it was hardly a surprise that people of a ‘Commie town’ such as Livorno didn’t want to come to a ‘420-year-old, lousy, cess-pit stadium’.
After 17 years of torture for Livorno fans, Spinelli finally resigned 13 months ago...after a bad refereeing decision. In a Serie B fixture between Spinelli's Livorno and Como, the referee awarded a late equaliser to Como despite the goalscorer being two yards offside.
Spinelli exploded, announcing post-game:
Enough is enough, this is the last crap that I'll take from this rotten system of remote-controlled referees. I go from football which I loved so much. I will leave his post.
The only way to save football from the overwhelming power of the referees is to get slow-motion (replays) to the field soon, because otherwise we are in the hands of an ostensible refereeing dictatorship.
Ken Richardson, Doncaster Rovers
In 1995, Doncaster's messiah turned naughty boy.
After his proposal for a new ground was thrown out by local council, Richardson hired two local criminals - one of them a former member of the SAS - to burn down the club's Belle Vue stadium.
He had intended to claim insurance and then sell the flattened ground to property developers, but the SAS men absolutely botched an otherwise perfect arson attack, and dropped his Blokia 9000 at the scene of the crime. He was promptly tracked down by South Yorkshire police.
Richardson was subsequently jailed for four years.
He perhaps only reached peak insanity long after burning his club's stadium to the ground, however. With Doncaster in dire financial straits, Richardson hired the former manager of Stockport County's club shop as first team manager in order to cut costs.
Doncaster were duly relegated to the conference with a goal difference of -83, and Richardson withdrew his financial backing nigh on instantaneously.
As per Who At All The Pies, Richardson was once described by detectives as "the type that would trample a two-year-old child to pick up a 2p bit."
Ken Bates, Chelsea/Leeds
You probably figured Ken Bates would feature somewhere in this list, but not for the reasons we've chosen him. While his various shenanigans - including a proposal to keep fans off the pitch using an electric fence 'because it worked on his farm' - are well-documented, Chelsea legend Pat Nevin revealed an equally eccentric but kinder side to Bates which we felt compelled to relay.
Nevin was a guest on our upcoming 'Friends in Football Podcast' in association with Ladbrokes, which will be available in March. He explained that he was stood in Bates' office to negotiate a new contract at Chelsea after winning the club's Player of the Year for two consecutive seasons. With his contract soon expiring, Nevin - a lover of education and the arts - explained to Bates that he was more than happy to return to Scotland to finish his university degree.
A bemused and furious Bates told him to write down a number (for a potential salary) and return to his office the following day. A day later, Nevin consulted with teammates and presented Bates with his 'demands'. Bates immediately crumbled the piece of paper up and threw it in the bin as he walked from his office without uttering a word to Nevin. Seconds later, Nevin saw him burn out of the Chelsea car park in his Rolls Royce.
It was then that Nevin (who gratuitously pointed out to us that he was from Glasgow) decided to root through Bates' drawers, where he found all of the club's player contracts. He found the average salary amongst the entire Chelsea squad and presented his case to Bates the following day. Such was Nevin's gall and enterprise, the impressed Bates signed on the dotted line almost immediately, and Nevin soon became - by a considerable margin - his favourite player at the club.
Jesus Gil, Atlético Madrid
Jesus indeed.
Gil was named president of Atlético in 1987 and over the next 17 years until his death, he hired and fired 39 managers. He once said on radio that he hoped the plane crashed and killed his team on the way from their defeat at Las Palmas - a relatively tame criticism for a man of Gil's ilk.
Oddly, many Atléti fans appreciated his blunt and frequently controversial 'honesty'; Gil once said of his team, 'Players? My mistake was to treat them like people. My horses are more intelligent.'
He was banned from attending home matches on numerous occasions: in 1990, for 18 months, for calling a French referee homosexual; in 1996, for beating up the director of another team, Compostela; and in 1997, for eight months, for claiming that Spanish referees were a mafia spearheaded by the president of the Spanish FA.
Gil was arguably more reckless outside of football. As per The Telegraph, in 1969 58 people were killed when a roof collapsed in a restaurant within a complex he had built - without using an architect. The cement had not been given time to dry. Gil was sentenced to five years in prison for his part in the disaster, but after 18 months he was personally pardoned by General Franco.
A litany of financial irregularities and subsequent investigations followed him until his death in 2004. While mayor of Marbella in 2002, Gil was cleared of fraud but sentenced to six months in prison for lesser offences. He was also banned from public office for 28 years. He died in 2004, and didn't serve his prison sentence.
