55: Bradford City Badge, Merlin’s F.A. Premier League 2000, Millennium Edition Sticker Collection

Back to the stickers and back to Richard Allinson today. Continuing a trend of lesser-known Premier League teams beginning with ‘B’ he has a look at Bradford City’s brief dalliance with the top flight and unearths further evidence of Benito Carbone being a bloody nice bloke. We’re not just saying that for the Insta likes, honest. Over to Rich.

As you may now be aware, given the fact that I have shoehorned it into almost all of my posts, except for a two-year spell glory hunting with Blackburn Rovers I have been a Grimsby Town supporter since birth. By rights though I should probably have followed Bradford City because I grew up only seven miles from Valley Parade, but my Dad is a Mariners fan and so it was a lifetime of trips to the Cleethorpes seaside for me.

Despite my childhood geography I can only remember meeting one Bantams fan growing up. Leeds United were always the go to team in the local area (must’ve been the glamour of Carlton Palmer and Tony Dorigo that drew people in I guess) followed by your standard Manchester United and Liverpool fans with a light dusting of Huddersfield Town. However, ever since picking up a Bradford City shirt for a fiver in Grattan in about 1988 I have always had a soft spot for the club. Just realised that no one will know what Grattan is. For non-Yorkshire folk think Littlewoods, for people under 30... just Amazon for clothes in a catalogue.

I think my affinity for Bradford comes from the fact that they were the local underdog (and that they weren’t Leeds). Supporting Grimsby you get used to hearing “...oh right, fair play, that is proper football. It is good people follow clubs like that...” when announcing which team you support. I always imagined it was the same for Bantams fans up until their promotion to English football’s top flight from which point on in it would be “oh right, weren’t you in the Premier League once?”

Up until their return to the top division Bradford were always on a par with the Mariners, give or take a few seasons here and there. I especially remember a ‘relegation six pointer’ at Valley Parade in 1997 when Grimsby ran out 4-3 winners against a Bradford City side managed by Chris Kamara (#unbelievableJeff). After the match I was convinced we would stay up. We didn’t. The Bantams overhauled us that season and only two years later were on their way back to the top division after a 77-year absence.

Their spell in the Premier League was short lived but I think it is fair to say that by stretching into a second campaign it lasted a season longer than most expected. A 1-0 win against Liverpool on the last day of the 1999/2000 season meant that they stayed up the first time around, albeit with a record low 36 points. The next year they finished bottom of the league and with their top goal scorer only managing to find the back of the net four times it probably didn’t come as much of a shock. Even taking the onfield results into account I can only imagine how exciting it must have been to follow the Bantams during those two seasons. The ground was transformed into some kind of semi-built Bernabeu (two sides being f**king massive, the others more suited to League 1); signing international footballers; wins against Newcastle, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea and appearing on Match of the Day every week.

Looking back at it now with the benefit of hindsight I still can’t really see much that Bradford did wrong transfer wise and when I say transfers I’m not talking about wages, just the players on the pitch. The club spent less that £3m (modest even back then) in their first season and brought in proven Premier League experience in the likes of Gunnar Halle, David Wetherall and Lee Sharpe from local rivals Leeds United and Andy Myers from Chelsea. The next year they added extra quality to this with Benito Carbone, Dan Petrescu and Billy McKinlay all joining up but sadly it just wasn’t to be. That being said there is almost always a tale of caution for other clubs in these kind of situations and Bradford’s time in the Premier League (along with the subsequent infamous collapse of ITV Digital) ultimately led to them entering administration and a tumble back to League 2. However, in a world where footballers are so often maligned it is worth noting here that Benito Carbone walked away from £3.32m in wages because, devastated by his team’s relegation from the Premier League, he “...couldn’t be the person who put Bradford City out of business.” The world needs more people like Carbone.

Despite their almost inevitable relegation, Bradford City’s time in the top flight really does show fans of smaller clubs one thing: That one day, with the wind blowing in the right direction, you might just find yourself in the promised land. Yes you’ll be way out of your depth and lose most matches but you won’t half have a cracking time nonetheless. I’ll leave you though with the words of Mr Benito Carbone who in a recent Instagram post summed up the whole experience:

“I could define it as a moment of passage, a ‘market hit’ my purchase by the team... but in reality Bradford City was much more to me than this... it was passion, dreaming with my eyes open, a city that has given me immense satisfactions, important knowledge such as that of Stan Collymore, Dan Petrescu, Dean Windass, Lee Sharpe... it is so... the time in which you live moments is not important but the intensity in which you dive into them.”