It must be a football manager’s worst nightmare. The club owner sticks his head around the manager’s office door, smiles and says, ‘Can I have a minute?’ And then he proceeds to tell his head coach which players to pick and in what formation. It leaves the manager in a Catch 22 situation. Does he risk his job by ignoring the owner’s wishes, or give in to their demands… going against their own ideas of how to play the game?
For Botafogo head coach, Renato Paiva, the former was the only viable option. The club’s owner, John Textor (more on him shortly), demanded that Paiva did away with his policy of selecting three defensive midfielders; naming a more attacking line-up instead. Paiva refused… and was instantly sacked, despite guiding the Brazilian side to the last 16 of the lucrative Club World Cup.
Textor wasn’t having the best of times in the summer of 2025. His multi-club ownership scheme backfired when both Crystal Palace and Lyon – of which he was the major shareholder – qualified for the Europa League. UEFA rules dictate that two teams from the same stable can’t play in the same competition.
The American then resigned from his role at Lyon, after the doomed French club were handed an administrative relegation. All of that stress, of course, does not excuse Textor from his terrible treatment of Renato Paiva and Botafogo. But he’s not the first football club owner – nor presumably will he be the last – to go rogue…
Just 10 days after beating PSG at the FIFA Club World Cup, Botafogo boss Renato Paiva has been….SACKED 😅 pic.twitter.com/sTXMdN9LHc
— OneFootball (@OneFootball) June 30, 2025
Doing It Yourself
Whatever the fans want you to do, you should do the opposite.
Ron Noades’ combative style of football club ownership perhaps wasn’t the blueprint for a harmonious relationship with one of his side’s key stakeholders. But then this was a guy who very much did things his own way…
Noades, a successful businessmen, held ownership shares in a number of London based football clubs over the years – including, most notably, Crystal Palace, whom he helped to bring success to in the 1980s and nineties.
Having sold his stake in Crystal Palace in 1998, Noades then went and acquired a controlling stake in Brentford – taking the extraordinary step of appointing himself as the club’s manager. Although he held the necessary coaching badges, Noades had little to zero experience in professional football – this was considered to be the ultimate vanity project.
And yet, he helped the Bees to win the then Division Three, before consolidating in the third tier during the 1999/2000 season. Noades resigned as manager and chairman in 2000, but is generally remembered fondly at Brentford for helping to steady the ship at a challenging time for the club. He later recalled:
I wanted to manage. I wanted to decide myself who I wanted to buy, and the big advantage of doing both roles is that you speed up the process so much.
I could buy a player within 24 hours when other clubs were talking about sending out their chief scout to see them, after that the manager and then after that trying to persuade the chairman to buy him. While they were still poncing about, I’d bought him.
My Way or The Highway
Other owners have established a reputation as overbearing demagogues with an innate desire to meddle in team affairs. Two different managers – Sam Allardyce and Gianfranco Zola – separately accused David Sullivan and David Gold with interference at West Ham.
During the 2009/10 campaign, the Hammers were threatened with relegation – a prospect that Sullivan described as ‘Armageddon’ for the club. And so he took it upon himself to give the players a good old-fashioned talking to.
But that didn’t sit well with Zola, who asked his employer to leave the training ground. David Gold has also taken to appearing in the dressing room during Zola’s pre-match briefings – seemingly to keep tabs on what the Italian was up to. Zola commented,
I understand the owners are concerned about the club and the whole situation. They can be as proactive as they want… as long as they don’t interfere with my job.
It was later suggested that Sullivan and Gold had tried to buy players for West Ham without Zola’s consent, while also putting the entire playing squad – apart from Scott Parker – up for sale.
Such interference was later confirmed by Sam Allardyce, who managed the Hammers between 2011 and 2015. He revealed that he once turned up for training to be met by a player in full kit that he had never met before – an unnamed individual signed by the owners behind his back. Allardyce revealed,
[Sullivan’s] a strong man when it comes to signing the players he wants, I know that for a fact.
Fire, Brimstone and Dunkin’ Donuts
Francesco Becchetti was a fiery character that did things his own way at Leyton Orient… with disastrous consequences. The Italian acquired the O’s in the summer of 2014, when they had nearly been promoted to the Championship. By the end of his tenure in 2017, the club was on the brink of dissolution.
In little over two-and-a-half seasons, Becchetti hired and fired nine managers, served a six-match ban for kicking Orient’s assistant manager Andy Hessenthaler and plunged the club into so much debt they faced a winding up order. In the end, Becchetti ended up selling his shares to Dunkin’ Donuts CEO, Nigel Travis.
Speaking of fire… former Doncaster Rovers owner Ken Richardson took the word a little too literally during his time as Dons owner in the 1990s. Frustrated by the local council’s refusal to green light a new stadium, Richardson took matters into his own hands. He hired a former SAS soldier, Alan Kristiansen, to burn their Belle Vue Stadium to the ground. Why? So that Richardson could claim the insurance money and effectively force a new stadium to be built in the city.
Kristiansen started the fire which caused £100,000 of damage, but it didn’t gut Belle Vue as planned – he was later caught when his mobile phone was found amongst the damage. Richardson was found guilty of conspiracy to commit arson in 1999 and sentenced to four years in jail.
It wasn’t Richardson’s first brush with the law: in 1982, he ran a ‘body double’ in place of his horse Flockton Grey in a race at Leicester Racecourse – he stood to win £200,000 from the ruse when the 10/1 replacement won, however eagle-eyed stewards spotted that the imposter could not have been an unraced two-year-old.
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