With the exception of West Ham's Reg Pratt (due to retire later this year), nobody has been chairman of a League club for longer than Bob Lord. This is his nineteenth year in the Burnley chair; longer than half the club's supporters have been alive. As a study of how one man can gain control of a football club, and then personally guide its destiny, the case of Bob Lord is unique.

Football could have died in Burnley, just as it is surely dying in Bury, Barrow, Halifax and Rochdale. The reason that it has not, and the reason that anyone outside North-East Lancs has heard of the town, is because of his vision. When all is said and done, this fact at least cannot be taken away from him. He says that he realised the heart of the matter very early in life: "I knew when I was your age that Burnley, with a population of 74,000, could never support a successful League club on gates alone." But instead of trusting to luck, as have other clubs, to throw up a player every two or three years whose sale will command a fee large enough to clear the overdraft, Burnley have evolved the System. This has taken twenty years to put together, and the fact that Burnley were relegated 3 years ago was only due, in his view, to temporary defects. To a less committed observer however, the composition of the present team makes it less than a 'typical' Burnley side.

Two preconditions were necessary. The first was laid when Burnley acquired the 79-acre Gawthorpe Hall, with its seven training pitches, all weather surface, and staggering appreciation in terms of wealth. When granite-hearted Alan Brown heard the news (it was he who spotted Gawthorpe first, taking tea there with the caretaker), he reputedly embraced the two messengers and pronounced, "Now we'll get somewhere with our youth policy." Who was actually responsible for the purchase of this Lancashire gold mine has been lost to the chronicler, but we know who takes the credit.

The second was, and is, the inexorable continuity of the Plan, which ensures turnover at first team as much as at youth level. Not Ray Bloye's instant jam today and bouncing cheques tomorrow (where will the bills be sent?). "I have never sold a player either too early or too late," says Lord, and will produce chapter and verse to support his case, whether it be the sale of Jimmy Macllroy or Dave Thomas. Examine the records of Harris, Irvine, Coates and Elder, all fat fees who contributed little to the clubs they joined after leaving Turf Moor.

These conditions of employment are most attractive to the schoolboy star, and, more important, his father. Burnley have established a reputation for being the good shepherd to the lost youths who come to them, talented striplings for whom the reward is the offer of a first team shirt. Lord stresses the benefits of the warmth and homeliness of a small town compared to the anonymity and fleshpots of the metropolis. How has Lord guaranteed this continuity? Only by a gradual process of elimination of the Lordless elements in the mixture.

He joined the Board in 1951 with the minimum 35 shares, and admits, "They let me on by accident, while the team was in Turkey". Within four years he was chairman: "When I became chairman, it was the custom that each chairman should do the job for three years and then retire to let another member of the Board take over. Now that's not the way to run a business... When I became chairman there were nine directors." Now there are just four others. He sees his operation as successful only if every turret is manned by a private picked for that very post and none other. Lord remarked on the voluntary unanimity of the directors, adding that he does not vote himself. The training staff and managers - men like Dougal and Bennion - are and have been men with claret blood in their veins. This did not save Alan Brown, whose youth policy produced the League Championship side of 1960. He left for Sunderland in 1957, "But I had not spoken to him for twelve months before then. He was getting too bigheaded for his own good."

Bob Lord also abhors what he euphemistically calls 'wastage'. Harry Potts, manager of the triumphant team of the early sixties, agreed to be moved upstairs to the post of 'general manager' soon after his fiftieth birthday (Jimmy Adamson is twelve years younger). But he did not succeed in creating sufficient work for himself, and had to go in July '72. Lord claims to have awarded him, "the biggest golden handshake that had ever been seen in football. I like creating records."

Driven by this singleminded devotion, it is difficult to see why Lord has had so little effect on the League Management Committee. He tried to get on it for ten years before reluctant acceptance, but the reason, by his own admission, "was one of status." What reason could he have anyway for proposing new statutes which, if resulting on the reorganising of other clubs along his own lines, would only be at the expense of Burnley? "The task of the League is purely to organise and administrate the four divisions and not to meddle in the domestic affairs of the clubs." In particular, this autonomy must be maintained against a move by the supporters to have any say in the running of the club. "It took me until 1962 or '63 to make sure we could control who got onto the Board. Even now it is theoretically possible for the shareholders, collecting all the dead votes, to vote someone on, since I do not own a majority of the shares, and nor does the Board as a whole." But given his opinion that, "It is fatal to allow shareholders to elect any Tom Dick or Harry," it is clear that such a proposition is to all intents and purposes impossible.

His devotion to the Plan means that it must also be defended against interference from supporters. "We don't recognise any supporters' associations. I don't mind them existing - just won't have anything to do with them. I never go to Supporters' Dinners; it only costs them a fiver or so, but then they think they own you. In particular we never accept money from supporters associations; they hand you a couple of cheques for a few thousand, and the next thing you know they are demanding a seat on the Board in return. There is all the difference in the world between a supporter�s viewpoint and a director�s viewpoint."

Where, then, is the Plan leading? Certainly not towards the democratisation of the League, or of Burnley FC. In fact, it is leading in the opposite direction. In the words of the pilot: "My ambition, what we are aiming for, is for the club to function completely without any money coming through the turnstiles at all. That is the road to Utopia."

Reproduced by Jez Wilson and Pat Gates, July 1998.

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