Before the teams with whom Chapman enjoyed his greatest success meet in the Premier League on Wednesday, we recall arguably English football’s most influential manager – referred to as the ‘maker of champions’

On Wednesday Arsenal and Huddersfield meet in the league for the first time in a generation, since the Gunners contributed to their one-time rivals’ relegation with two 1-0 wins in 1971-72. Theirs is a history pockmarked with notable encounters, from the 1930 FA Cup final to the friendly with which Huddersfield celebrated their centenary, but perhaps the most important occurred a little after midnight on the night of 10 June 1925, as Herbert Chapman decided which club he should manage the following season. Every one of these key battles was won by Arsenal.

Huddersfield’s board thought they had done enough in that late-night meeting to keep their man in Yorkshire, including matching Arsenal’s offer to double his £1,000-a-year salary. The following morning the Gunners announced his appointment, a move that, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post, “greatly surprised both the Town Club directors and Mr Chapman” and forced the manager’s hand. “Though very reluctant to sever his connection with the Huddersfield club, he feels that he cannot allow this opportunity of going to London – with the greater prospect it offers – to pass,” they wrote.

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But both clubs, and English football in general, almost missed out on the man who may rank as their greatest manager of all time. For five years before he made the move that changed both clubs’ histories. Chapman had been out of football altogether, and apparently forever, banned for life for his part in some wartime financial irregularities whose precise details it seems will remain forever mysterious but which at the very least involved illegal payments and two attempts at blackmail.

Chapman had made his managerial reputation at Northampton, before moving to Leeds City as secretary-manager in 1912. Following the outbreak of the first world war he took up a position as a manager in a munitions factory just outside Leeds but remained listed as a secretary at the football club. The extent of his involvement there during the war years is now unclear: he appeared in some club photographs but certainly spent much of his time elsewhere.

In July 1916 the Yorkshire Evening Post wrote that his “important munitions appointment … engrosses his whole time and attention”, while the following January the Sheffield Green ’Un reported that he had missed his club’s visit to Hillsborough. “The Leeds secretary has hardly seen a match this season,” they wrote. “He is tremendously busy on munitions, and has been a great success in his national work, which was to be expected, for a capable and earnest man usually makes good whatever he turns his hand to.”

Full League football was suspended for the duration of the war but regional competitions emerged in its place, and Leeds continued to field a team, often padded out with guest players such as Charlie Buchan – whose permanent transfer from Sunderland to Chapman’s Arsenal in 1925 would later be exposed for having been eased by illegal payments. With Chapman busy at the munitions factory, his former assistant, George Cripps, was handed control of the team – and of the club’s book-keeping.

It is fair to say that Cripps did not have an easy relationship with the club’s chairman, Joe Connor. Cripps said that he “did not wish to undertake the book-keeping” but that “it was thrust upon me” and that he performed his tasks so well that he was given a string of bonuses “as an acknowledgment for the able manner in which I had carried out the work”. Connor, meanwhile, alleged that “at the end of Cripps’ first season the books were in a hopeless state”, forcing them to hire “a competent accountant” to oversee them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Herbert Champman, far left, with his Huddersfield team that won the 1922 FA Cup final. Photograph: W. E. Turton/Getty Images

By the end of the 1917-18 season, again according to Connor, “the directors had so much disagreement with Mr Cripps that they became sick of the trouble” and asked Chapman to return. But Cripps was unwilling to step back into his old role as assistant, told directors that he had proof that players had been paid improper expenses, and demanded a £400 payout. The legal claim was settled, and Cripps’ evidence handed over to his solicitor, James Bromley – who, just to make matters more complicated, was a former director of the club – and locked in a safe, with both parties agreeing that they would remain there for good.

In the summer of 1919 the club prepared for the resumption of the Football League after the war, offering contracts to some of the players who had appeared in their colours both before and during the league’s four-year hiatus. One of them, the full-back Charlie Copeland, was distinctly unimpressed to be offered a considerable reduction on the £3 a week – £4 when he featured for the first team – that he received before the war. He was so unimpressed, in fact, that he sought legal counsel – from a certain James Bromley.

He went on to warn the club that, unless a more generous offer was forthcoming, he would inform the FA and the league of illegal payments during wartime, when all players were supposed to be pure amateurs, receiving for their efforts neither wages nor expenses. The club called his bluff, releasing him on a free transfer, but it was a misjudgment that killed them. He made good on his threat and proceedings were opened against the club, their directors and their officials – including both Cripps and Chapman.

As proceedings began, Leeds’ directors were ordered to hand over all pertinent paperwork. They replied that they were unable to, since the documents were not in their possession and were locked in a solicitor’s strong room. From reporting at the time it seems that the documents probably could have been produced but a decision was made not to do so, presumably because, rather than exonerating those under suspicion, they would actually implicate more people.

“If payments were not strictly proper under the war regulations, they were not of such a nature as fully to compensate players for the time and wages lost in playing the games,” wrote the journalist Alfred Pullin, using the pseudonym Old Ebor, in the Yorkshire Evening Post. “But even small illegalities carry punishment – when discovered or exposed – and the directors appear to the writer definitely to have made up their minds to sacrifice themselves rather than let punishment fall on players who had been loyal to them and whose suspension now might be a serious matter for the clubs with which they are at present connected.”

Leeds were not so much found guilty as unhelpful, and the authorities came down hard on all concerned. That October the club was thrown out of the league, replaced by Burslem Port Vale – who the Lord Mayor of Leeds said “did not act in a sportsmanlike way in pressing their claim before the final decision was made”. They are the only club ever to be expelled from the league mid-season; Port Vale not only took over their remaining fixtures, but also their previous results.At the Hotel Metropole on 17 October all the club’s assets, from their players to their goalposts, were auctioned off to the highest bidder. Four directors, including Connor, plus Chapman and Cripps, were “suspended sine die and not allowed to attend any football matches or take any part in football management”.

In fact Chapman had already left, to become manager of an oil and coke works in Selby. After City’s dissolution a new club, Leeds United, was formed, took over City’s old ground at Elland Road and – thanks to a generous loan from Huddersfield’s chairman, Hilton Crowther (who hoped to merge the two clubs, and soon became chairman of Leeds) – flourished. League football returned to Leeds in 1920.

In October 1920, after a year in purdah, Chapman’s position was discussed at a joint meeting of the FA and the Football League in Newcastle. Connor’s testimony was apparently crucial in persuading them that Chapman had been a peripheral figure at the club through the war years and to lift his ban. “He was after all merely the servant of the directors, and the decision to withhold all the records did not rest with him,” wrote the Athletic News. “For 12 months he has been under the ban and both he and his family have laboured under difficulties, and with a sense of injustice.” Within weeks he was at Huddersfield, by the following March he was their manager (taking over from Ambrose Langley, who coincidentally had been succeeded when he left his only other job in management, at Hull City in 1913, by Chapman’s brother Harry), and three years later they were league champions.

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At both Huddersfield and Arsenal he won two league titles and an FA Cup. He was, as one paper headlined its obituary after his unexpected death in 1934, a “maker of champions”. His influence on both clubs continues to be felt; indeed it could – quite easily – be argued that no other manager in the history of English football has ever been so influential. But some chapters in his story are remembered better than others: the Guardian’s obituary listed some of the innovations he helped introduce – “he worked hard to popularise football by floodlight, experimented with a white ball, had a special timing clock erected at Highbury and introduced several other novelties” – but never so much as mentioned the year he spent forced into the footballing wilderness.

The other individuals concerned in the Leeds City affair are not remembered so fondly, if they are remembered at all. By 1939 only two of them survived and Connor, then managing a Scarborough hotel, appealed to the FA for their reinstatement. He had no desire to work in football, he said, but wanted to watch Scarborough Town play a Midland League match. “You’d think that 20 years was a sufficient sentence to impose,” said Connor. “For 20 years I have not seen a football match. For 20 years I have been banned from all grounds, large or small.” In a brief reply Stanley Rous, secretary of the FA, politely declined. Three years later Connor, too, was dead. He never did get to see Scarborough Town.