By June 2002, O'Leary had spent almost £100 million on new players in less than four years for no reward in terms of trophies, but he had never finished outside the top five as a manager. Ridsdale sacked O'Leary as Leeds manager in the summer of 2002, replacing him with Terry Venables. O'Leary's departure signalled a downhill spiral for the club – highly attributable to the financial state that saw the sale of several key players, which saw three more managers (Venables, Peter Reid, and Eddie Gray) come and go before the club was finally relegated from the Premier League in 2004 with £80 million debt, and fell into League One (the third tier of the league) three years later. This fall from grace led to the phrase "doing a Leeds".