A legacy of loan clauses

To defend his tenure as Leeds United's chief executive officer, Angus Kinnear told Dan and Michael on our podcast this week:

"I think out of the first five years, we had one average one of transition. We had four relatively successful ones, or very successful to relatively successful. And we've had one year which was definitely a failure."

You could say the last part over and over and louder and louder and it would still feel like an understatement. The way the transfer window closed last weekend really emphasised how definitive last year's failure was, as Luis Sinisterra left for Bournemouth. He only came to Leeds last summer. Also signed last summer were Brenden Aaronson (gone), Rasmus Kristensen (gone), Marc Roca (gone), Tyler Adams (gone), Joel Robles (gone), Sonny Perkins (gone), followed in January by Max Wöber (gone) and Weston McKennie (gone). Of the not-gone, Darko Gyabi almost left on deadline day, Wilf Gnonto gave leaving a bloody good go, and Georginio Rutter was having a lovely time with Leeds Children's Charity at Lineham Farm this week, like an amiable version of Gaetano Berardi, the nice guy who stood apart as the Sick Six he signed alongside trashed their reputations.

I'm wary of the concept of 'legacies' in football, for various reasons I've droned about before. But they're generally about what someone leaves behind. In Victor Orta's case, even after Kinnear's defence of the five years when no one got relegated, it feels like his legacy will be these players, the ones who fled within a year. It's not about what he left behind. Because there isn't anything.

You can tell something was a bad idea when, twelve months later, every trace of it has gone. Orta's attempts to rebuild Leeds as Jesse Marsch's club peaked when Chris Armas arrived to help him, and that moment, when you could say the jigsaw was complete, lasted all of two games.

We've now heard from Kinnear that this project was based on two things. First, Orta's belief that Marsch was "going to be one of the highest performing coaches of the next three to four years". Second, that the players they were signing "had the potential to be 8 out of 10s or 9 out of 10s". This was because:

"I think there was a desire from all of the board, but particularly from Andrea (Radrizzani), because he was an ambitious guy, that we wanted to really put Leeds on a very steep trajectory into Europe. And to do that, on the budgets we had, we had to take bigger risks in terms of the players that we recruited, the manager that we recruited, and trying to find somebody that would maybe over perform."

Elsewhere in the interview, Kinnear talks about the fine margins that can lead to relegation — in our case, the injuries to Rodrigo and Adams, and a couple of unfair results. But putting the strategy of recruiting players and coaches with the aim of overperforming and getting into Europe, against the fact that every single one of them is no longer here and Leeds are in the Championship, does not show Leeds failing by a fine margin. It shows a wide margin. A huge margin. It shows everything they set out to do going wrong.

Kinnear also said, about last season:

"The reality is, if the players had performed in line with their expectation and in line with the values that we paid for them, two things would have happened. One, we probably wouldn't have gone down, and two, they (could) have been sold for (the value of) their exit clauses."

But that is not 'the reality'. That's the fantasy. Yes, if all the players had played really well, everything would have been fine. But 'the reality' is that everything was terrible, and the proof is that everyone has gone. Even in the cases of Adams or Sinisterra, who performed reasonably well, Leeds couldn't get a transfer fee worth more than the exit clause for either of them because the overall failure triggered the relegation clauses that helped them leave.

If the job was to hire one of the best performing coaches of the next four years, and buy — for low fees — a crop of 'eight or nine out of ten' players who would put Leeds onto a 'steep trajectory into Europe', then the job was done badly.

But, we knew all this. Or had worked most of it before hearing it confirmed. 'The past is the past', as GFH Capital once told us. Going over it all again won't help anyone. At least I haven't dredged up the stuff about Marcelo Bielsa not being backed (although it's a safe bet I'm going to, some other time). Victor Orta and his scouting network has gone, Andrea Radrizzani and the ambition outstripping his means has gone. That just leaves Angus Kinnear to tell us about all the things that went wrong before, and 49ers Enterprises, who should have enough money to make nothing matter as much.

That's the theory, anyway, but there was one part of Kinnear's interview in particular that warned me against complacency.

Back in that dumb Daily Mail article at the start of the season, about how 49ers Enterprises were 'winning over sceptics' at Elland Road, was this about the new strategy for playing in the Championship:

While those involved want to keep the precise detail to themselves, for obvious reasons, a third-party data company was commissioned to uncover what it takes for a relegated club to make an immediate return. 
Their findings were myth-busting and many. While they are not being treated as gospel, they have formed part of the club's planning. What can be said is that retention and know-how formed a key element.

Know-how is apparently here. As said in the article, Daniel Farke knows how to get promoted from the Championship, Nick Hammond knows how to sign players, Gretar Steinsson and Adam Underwood know how to run a football department. And when it comes to retention, Kinnear makes the case in his TSB interview for keeping his own job — those five good years, plus building 'a structure that can withstand' one bad year.

But the point about retention — and the plan for this season — was that part of the club's plan for this season was based on convincing players to stay. In the TSB interview, Kinnear said:

We thought we would have more of an ability to convince them that this was a great project, and that playing in the Championship and tearing it up for a season would be good for them, would be good for their careers, wouldn't harm their international careers
...
(49ers Enterprises taking over, hiring Farke, signing Piroe) We thought that those things would have influenced people, particularly when you looked at the loan options that were available to them ... a number of players were made offers (to stay) which would have closed the financial gap for them between where they were and where they are now.

But the players Kinnear thought could be convinced to stay at Leeds, did not stay at Leeds.

I have to say, I kind of feel like I've been maybe naive about it, but it's been just brutally disappointing how we've seen players want to crawl over broken glass to leave our club ... I thought there would be, for a number of these players, a bigger emotional bond, and a desire to put right bad seasons that they had last year ... I think it is just a function of how they perceive the Championship ... I would confess we definitely underestimated the strength of that feeling.

This was despite the players and their agents asking for exit clauses and loan clauses in their contracts in case of relegation. Kinnear seems to have thought these were to mitigate the wage reductions of 50% or more that Radrizzani's lack of resources would make necessary upon relegation. Instead, predictably, the players used them to avoid playing in the Championship. Reading between the lines, the attention on the loan clauses this summer — not least from Daniel Farke himself — has caught Kinnear and the club by surprise, because they don't seem to have expected them to be used.

Somehow, they looked at Max Wöber, a player who only came to Leeds because his old boss Jesse Marsch phoned him and made him a lucrative offer in exchange for helping him keep his job, and thought he would be willing to take a big pay cut this summer to play in a second tier league to 'put right' a season he only played a couple of months of, at a club where his 'emotional bond' was with the manager they sacked as soon as he arrived. They thought the captain of the USMNT would be willing to play in the Championship, that Rasmus Kristensen might prefer Leeds to Rome, that when Jackie Harrison said he still has a target of playing for England in the next World Cup, he was just joking around or something?

It seemed obvious, when stories about the club hoping these players would stay were floating around the press after relegation, that it would mean footballers letting their hearts rule their heads. And it was nice to think that maybe Adams or Harrison or even Wöber might do that. But I don't think many fans took the idea very seriously. And not as seriously, by the sounds of things, as the club did.

Which means a jury debating their competence has to stay out. Speaking to Leeds United Supporters' Trust a few weeks ago, Kinnear was saying the club is now building

'a squad of players who want to wear and fight for the shirt ... who are united in the fight ... ready for the fight'

Which all sounds good, and there's no reason to doubt anything in the commitment of Ethan Ampadu or Joel Piroe. But the judgement on which players want to fight for the shirt is being made by the same people who thought Max Wöber might want to stay and fight for the shirt, or Luis Sinisterra, or Tyler Adams. Kinnear says he might have been "naive" about this, but it doesn't count as ancient history the way Orta believing Rasmus Kristensen would fast-track the Peacocks into Europe does. This naivety was this summer, while planning for this season.

It's Orta and Radrizzani's legacy that, in the end, they don't have one — everything they tried to build last season, when after Bielsa they really tried to build their own thing, has gone, and they've gone with it. The legacy of this for Angus Kinnear and 49ers Enterprises is that they're still here, and still have to deal with the consequences of their part in what went down.

Football club owners all have to make the same appeal to fans, which is, that fans should trust them even when our instincts suggest otherwise. To be fair, a lot of us did trust them last season — we were excited enough to see what Marsch, Aaronson, Adams and co would bring, hoping the owners knew what they were doing with all this. And, to be fair, a lot of us are giving 49ers Enterprises the same chance now, as they bring a new structure to the football side, with new people, and give Daniel Farke what backing they can within Championship spending rules.

And, as fans, we don't really get a choice about how we respond to that appeal. Whether we trust them fully, a little, or not at all, we just end up watching, hoping that in a season or two we're not listening to detailed explanations of how hubris and naivety put us through more miserable football. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)