Archie Gray, PSR, and saying goodbye to football's glorious delusions

The time of writing is a time of waiting, like Archie Gray in a service station waiting to hear where he's supposed to do a medical next. It looks like he's being sold by Leeds United, to comply with financial... finances at Leeds United, unless Leeds United can find a buyer for something else. Sell the club, keep Archie Gray? It's one option.

Wherever Gray ends up we'll be left with a few things to think about after this weekend. The first thing is, that he was never going to end up at Brentford. Even if they'd paid £40m, got Archie's signature on a contract and his body from the medical to a full-kit photoshoot, he was never ending up at Brentford. 

Leeds fans perceived an insult in this near-miss — Pontus Jansson was bad enough, but not Archie Gray, not any Gray — because our sense of big-club self, justified or not, can’t compute the idea of a world-class Leeds talent leaving us for a Fourth Division team. You say they’re not in the Fourth Division anymore? Sorry, but rose-tinted nostalgia doesn’t work like that. Leeds are bigger. Leeds are better. If Archie Gray is too big for us, Brentford is too small for him. 

And that would have been proven eventually. Brentford weren't bidding for Gray because he could help them win the Champions League. They wanted him because football has become — although to an extent it always was — a market chain where clubs with strong academies (factories) sell to mid-table or stepping-stone clubs (wholesalers), who then sell to trophy contenders (retailers) who profit by winning things and marketing the life out of their assets. Brentford were opportunist middlemen, seeking a slice of Archie's path to the top, to Manchester City or wherever, because like Brighton they are owned by people who made their fortunes from gambling who are willing to take braver risks than the inherently conservative top teams and their dead-weight shareholders. 

A transfer to Brentford would not have been about football, but to facilitate asset growth. We like to talk about young players blooming or blossoming, but this was more of a forced rhubarb situation, shoving Archie away to grow in a dark shed until the bigger clubs felt reassured enough by his Premier League performances to spend bigger on a sure thing. Brentford saw a chance to take on the risk that the biggest clubs shy away from. Manchester City won’t pay £40m to find out if a player with one season out of position in the Championship is good enough to play in Europe. But it was worth that to Brentford who, if he turned out to be, could look forward to £80m when Manchester City felt confident of that sure thing. 

So we've heard something about the state of modern football this weekend. We've also, in the switch from Brentford to most likely Spurs amid interest from Aston Villa, Chelsea and others, found out something about Archie Gray: that he is deemed good enough, now, by the big clubs, to be worth that risk, cutting Brentford out and taking it right now. It's questionable whether Spurs really have a much better shot at winning the Premier League or Champions League than Brentford do, but that classic Tottenham delusion is important in that they believe they do, and they believe Archie Gray can help them. 

At Elland Road, opinions have been mixed about Gray's first season — is he really as good as people say? Did we see enough evidence of this 'generational talent'? If he had gone to Brentford this summer, the nays would have had more evidence that he's not all that. The rush to take Gray immediately into the top six says the people who ought to know know something. Of course, Spurs could end up doing a Jack Clarke on him, but the number and type of clubs reported to be interested and the fee they're willing to risk on this one-season Champo wonderboy are the story here. If you judge a player by the clubs willing to risk it all, Archie Gray is the best bet in football right now.

Which makes his departure from Leeds, for financial reasons, so much harder to take. Nobody seems entirely sure, because nobody can hope to understand this stuff anymore, but the likeliest scenario seems to be pressure on the Peacocks to sell to meet the Profit & Sustainability limits that the club, with Red Bull investment in the books and the NFL's sharpest negotiator, Paraag Marathe, at the helm, had intimated were navigable without drama. "The partnership with Red Bull leads to more profile, to global revenue, to more money to buy players and keep players," Marathe said when their involvement was unveiled. "It could be the difference between saving a player from being sold or signing a player." Righto. I suppose he did only say 'could be', all while knowing one of the club's most important players had a non-promotion release clause in his contract.

We don't know whether that clause was inserted at the behest of a player who, reports say, hasn't been pushing to leave, or to suit a club who would need to cash in if they missed out on going up, or because it was good for both. Usually it's requested by the player and their agents. But it's important to remember that a release clause still gives a player the right to say no — their club has to accept a transfer offer from another team, but the player does not. The reported timelines with Gray have me leaning towards clubs meeting his release clause, Gray saying he'd be happier staying at Leeds for another season, and Leeds saying he can't do that, because of their PSR situation.

It's hard to tell how much of this is on Leeds, as a particular case, and how much is being repeated in boardrooms across the country since PSR changed last season from something to shrug and roll your eyes at like a droning pub bore, to something that can mean points deductions and has to be taken seriously, like if the pub bore suddenly turned up in a new sports car and started demanding money with menaces. Clubs have got to take PSR seriously, now, and it doesn't seem like everybody was prepared. We don't know what's been going on between Elland Road and Santa Clara this weekend, but The Athletic's Chris Waugh does have reporting from within Newcastle's end-of-June, end-of-days shenanigans:

The club’s frantic late attempts to comply with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) by their annual accounting deadline led to a fraught, frenzied and largely unedifying week of discussions about the potential sale of more than half-a-dozen members of the first-team squad. “Scrambling like mad,” was a phrase repeated again and again about Newcastle within recruitment circles.

...

Multiple senior figures have described this past week as the most difficult of their careers and the intense stress was felt from the boardroom to the head coach, through to the squad.

In the end, after resisting bids for star players like Anthony Gordon one minute, then offering the same Anthony Gordon to Liverpool the next, Newcastle think — with fingers crossed — they have solved their situation through the PSR friendly methods of selling a really good player who had made it from their academy to their first team — Elliot Anderson — and forcing out a cheaply bought young prospect with a high valuation, Yankuba Minteh:

The 19-year-old knew Newcastle had Premier League interest — and he had agreed personal terms with an unidentified club — and wanted to stay on Tyneside or head elsewhere in England. For around a week, Newcastle aggressively attempted to convince Minteh to move to Lyon. It was suggested to him he could find himself training with Newcastle’s Under-21s if he did not leave, though the club have denied that this was a threat to make him move, more an outlining of the reality.

This is the reality of what clubs are doing to meet Profit & Sustainability regulations and it can't carry on. We don't have the same clarity on events at Leeds, but we do have three players — assets, people call them now — who look like they've been caught up in the PSR trap: Brenden Aaronson, because it makes PSR sense to keep him; Crysencio Summerville, expected to leave but not in time to help the PSR bottom line; and Archie Gray, who wants to play for Leeds and win the Champions League with his little brother, having to go. Are any of these players happy right now?

Meanwhile, it's probably not the only reason for England's insipid performances, but Jude Bellingham wandering around a pitch in Germany complaining of feeling "absolutely dead" is a manifestation of the welfare concerns that players' unions are beginning to make legal: that the football authorities are making them play too much, too often. And recently, in the Premier League's scramble to solve its own PSR mess, the proposal of a squad cap linked to turnover brought players' wages into the cutting line — again, met with raised eyebrows from the workers' reps. The outcome of PSR, as it stands, is a mess of panicked transfers and loopholes in which no player who happens to be a) good b) under 23 and c) still at their first club can safely concentrate on becoming a footballer, rather than an asset for balancing the books at some billionaire's over-stretched company. It's hard to think unions won't soon be speaking out on this as well, if they're not already. 

With older players, the need for clubs to profit on their already inflated transfer fees is pushing the market into areas it's hard to imagine it can sustain. A £150m player looks great in the accounts, until you try to sell them and there's not another club out there with the cash or the financial headroom to buy them. It's been hard enough, for Leeds, to find ways of selling Marc Roca or Diego Llorente. The clubs that do have the money to buy the world's best players — no, not Llorente — and don't have the restrictions, are in Saudi Arabia, creating a scenario where the only way to bail out European football is by selling its greatest assets — again, players — to the league that wants to take European football's place.

Profit & Sustainability — the regulations have made it an oxymoron. Clubs are supposed to become sustainable, by maximising profits, by selling players they could build a team around for a decade — players who then need replacing by other players, whose fees come out of the profits that are supposed to be making clubs sustainable. And remember, it was the clubs themselves who voted this system in. The chain of unintended consequences is now so long that nobody can find their way back to what the intended consequences were and, in a desperate hunt for any consequences at all, that's when points started to be docked apparently at random. Arguably the worst thing that could have happened with PSR, after introducing it, was enforcing it. 

When I think about the dissatisfaction many of us feel with modern football, it's with a sense of powerlessness — we can't stop Red Bull or anyone doing what they like, really. But the players do have power, and over the years have for good or ill wielded it to force some of the sport's seismic changes: abolishing the maximum wage, the Bosman ruling. Perhaps, rather than slamming them for greed or underperformance, we should be asking for the players to save football for us. Any young player standing up for themselves this summer, refusing to accept a transfer they don't want just to meet some regulatory framework that doesn't make sense and will be scrapped soon, is doing the right thing. If they can bring about enough pressure to change the football calendar, reduce injuries and increase quality, we'll all enjoy better games.

All of which is taking us over a lot of ground, away from Archie Gray, but to demonstrate the net he's caught up in. And it all helps to emphasise and explain the pain of this weekend. Because even if that's the way of modern football, it wasn’t supposed to be this way with Archie Gray, son of Andrew, grandson of Frank, grand nephew of Eddie. He doesn’t just share the name, he shares the face. And the talent. To look at Archie playing for Leeds was to see a golden era come back, to forget all the market forces crushing modern football and feel the glorious 1960s and 70s again. A smiley badge on the away kit next season won’t do that the way Archie Gray could do that. I remember watching Rotherham’s Leeds supporting manager Leam Richardson seeking Archie out for a handshake after the game at Elland Road, like any Leeds fan, wanting to shake hands with a representative of the best of our history. If football was the game we thought it was when we fell in love with it, Archie Gray’s Leeds career would be never-ending. Player, player-manager, manager. Like his grand uncle. 

His grand uncle Eddie Gray is so special, though, because even when football deserved him, he was rare. And actually, football barely ever deserved him. He was constantly hacked down and hurt by clogger opponents who stamped on flair. Brian Clough talked about shooting him like a lame racehorse. He became Leeds United's player-manager because the board calculated they wouldn’t have to pay him a full manager’s wage. After he made a brilliant team for David O’Leary, he was pushed aside to make room for Brian Kidd. He was brought back at our lowest ebb in 2003/04 and made to bear the pressure and responsibility of Peter Ridsdale's relegation. Then he was sacked before the season even ended, his job given to Kevin Blackwell. Ten years later, Massimo Cellino’s sons were accusing him of hanging around for money and comps. Sometimes I think we shouldn't only be building statues to Eddie Gray at Elland Road, but profusely apologising.

Part of why Archie has attracted so much love at Leeds is because, with greater distance, we've appreciated his family more. Our links to our history have been stretched and strained by our 21st century doldrums. When Archie's dad Andrew broke through in 1996 he inspired similar but smaller scale nostalgia, because nostalgia hadn’t become as desperate as it has now. He was a charming link to a past so recent that Eddie was on the coaching staff, but that was all. This was the 1990s, and we wanted players for an exciting Packard Bell, Puma and Premier League future. When Andy Gray didn't work out on our wing, it was a shame, but his departure didn't register as a deep loss. We had Harry Kewell, and Eddie was still in the dugout. It's different now with Archie, now there's been so much more history since then, and since it became so much more attractive than now.

Of course, our fervent wish for just one dream to come true would have been lessened, in May, if Leeds had gone to the Premier League ourselves. That’s going to be hard to avoid next season. Would Archie Gray be staying if Leeds had been promoted? Probably, yes. Would Leeds have been promoted if Gray had been played more often in midfield? Nobody can say for sure — but when Glen Kamara and Ilia Gruev are refusing every shooting opportunity next season, that won’t stop anybody from saying it. Daniel Farke is going to feel his first season like an even worse hangover now.

The single first team season we got from Gray feels like it will end up being a barely adequate representation of his eventual ability. How much of that is just because he's young, and how much is because Farke didn't let him run riot, will be a depressing argument to rehash in the years ahead. But while we should treasure that moment at Elland Road against Leicester — as exhilarating a night as you'll get, with the old songs and the new songs and Eddie in the stands and Archie singing and dancing on the pitch — that's about as good as it got for us and Archie. Someone else will get his thirty-five yarders.

Maybe it would all have been better if young Archie — and even younger Harry — had just gone to Manchester City’s academy years ago, and we’d never known this mirage. And it was a mirage: Archie Gray was a vision of a desert oasis, a Champions League trophy we could see in the barren landscape of the Champo, and choose, deluded as they come, to believe in. We wanted Archie Gray to stay to bring our history back. If we could just get promoted before he finished his A-Levels, if we could get into Europe before he’s married, if we could be challenging for honours before his young person’s railcard runs out, then, maybe then, we could keep him forever. And maybe that could persuade his little brother to stay too. It was always a fantasy, all this, of spending hundreds of millions to outpace Archie Gray and puberty. But there was a time, and a lot of people can remember it, when you could build a successful team around your homegrown players, a time when that was supposed to be the point.

In 2024 all this was a lot of weight for young shoulders, even if they have the distinctive slope of a Gray, but Archie seemed ready for it. Tottenham think he's ready for it. One club, at least, think it's worth trying to build a Champions League winning team with Archie Gray in it. Maybe Leeds fans who dreamed of that club being us were not actually deluded. Although only being as delulu as Spurs is not much of a recommendation, I grant you. ★彡