At Leeds United, 49ers Enterprises already know the playbook

What can you do with all the buzz of a completed takeover once the announcement has been tweeted, the quotes have been released to the press, the in-house media interview has been sat through and the open letter has been printed in the local paper?

49ers Enterprises took the clever option by following Paraag Marathe's talk about being 'aggressive' in the transfer market with an immediate new signing. Ethan Ampadu, from Chelsea, £7m, have that. Talk leading to action is a good start.

Then follows, inevitably, a fallow period that in a 24 hour news environment puts a club back to relying on vibes. Nobody needs any more interviews about what the new owners will do, as repeating themselves can only damage the good mood, so now United have flipped back into the mode of last week, back to promising that they're working hard behind the scenes while hoping the pre-season friendlies, incoming transfers and negotiations to keep star players will keep everybody happy.

Every takeover is the same, at this time, in that because we don't have any actions to judge the new owners by, let alone results, it all comes back to the vibe. Does this feel better than before? And does that mean anything?

This new start is immediately better than the ending we were going through. What stood out most to me from Andrea Radrizzani's exit interview with Sky Sports was not just how willing he was to blame Victor Orta for everything, but how he described himself as "distant and quite passive" until the moment when Orta and Javi Gracia were fired and he decided to "play magical cards with Sam [allardyce]" — who was Angus Kinnear's mate anyway, not Radrizzani's. It's hard to believe that Radrizzani could have been "distant and quite passive" during a season that ended up costing him more £300m in a reduced sale price and the goodwill of a city, but it's also hard to believe Radrizzani describing himself that way if it is not true.

Even when he did take control back from Orta, in Leeds that looked like turning up to say his goodbyes at the Newcastle game, then skipping the finality of Spurs, apparently on his doctor's advice. Which fits with something I have suspected was a big problem at Leeds, post-Bielsa: everything became more difficult, and less fun, and more antagonistic — especially for someone like Radrizzani who reads his mentions on Twitter — and so Radrizzani lost interest. Letting Orta take charge might be the mistake Radrizzani admits to, but might Orta have been helped by an owner who was not sulking in the background, saving up to buy Sampdoria and save himself from the stress?

This sullen year unfortunately coincided with vice-chair Paraag Marathe, who said this week that he is "a pretty open, honest, direct person, and so I like to say what I mean and mean what I say", deciding — as he said with his next breath — not to speak his mind, but "to bite my lip and just stay in my seat, so to speak, and watch the plane fly". Given Radrizzani had taken his parachute and was putting plenty of distance between himself and the pilot's seat, I'm not sure who Marathe was actually watching last season. It suggests a surreal image of him holding weekly Zoom meetings with an empty chair, diligently taking notes — "I have multiple notebooks of notes now of how I would like to do things," he says — about nothing.

Perhaps there was more to the boardroom arrangements that prevented Marathe speaking his mind and keeping this airship in the Premier League. Either way, those notebooks are important now. Marathe doesn't have the disadvantage of starting from scratch with Leeds, but that means he doesn't have it as an excuse, either.

Radrizzani didn't seem to know what he was getting into when he bought Leeds. Near the end of their first season, Radrizzani, Orta and Kinnear crowded into an awkward video call from some office in London to answer questions from angry fans for LUTV. Radrizzani's main plea was for patience, time to learn, indulgence for his errors. He'd owned the football club, the first he'd ever, for less than a year. Where Orta succeeded was, a couple of months later, making Radrizzani understand that his year was nothing compared to the years that Leeds fans had been through. Our patience had run out, justifiably, long before Radrizzani had even arrived to ask for it. Was that fair on him? No. But while he might not have realised it, he had bought our problems when he'd bought the club. Orta got it, so Orta went and got Bielsa. (Why and how Orta later lost both Bielsa and the plot is even harder to understand after this intervention.)

Nothing about Leeds United should be surprising to Marathe, even if some of the other investors might not have understood what it would mean to be named on Twitter (given the choice, I would have opted for anonymity until I could see who things were going with my new investment). Marathe's notebooks should be full of answers to problems he is already familiar with, and the next months and years should be filled with action.

That marks this new era, I think. Radrizzani spent a lot of his time as owner talking a big game about all the things he wanted to do, and for a long time we let him talk, because we remembered how bad the club was when Massimo Cellino (and GFH, and Ken Bates, and Adulant Force) owned it, and recognised the achievement of winning promotion. 49ers Enterprises will not get such a grace period. After five years of silent partnership, talking won't be enough: Marathe and his pals will have to deliver on all Radrizzani's promises, or replace those promises with their own and deliver on those, quickly.

That will perhaps be an even harder job. While Radrizzani let concepts like redeveloping Elland Road evaporate, it meant he never had to deal with the consequences of actually doing it, with the arguments and rancour that will inevitably come when someone starts trying to modernise this football club. It was funny that, even though it was due to some lapsed paperwork, the 49ers era began exactly as the Radrizzani era began: with the Supporters' Trust getting approval from the club and the council for listing Elland Road as an Asset of Community Value. One takeover is very much like another, but that felt a little too much like history repeating. For 49ers Enterprises, though, that should be an opportunity. If history is to repeat, starting now, their selling point is their wherewithal to take the chance to do it better. Let's see how they do. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)