Joel Piroe, and what Leeds were missing from their Brighton model

It might be difficult for Joel Piroe, newly arrived at Leeds United, to keep hearing himself being described as 'the obvious thing'. Footballers must like to think of themselves as extraordinary, unique talents, worth millions because they can do things no other player can do. But at Leeds, Piroe is being received like an automaton, a solid and reliable piece of equipment, predictable. Put him on the pitch, get twenty goals.

That is less about Piroe himself and more about a reaction to Victor Orta's seasons of shopping for Andrea Radrizzani, and yearning for the obvious thing is characterised by a very Yorkshire idea: stop trying to be too clever. In the end, Orta and Radrizzani came off worse for getting ideas above themselves, for thinking they're summat, for reckoning they were smarter than everybody else. Leeds is not always a kind place for people who want to stand out. Why did they think they're better than what's good enough for the rest of us?

Orta and Radrizzani thought that way for a pretty simple reason: it works elsewhere. Brighton are now the template breakthrough club of the 2020s and they've done it by being clever. What Orta has been criticised for trying to do is what worked at Albion: buying cheap young players that other clubs have overlooked, with the aim of developing them into top class players worth hundreds of millions to Champions League clubs. Brighton have been exactly clever enough to get from being our League One rivals in 2010 to Big Six insurgents thirteen years later. Leeds United's problem has not been trying to do what they've done. It's that Victor Orta was much worse at it.

That's perhaps not only due to Orta's inability to pick a player, or the advantage at Brighton of chairman Tony Bloom's top-secret database. As it often does in modern football, the problem begins with money. Little Brighton fighting against the big clubs and winning is a tinseltown tale, but it has not been quite so romantic as it sounds. Moisés Caicedo was at Brighton for just over two years, playing one season on loan and one in the Premier League. A £4.5m outlay became £115m income, and that was that. He wasn't there long enough for Albion fans to get his name on their shirts, but that wasn't really the point of him. The point was the £110m profit. Brighton are very clear about what they're doing with players like Caicedo: they're developing them so they can make more money from less money, and with that profit, improve the club.

Where Leeds went wrong was in trying to combine football with profit. Brighton did not start raking in the transfer profits as soon as they were promoted. In their first four seasons after promotion, Brighton spent more than they made on transfers, only selling players for mundane amounts — like Anthony Knockaert, bought for £3.5m and sold for £12m — until Ben White's transfer to Arsenal declared the Brighton 'model' open for business. Dan Burn, Marc Cucurella, Yves Bissouma and Leandro Trossard all followed at big prices, before this summer and Caicedo, Alexis Mac Allister and Robert Sánchez. Importantly, in the meantime, they always had a decent team. When Leeds United were finishing 9th in the Premier League, I mocked Brighton for only winning nine games per season every season for four seasons. Now I can see what that stability was leading up to.

Leeds never had such stability. Last week, Angus Kinnear told Leeds United Supporters' Trust that players had loan clauses in their contracts because the, 'previous ownership simply could not have funded the club in the event of relegation' and Leeds had to ensure they could reduce costs. But it also meant Leeds not only had to make more money from less money, if they wanted to copy Brighton, but rely on the same players they wanted to profit from for keeping Leeds in the Premier League. Orta wasn't just betting on Brenden Aaronson becoming a player worth much more than the £25m he paid for him, but on him being immediately good enough, aged 21, to keep Leeds mid-table in the Premier League.

The clue at Brighton is that Caicedo only played 45 games for them. They got 38 games from Cucurella, 41 from Ben White. Those three players are their biggest ever sales, £230m coming in for three players who played a season each, 124 games combined. It's nearly £2m a game. We know from Ben White that the most important games for his career development were not played for Brighton, but Leeds, and Brighton could allow that because Lewis Dunk was always in their back line with Adam Webster and Dan Burn. Their policy of developing youth was helped by signing Adam Lallana aged 32, Danny Welbeck aged 29, and lately James Milner aged 37, experienced England internationals with hundreds of Premier League games behind them, and that Graham Potter was always in place. When playing their advantages, Brighton didn't only use their data about esoteric transfer markets. The coach stayed the same, the system stayed the same, the core players stayed the same, and the young players they believed could become valuable were bought, loaned out or rotated in at the right times to make the biggest bang for their buck.

Leeds, meanwhile, left themselves no choice when it came to players like Brenden Aaronson or Pascal Struijk. Unlike Brighton's belief in Potter in tough times, Leeds didn't have faith in their experienced manager, and ended up turning last season into a four-coach all-or-nothing campaign of total pressure on shoulders too slim to handle it. Leeds might point to the impact of injuries on Liam Cooper, Stuart Dallas, Adam Forshaw and Pat Bamford, but none of them were James Milner, and the situation was not improved by selling Mateusz Klich, or by betting the relegation fight on Georginio Rutter's potential.

What Joel Piroe represents is the sort of player Leeds should have been signing before even thinking about developing Rutter. (By the way, if Leeds are to profit the way Brighton did from Caicedo in pure cash, he will have to become the third most expensive player of all time, or if we want the same percentage uplift someone will have to stump up £895 million.) Piroe, with Karl Darlow, Joe Rodon and Ethan Ampadu, represents reliability, durability and knowhow as more important virtues than potential or resale value. In the future, Leeds might not sell Piroe for more than they've paid for him this week. But if he scores twenty goals a season whilever he's here, that won't matter. He might even teach Rutter or Joe Gelhardt some scoring tricks: players do better, and become worth more, when they're a small part of a winning team rather than a big part of a losing one.

If we don't like the idea of borrowing from Brighton, we can call this the Wilko model. Howard Wilkinson is rightly recognised as the father of Thorp Arch, the manager who built the academy at Leeds and then leant his knowledge to the England setup. But in his first season and a half at Elland Road, he refused to even think about youth development. An academy without a club was going to be no good to anybody, and Wilkinson's priority was building a club and getting into the top flight before the Premier League launched and pulled up the drawbridge. Building a club meant, first of all, building a team, and that's why the players he signed were players who had done something. A lot of them were much too good for Division Two — Gordon Strachan, Chris Fairclough, Mel Sterland, Vinnie Jones and Lee Chapman were all dropping a level to go back up. But after promotion he bought Gary McAllister and Chris Whyte, the best midfielder and best defender in Division Two, plus title winning Arsenal (and ex-Leeds) goalkeeper John Lukic; then Steve Hodge and Tony Dorigo, England internationals. By their time he could also think about Rod Wallace, aged just 21, and start working on plans for Thorp Arch.

But when Leeds were signing players for Wilkinson in those years, there was not much thought for resale value. The only thought was how many goals a player would score, create or prevent. If enough players did those things properly, then the time would come when Leeds could spend the time and money on making players of their own. Almost ten years to the day from Wilkinson explaining his ten year vision to chairman Leslie Silver, Alan Smith scored on his Leeds debut at Anfield, aged eighteen, in a team featuring academy players Jonathan Woodgate, Harry Kewell and Ian Harte. There had been a lot of Paul Beesley along the way, a lot of John Pemberton, and quite too much Carlton Palmer, but that's football — there are no shortcuts, no cheat codes, no matter how clever you think you are.

I don't know what will become of Brighton's trajectory but Howard Wilkinson was, to my mind, a genius. But the key to repeating his genius is in understanding the part when he left his own ideas secondary to the immediate needs of the club and the team. There was going to be time to be clever, later, but the greatest value was in first becoming ordinary. If that's what we get from Joel Piroe, he could be our most intelligent signing for years. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)