The history of Red Bull, and the history of Leeds United

'The name and logo of Leeds United Football Club will remain unchanged.' It can't be a good sign when a football club's announcement of a new front-of-shirt sponsor has to end by reassuring fans that it won't destroy that club's heritage, despite being a "historic milestone", in chairman Paraag Marathe's words. But then, Red Bull come with a longstanding and deserved reputation in football that makes bringing them into your club like unveiling your new employee, The World Famous Arsonist, at the dry kindling factory. And, in keeping with their own grasping and insidious heritage, Red Bull are not only front-of-shirt sponsors but have, as mentioned in the final paragraph of the announcement, put in 'capital investment for a minority ownership stake'. Their name is on the shirt, their money is in the bank, and their hoof is in the door. 

So far, this has only ever ended one way, hence that not very reassuring reassurance about not changing the name and logo of the club. That track record is so well established that Marathe had to do interviews addressing it. "This club is and will forever be Leeds United Football Club. It’s not going to be the Leeds Red Bulls," he told Phil Hay of The Athletic. Red Bull's position is that of minority investors, with no seat on the board, and Marathe says it will stay that way. "It’s our group’s management of this club and my leadership of this club," he said. "Let me say it again — that’s not going to change. This is a minority and minority-only partnership." How minor a minority, though, could change: 'Marathe told the Financial Times that Red Bull would be neither the largest nor the smallest minority investor in the club, with the financial figures set to fluctuate if Leeds were to gain promotion to the Premiership.'

This sleeping bull will lie, then, a lucrative silent sponsor, grunting only when invited to by Marathe. He says Red Bull and Oliver Mintzlaff, their chief executive of corporate projects and investments, will add to the pool of investors — Will Ferrell, maybe Paris Hilton? — he can call up for advice. "I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know what I don’t know," Marathe told the FT. "And so when there are things that come up that I maybe have not seen before, I have a nice phone-a-friend that I can call and ask advice." Advice about hiring head coaches, perhaps, from an organisation that groomed Jesse Marsch through two of its clubs until he was ready for their pinnacle job, whereupon he screwed it up, came to England and relegated Leeds. Or advice about players, from the organisation that gave us Jean-Kevin Augustin, Brendan Aaronson, Tyler Adams, Max Wöber and Rasmus Kristensen. Or advice about playing styles, from the blueprint that didn't only send Leeds down in 2022/23, but Ralph Hasenhüttl's Southampton.

How long we can expect Red Bull to stay silent in West Yorkshire depends on your personal levels of cynicism and how much faith we can put in Marathe's assurances. Marathe presents well, and his week of tightly focused Q&As were good public relations. He stuck resolutely to his script. To the FT: "I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know what I don’t know. And so when there are things that come up that I maybe have not seen before, I have a nice phone-a-friend that I can call and ask advice." To The Athletic: "I’m smart enough to know what I don’t know, so when a situation arises that I haven’t seen before, I’ve got great individuals I can call." To the FT: "Leeds will never be the Leeds Red Bulls. We will forever be Leeds United Football Club." To The Athletic: "This club is and will forever be Leeds United Football Club. It’s not going to be the Leeds Red Bulls."

Among the things Marathe says he's smart enough to know that he doesn't know, though, are some important details. "I don’t know specifics about interactions between Leipzig and Salzburg, as you just talked about," he told The Athletic, when asked about the connections between two of the Red Bull owned clubs and how Leeds might fit into that. Those interactions, and those specifics, go right to the heart of the problems with Red Bull, but despite six months of conversations with Mintzlaff, Marathe is claiming not to know much about it. On the other hand, Marathe also says, "(Red Bull) recognised the global potential of Leeds and what this club could be ... They know the legacy of this club." I'm sure they do. And that's what worries me. 

In some ways the club colours and the badge and the name and the name of the stadium are all not so much red bulls as red herrings. I won't be relying on Marathe or Mintzlaff's word that these won't change. I also won't be relying on the Football Governance Bill's protections for club heritage, as these things can still be changed if a club can prove enough fans want them to. I have lived through the times when hardly any Leeds fans knew anyone who wanted the club to leave Elland Road, yet Peter Ridsdale's survey said 87.6 per cent of season ticket holders wanted to move; and through Andrea Radrizzani's salute badge which, while folklore may remember it being laughed out of existence by Leeds fans, died as much due to the dunking tweets from The History Channel as anything going on in West Yorkshire. There, again, the club was claiming fan backing, for a change they said would last 'for the next 100 years', through an opaque survey that gave them the answers they wanted to a question they hadn't actually asked. 

If Red Bull take more control of Leeds United and want to change the name, the badge and the colours, they can. The question is more about whether that will still be necessary. Their initial sponsorship and investment in Leeds is already a departure from their usual method of taking over and obliterating, and can perhaps be traced to the death of founder Dietrich Mateschitz, and his replacement by a three-member board — of which Mintzlaff is one. English football's resistance to Mateschitz's usual M.O. has supposedly been a factor in their absence from the richest league in the world, but without him, Mintzlaff may be more willing to try a different approach — a more traditional sponsorship, an influential but minor stake, a superficial respect for the heritage being bought. 

The best argument for convincing ourselves that Red Bull won't change Leeds United's name or colours is the weight of our heritage, but it is also the danger. An evolved Red Bull may not need to change the name or colours to reflect their involvement. Instead, they can change what the historic name and colours mean. An example comes from the style of play implemented across all their clubs by Ralf Rangnick, Jesse Marsch and co — high energy counter-pressing football identified by some as 'energy drink football' and possibly not by coincidence. You don't need to call the club Red Bull to have the team playing a style that people associate with Red Bull, and at this point that feels like a greater danger to Leeds United than a splash of red across the shirt. While everyone is on high alert for alterations to the club's badge, we may fail to spot everything else about the club changing to a Red Bull way, until we have a Red Bull club with a Leeds badge on top. And in that case, what good's the old name anymore?

Things have already changed, simply because of who Red Bull are and how they've invested beyond sponsorship, in ways that having a local boiler company paying to be on the front of the shirt didn't change things. Leeds United is already linked, in thought, not just to fizzy drink sales but to what Max Verstappen is doing — and Christian Horner — and to the fortunes of Red Bulls Salzburg, Leipzig, New York, Bragantino, Ghana. It's been true of 49ers Enterprises, too, who have involved me more in the NFL than I ever wished to be. When organisations like these buy their way into your club, they become thieves of thought, attention and — in the worst cases, as at Newcastle United — loyalty. Without changing too much more than the percentages of ownership, they can change the culture. Like it or not, Leeds United is already the club of Don Revie, Howard Wilkinson, all-white shirts and Red Bull energy drinks.

It's also now a club with a base note of uncertainty. Because of their history, Red Bull will loom over our future. A club spokesperson told Leeds United Supporters' Trust, 'There will be some in-stadium activations, as is already the case for partners like Hisense. More details on those pieces will be announced soon.' So that's something to look forward to — how far Red Bull will activate their combined sponsorship and investment, how close they'll go to the limit imposed by our club's heritage. Then next summer we can look for more. Then more. We can take Marathe's word that "It’s not going to be the Leeds Red Bulls", and hold him to it, for as long as he's here. But it will be impossible to see every fresh RB logo, in-stadium, on-kit and online, to read of every alteration to Red Bull's minority investment, to view every interaction with another Red Bull club, without remembering that at every club Red Bull have ever been involved with they have only done things one way — the way that suits them. 

It has to be acknowledged that, under the ownership of 49ers Enterprises, Leeds United is going to change anyway. The Premier League has fully entered its faustian era and become impossible without giving up your soul. What we want for the club we love is success, and what success will do is change the club we love beyond recognition. I once stumbled around making a point on the TSB Podcast that we might, one day, look back on Radrizzani's ownership as the last hurrah of the club we grew up loving, the last time Elland Road as we knew it, and footballers as we knew them, competed in the Premier League. Radrizzani's hamfisted inability to modernise Leeds gave us a last experience of recognising ourselves at the top level, a valedictory tour for a club still stuck, in many ways, how it was when it was relegated in 2004. 

While other clubs have incrementally progressed into the 21st century, dragging Leeds there now will mean a series of shocks. Not counting the cheese wedge, Elland Road has added precisely one new stand since 1974, and that was in 1993; it went all seater in 1994. There will be more heard about redeveloping Elland Road than the nostalgic grumpiness of a few old bastards, because it has been unchanged so long it has made even the youngest fans into grumpy nostalgic bastards. Generations of parents have taken their kids and grandkids to Elland Road and told them, wistfully, that in their day, it was all basically exactly the same. 

Radrizzani and co managed, mostly through incompetence, to dodge that problem, but 49ers Enterprises seem determined and willing to take it head on. A future is coming to Elland Road and 49ers Enterprises will be responsible for what that future is, and how Leeds fans feel within it. "This is the community's club," Marathe told the press last week. "I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I get to carry the torch on behalf of the community, and I have to make some difficult decisions, but as you make these difficult decisions you're thinking of the impact on and off the pitch." These words sound good but the actions and words of a few days later have deflated those hopes as his first decision of the summer is to start taking advice from a company whose vision for the future of football has always been the absolute worst. "I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know what I don’t know," Marathe says, but is he smart enough to keep Red Bull, who know a lot of things he doesn't know, firmly inside their can? 

"It warmed my heart a little bit," Marathe told The Athletic, sounding like the popular girl had asked him to the prom, "because they could have picked any club to pursue but they picked Leeds United, because they recognise our potential." Quite. Our potential for what, though? ★彡