The inflection point

Much of Angus Kinnear's interview with The Square Ball the other week concentrated on the sins of the very recent past, i.e. stuff that people were angry about on the internet all summer. The answers were about as mundane as being on the internet all summer. Why did Leeds United sell their best players? They got good bids and needed the money. Why didn't they sign a no.10? They couldn't find a good one they could afford. Well. Well... well SOD OFF anyway.

All that concentrates on players who don't play for Leeds United, which is a key part of the modern football textbook as described several years ago by Marcelo Bielsa. The right players are always the ones who aren't in the team, and the right tactics are always the ones you don't use, and they're always right because they can never be proven wrong. In the football supporter's brain, where hypothesis never meets experiment, Gus Hamer in a 4-3-3 will always be better than anything Daniel Farke actually does.

As for the players Leeds United did sign this summer, for a moment Kinnear sounded close to declaring the end of strategy forever at Elland Road, but he was just paving the way for yet another. It has felt, in the Andrea Radrizzani era and after, like Leeds have been speedrunning through all modern football's available 'models', from The Wolves to The Leicester to The Brighton to The Red Bull, like tweens chasing TikTok trends the older kids have already discarded. In fact that's exactly how Kinnear sounded when he said to TSB, "If you speak to Steve Parish at Crystal Palace...", as if he'd just been doing exactly that, before rushing back to the office to hop on a Teams call to Santa Clara. "Guys! I've just been talking to the coolest guy, he says he knows how to get some really good footballers, and..."

Those dances with devilish models are a big reason why the sins of the past have piled up at Elland Road, but leaving them behind one after another gives Kinnear an easy opportunity to leave the blame with them. Some of the recruitment in the past was "just a little too speculative" he said, summing up United's attempt at following The Brighton Model® as an example of a club "perhaps getting ahead of themselves in terms of, you know, how the trading model is going to work". We're all trying to find the chief exec who either failed to get Leeds United ready for its own trading model, or signed off on a trading model that the club wasn't ready for.

Anyway, it sounds like the new club to emulate are Crystal Palace, who have "consolidated a position" where they don't have to worry about getting relegated, and can start buying players who will later have large resale value. I mean, this absolutely is the same as The Brighton Model, even down to Kinnear's suggestion of employing Glenn Murray for a few years, but maybe Steve Parish still talks to him while Tony Bloom is too cool to be seen with Championship executives.

What this means practically is that, this summer:

"We haven't bought any high risk, high potential players. We've bought players who we think can deliver for us this year across every position ... there has been a deliberate strategy. I think most players (Leeds signed) fall between the age of 24 and 26."
...
"At the moment our objective is not to trade players. It's to get promoted."

It's not clear to me how the newest strategy is any less reliant on the sort of magical thinking Kinnear used, in the same interview, to convince us that if we just forget the last two seasons ever happened then Brenden Aaronson is a good signing now. Talking about buying players who will have "immediate impact", Kinnear cited the club's work to make sure Leeds are buying Largie Ramazani "at the right point of the curve ... all the data and scouting reports suggest this is a player who has scored five or six goals a season historically, but has the ability to score fifteen because they're at that inflection point in their career."

It feels like this is missing a 'how'. Just because Ramazani's at the 'inflection point' where he could score more than five or six doesn't mean he will score fifteen goals this season. An inflection point can send a curve either way, and even if the data suggests a sharp upward line ahead, the data won't be training him and the data can't help him adapt to a new team in a new league in a new country so he can immediately deliver fifteen goals.

This feels as hypothetical as Kinnear's hindsighted claim that, if Joel Piroe had played all last season as a no.10, he would have scored twenty goals. Maybe he would? Like putting Hamer in a 4-3-3 last weekend, we can never prove things wouldn't have worked that way. But we can say that if Piroe had stayed at no.10 then Georginio Rutter would not have played half his season there, and would not have become everybody's favourite player and worth £40m to Brighton, and Leeds would not have had the financial or PSR benefit of that transfer if Piroe's seven extra goals hadn't brought promotion either. So, as solutions-of-the-past go, Piroe at no.10 still needs work.

Ramazani's fifteen goals and Piroe's twenty are football fantasies that belong more in the mind of a fan than a chief exec, but this is what's getting us to the point where Ramazani can be declared a low risk signing because somebody drew a graph and Kinnear says the bad old days of bad strategies are over. Until the next time something goes wrong, when we'll hear about a new model they're following that will solve all the past sins but is still, meanwhile, purgatory.