Victor Orta, and the search for an idea

Victor Orta’s time at Leeds could have been synonymous with Marcelo Bielsa’s, but instead it will be defined by his work before and after. And what happened before Bielsa could all have been forgotten if not for what came after. 

Orta’s achievement was to recognise where the club had gone wrong in Andrea Radrizzani’s first year. Radrizzani arrived with two ideas, one about getting Leeds promoted in five years before he’d lost too much money, and selling if he couldn’t; another about raising funds by developing and selling young players. After less than a year of asking Thomas Christiansen and then Paul Heckingbottom to work on Jay-Roy Grot, Pawel Cibicki, Aapo Halme, Yosuke Ideguchi and the rest, Orta had learned something about the club and its fans and realised that this would not do. Radrizzani expected patience — this was his first year. Orta realised that patience, in a passionate Latin-style fanbase he recognised, had been and gone in the fourteen long years since relegation from the Premier League. 

We all know the story from there. What’s bewildering is how quickly its lessons seemed to be forgotten. The way Radrizzani and Angus Kinnear tell it, Marcelo Bielsa made Leeds realise they had a choice to make in summer of 2021, after finishing 9th in the Premier League. Bielsa burnout was a cliche but, for any manager, four seasons is a long time with the same group of players (Alex Ferguson’s longevity at Old Trafford was helped by his willingness to change assistant, to freshen up the coaching). Leeds could change the coach. Or Leeds could change the players. A new coach would be cheaper and the sums Bielsa mentioned in press conferences, to buy better players than he had, were eye-watering. It took a while for events to catch up with Leeds — rather than change the coach or the players, they changed neither until after the January transfer window was closed in 2022 — but it feels like the decision had been made. Leeds, believing themselves secure in the Premier League thanks to that 9th place, were going back to the buy-low sell-high policy Radrizzani had started with.

There’s nothing wrong with the concept itself. Brighton and Brentford have been very successful this way, by being very data led, and although they hide it behind Jurgen Klopp’s gnashers, Liverpool’s success came this way too: selling Philippe Coutinho funded their Champions League win. It’s a good idea to grow a club by making smart data-driven purchases to unlock value in players who can be sold for a profit, so the club can make more smart data-driven purchases from a higher shelf and make more profit, and so on. The key must be, then, in the execution. Brighton and Brentford are both owned by professional gamblers, and it’s their mathematical chops that keep them ahead. Brighton’s algorithms are a closely guarded competitive advantage that don’t leave the club. Liverpool’s analytics department has been led by a literal nuclear physicist. The secret, at those clubs, has been in the numbers.

When Orta has spoken about analytics it’s about ‘converting data into knowledge’, and this is where his methods differ from Liverpool and the two Bs. The data is used to find players from which to choose — Orta maintains lists of alternative footballers in each position, tracking shadow elevens, actively monitoring by some counts 2,000 possible Leeds players. The final choice, it seems, comes down to that transformation of data into knowledge — essentially, Orta’s intuition. Orta is not a mathematician. He’s a football guy, a fan, a scout, by now an experienced director of football. He backs himself to know football, to know players, to pick the diamond from the spreadsheet. Thanks, maths, Victor will take it from here. It’s actually much closer to playing Football Manager than we might imagine when we joke about it. The database gives you a list of players who meet your criteria, then you pick one, and hope you don’t end up needing an old save game to save you.

It’s how Orta found Jesse Marsch. From forty managerial profiles, Marsch stood out. “We had already started to analyse different profiles,” Orta told the Telegraph, and Jesse confirmed they’d started speaking two years before he arrived at Leeds: “When Victor and I started speaking a couple of years ago, he kind of drew some comparisons between the ideals of Bielsa, the way he likes to play, some of their performances that they put together, and then showed me how it is similar to the teams that I coached. I have never seen a sports director do an analysis like that. So right away I was impressed.”

To the Telegraph, Orta continued: “We took into account his model of play, which was similar to Bielsa’s in terms of pressing, intensity and physicality. We wanted to keep the things that had worked and make a more moderate transition. Marsch is a coach with a style that is trending in Europe right now, offensive, with a lot of energy. I love that. We also used big data as a filter, and what he was like as a person. Everything was analysed in detail.”

Orta thought the style was trending, but Leeds were already two-thousand-and-late. Marsch’s work at Leipzig should have made everybody think twice. A season in the German Bundesliga should have been the ideal preparation for the Premier League, and the culmination of Marsch’s years of working up the Red Bull organisational chart. But the top of Red Bull now looked very different to the climb. Under Julian Nagelsmann the Leipzig players had learned football with more possession, and been more successful, and enjoyed it more than the classic RB antagonism against the ball. The style Marsch knew, that he’d learned from all the RB playbooks, was now unpopular with the players and he couldn’t adapt. Red Bull, which before anything else is a marketing company, will not back a brand that’s out of fashion, and was working with the change. Everyone was moving on from everything Marsch knew. But he was moving to Leeds. Orta was sure he’d found the coach to move Leeds on, to improve from Bielsa.

Was this ego? Maybe. But of a kind that is more about trying to make a mark than only wanting credit. When Andrea Radrizzani arrived, I wondered about his motivation as the former partner in MP & Silva to Riccardo Silva, who after he and Radrizzani sold up bought Miami FC, named a stadium after himself, and started having a very nice time. I thought Leeds might be Radrizzani’s way of vying for similar fun and status. Orta, meanwhile, has always been the pupil of Sevilla sporting director Monchi, willingly and gratefully, but at some point the apprentice wants to step out from the shadows and establish himself. At Leeds, Orta ended up in another shadow: Marcelo Bielsa’s. 

He was always going to want to test his own ideas. We don’t know what he and Jesse Marsch talked about over Zoom during the long months of Covid, while Bielsa was completing Leeds’ promotion and taking us into the top half of the Premier League. But by the time Marsch was hired, he and Orta had convinced the Leeds board that whatever they had been planning was the future, that it was worth taking fast fees for the club’s two best players, so tens of millions of pounds could be invested in a new concept that would make Leeds the future of football. 

The problem was not only that Marsch’s ideas were not the future, or even the present. Part of the problem now was that, after concluding from the data that Marsch was the answer, Orta had to keep following the data to identify players that would work with Marsch. Far from opening up worlds of possible players for Leeds, the analytics pushed the data into a sieve from which only the Marsch compatible could emerge. There will be better right-backs out there to buy than Rasmus Kristensen. But when you’ve adjusted your model to suit your guy, you’ve excluded many of them by design. That makes it even more important that your guy is the right guy, because if he’s wrong, the players who will play best for him will also be wrong. When a sporting director is picking one idea, they have to make sure it’s the right idea.