Leeds’ transfer window: A summer nobody at Elland Road ever wants to repeat - The Athletic 2/9/23

Phil Hay

The pettiness of Monday afternoon at Leeds United was all rather wonderful but somewhere in the trolling of Nadiem Amiri was a sober consequence of the club’s summer 2023 transfer window — as if somebody was bound to push their luck too far at some point, and Amiri was that person.

To recap, Amiri’s on-off, on-off transfer from Bayern Leverkusen was as close as it got to being actually on when Leeds flew him over from Germany at the start of this week with the aim of getting down to business. He and Leeds’ new manager Daniel Farke spoke privately and that conversation was productive, or so it seemed. Amiri looked around the club’s Elland Road stadium and Thorp Arch training complex and all Leeds wanted was his permission to activate a medical and tie up the loose ends.

Then came the pantomime. Amiri’s camp moved the goalposts and Leeds found themselves facing financial demands they were not anticipating. After some consideration, and sensing they were being messed about, the club stopped negotiating and told the 26-year-old midfielder to make his own way home. The private jet they hired to fly him in would not be there to use for the return trip. Finding a flight back to Germany was his problem.

Amiri to Elland Road, deal aborted and exasperation all round, was the latest leg in the relay of people taking Leeds on or taking the piss.

The club’s new chairman, Paraag Marathe, has a phrase he likes to use — sport is sport whether the ball is ‘stuffed or puffed’ — but football is the wild west and here was the summer to prove it: Andrea Radrizzani’s takeover of Italian club Sampdoria while proposing to use Elland Road as collateral for a bank loan to fund it; Tyler Adams, a USMNT poster-boy, threatening legal action as leverage for a post-relegation move back to the Premier League with Bournemouth; Max Wober promising to stick around… for as long as it took him to find a way out; Willy Gnonto threatening to go by any means necessary, whether he had the right to or not; Luis Sinisterra challenging the legalities of his release clause hard enough to force a dramatic loan to Dean Court last night; Max Aarons being led to water, only to take a sip and promptly sod off, another Bournemouth jab-in-the-ribs. And Amiri, traipsing down Briggate, a main thoroughfare in Leeds city centre, waiting to book a plane to carry him back to Leverkusen.

Does the NFL, a competition without the spectre of relegation or the carrot of promotion, move and shake like this? Maybe it does.

In his 20-odd years with its San Francisco 49ers franchise, has Marathe ever had his personal contact details published on Twitter for the purposes of constructive correspondence, as happened a month ago? Maybe he has.

But association football is another world, with its own ecosystem, predators and politics.

The upside for Leeds’ new ownership group is that in educational terms, they have now seen it all in the space of one summer and one European transfer window. With Friday night’s deadline gone, they are through a near-impossible baptism. And with so much water under the bridge, ending with the saga around Sinisterra in the final hours, they seem satisfied with the end result.

It does not take much experience of a specific sport to know that any club of any standing who finish a season needing a takeover, a new manager, a new technical director and a new squad have little or no chance of enjoying the perfect summer.

Relegation from the Premier League exacerbated stress levels at Elland Road and was the cause of many of the club’s problems in the first place.

Some of what went on in the wake of that decisive season finale at home to Tottenham Hotspur on May 28, Leeds brought on themselves; clanging consequence which were nothing less than the sound of their own actions. Some of what went on was football proving that, no matter how considered or methodical you try to be, some situations are not yours to dictate.

There were uncomfortable truths waiting to be learned by 49ers Enterprises, and the American investment fund has learned several. One of the harshest was spelt out by a senior figure at the club, who was asked by a supporter midway through the summer how likely Leeds were to hang onto key players. The brutal answer? “Almost everyone wants to leave.”

Leeds’ three-season absence from the second tier of the English game was not so prolonged that they forgot where the EFL lies in the food chain but this transfer window has reminded them of two things. One is that very few footballers who think they are better than the Championship want to play there. The second is that, more than ever, transfer negotiations which come down to money and money alone will be lost if a Premier League club are competing with you for a player’s services.

They were not under the impression that Adams, for example, was desperate to go to Bournemouth specifically. Chelsea, yes, but 11,000-capacity Dean Court not so much. The Premier League equals exposure, though, and Bournemouth had it. Adams was sure to make good his escape.

Only Liam Cooper really bucked the trend by saying no to a Saudi Arabian approach in the interests of discussing a new deal at Elland Road. His reward was to injure a foot in the season opener almost four weeks ago. The defender hasn’t played since.

In too many cases, escaping from Leeds was too easy. If there is one thing the club will take away from the summer, it is the folly of leaving themselves so exposed to release clauses they cannot control.

Long-term, avoiding a repeat of this window would involve sailing on a different tack were Leeds to return to the Premier League because the reality is that, Gnonto aside, every player who left or tried to leave was entitled to do so.

Relegation loan clauses inserted in numerous contracts — provisions which could be activated merely by an interested club agreeing to full salary recovery for a season — were the product of Leeds insisting that signings they made while in the Premier League committed to wage reductions of up to 60 per cent if the club went back down to the EFL. New arrivals reacted to that suggestion by demanding concessions in return and however questionable the clauses seem, no club covering their back by implementing such major cuts in pay could expect to have their cake and eat it.

In short, Radrizzani did not want to find himself covering a Premier League wage bill in the Championship and as a result, Leeds and 49ers Enterprises set out this summer with grand plans for retentions, only to discover that most of the players they wanted to retain saw their futures elsewhere.

It might be that the funding behind the 49ers’ operation avoids the need to dance with the devil when Leeds next go up to the top division; that wage reductions need not compromise the club so much. Farke has said, and it is hard to disagree, that letting the tail of the dressing room wag the dog is no way to run a club, although the trouble with Aarons and Amiri made the point that player power is alive and well. But until promotion materialises, that discussion is for another day.

The positive byproduct of so many exits is that Leeds have hacked big chunks off a wage bill which was costing more than £10million a month last season, reducing it to around half as much.

And a feather in the cap of the new board is that despite so little arriving in the way of transfer fees — considerably less than was recouped by fellow relegated sides Southampton and Leicester City — they were able to not only dig their heels in over Gnonto’s valuation but find the finance to spend and make meaningful bids: £7million on Ethan Ampadu, £10.5m for Joel Piroe, £5m tabled for Amiri, a further seven-figure sum offered for Joseph Paintsil at Genk, a combined £10m or thereabouts invested in Ilia Gruev and Glen Kamara. Leeds promised an aggressive window, albeit in the Championship, there is only so aggressive a club’s window can be. Farke, for one, would consider his squad as it is to be in the promotion mix.

And Farke, an anchor in strong tides, might be as important a recruit as Leeds have made, a manager their fans are warming to quickly and who looks like the Championship, which he won in two of the previous five completed seasons with Norwich City, is his second home.

There was no ideal way of finding a first-team boss at the end of last season because the summer itself was so far from ideal.

With hindsight, it would have made sense for a post-relegation deal that would see Radrizzani sell to 49ers Enterprises to have been in place before Leeds actually went down, given that he was most likely going to be selling anyway. In a perfect world, 49ers Enterprises would have named a replacement for departed director of football Victor Orta before appointing Farke, but time ticking towards the start of pre-season gave them no choice.

Gretar Steinsson appeared as technical director soon after, taking on recruitment duties which had previously fallen to Nick Hammond on an interim basis. Leeds have been so pleased with Hammond’s input that there is a strong chance they will look to extend or make permanent his temporary contract.

Angus Kinnear remains as chief executive and however much cynicism there has been about him outside the club, the 49ers saw nothing in his work which tempted them to find a new CEO. Sources close to the takeover, who asked not to be named for reasons of confidentiality, say the sale by Radrizzani to the 49ers fund was unlikely to have crossed the line without Kinnear in the middle of it, managing both sides. The extreme tension of the buy-out was symbolic of the weeks that followed, a hierarchy deprived of any chance to relax and a club condemned to a permanently high heart-rate.

Farke has been the exception to the rule of stress, at least externally. The fascinating aspect of his job interview with Leeds’ new board was that unlike other candidates, one of whom put forward a presentation running to scores of pages, he made it clear to the club that he was interviewing them, not the other way round; almost implying that the role had to be shown to be good enough for him, because he was clearly good enough for it.

It was a brave approach, risking a tone of arrogance, but the interview panel liked it and could see that Farke had the CV to back up his confidence. On the evidence of his early work, they are pleased that they avoided a break-neck approach to an easier candidate. In one of the many press conference questions related to Gnonto’s attempt to leave, Farke was asked if the club had asked him not to use the winger. “No one tells me who to play,” Farke replied, and he is running the show with that mindset. No one has told him who to sign either.

The feeling at Elland Road is that, step by taxing step, they got there or thereabouts in the end: passing the deadline with a coach they have faith in, the calibre of signings they envisaged and a dressing room which, without being perfect, has changed as much as it was likely to. The players who have gone wanted to go and perhaps it is for the best that they have. In Amiri, they might only have been hooking up with someone else who was not quite sure. The depth at left-back is debatable, history on repeat at Elland Road, but Farke seems content.

Sinisterra, the last act in the drama yesterday, summed everything up. The release clause in his contract expired midway through August but in his view and that of his camp, Leeds had not honoured the clause as they should have done following a prior approach from Nice, an approach which was rejected. United disagreed but as this week wore on, the club were increasingly concerned that obstructing the winger’s exit would result in a protracted court case, stemming from legal objections made by his camp.

Bournemouth tabled a loan bid yesterday and Sinisterra passed a medical in London little over an hour before the deadline, so late that completion required a deal sheet after the 11pm cut-off passed. Jaidon Anthony, Bournemouth’s 24-year-old winger with almost 100 appearances behind him, came the other way on loan. Anthony had been at Bournemouth’s team hotel in London when the process suddenly gathered pace, preparing for their game against Brentford today. Leeds were adamant that they would only go through with losing Sinisterra if a suitable replacement was offered up by the club signing the Colombian. United’s high opinion of Anthony was key in making Bournemouth’s approach attractive.

And that, after three extraordinary months, was that, a frantic chapter of transition closed. The 49ers are new to full ownership of a football club but it might be that they have seen their hardest summer already, Leeds’ most complicated since insolvency in 2007. There is one thing everyone in the boardroom agrees on: a window like this one? Never again.