Radrizzani, Kinnear and Orta – why Leeds’ tight-knit team fell apart - The Athletic 12/9/23

By Phil Hay

The way Angus Kinnear describes it makes it sound like something close to the perfect team. Andrea Radrizzani and Victor Orta, he says, are an “over-index on Latin American and Hispanic passion”, while Kinnear sees himself as the “boring Anglo-Saxon” who balances out their temperament; a collection of “friends as well as colleagues” slotting together neatly.

The quotes come from 2019 and an Amazon documentary about Leeds United that Kinnear swears he wanted no part of. Marcelo Bielsa was the star of it, albeit while keeping a million miles from the cameras, and the timing of its release with promotion bubbling away in the background achieved the improbable: portraying Leeds as a club who were getting their act together. Bielsa had it licked. The club’s board were sounding competent. Miracles do happen.

Radrizzani, Orta and Kinnear were indeed a team; owner, director of football and chief executive, all of them aligned. There were additional players in the game too but from an operational sense and away from the dugout, that was where the power lay at Elland Road; where Leeds’ direction and strategy were decided. Orta and Kinnear were two of Radrizzani’s first appointments after his takeover in 2017. With the exception of a month after Orta left, they saw out almost six years together. Except, as is plainly apparent, the old bonds were no longer intact once the end drew nigh.

That fact was amplified by Radrizzani’s tweeting and deleting on Friday evening; tweeting responses to a long interview conducted by Kinnear and then apparently deleting not only those tweets but his account entirely. The irony of his disappearance from Twitter is that there are plenty of people at Leeds who wanted him to deactivate from the platform a long time ago, leaving alone an outlet where he was prone to speaking in haste and stepping in it. Only now that he has gone from Elland Road, no longer an influence on day-to-day affairs, has his profile vanished. But not without making a point about why Leeds were so ready for fresh blood at the very top.

Kinnear’s interview with The Square Ball podcast cast Leeds as a club who, as the Radrizzani era wore on and ran out of road, were no longer functional, or no longer functional enough to have much chance of clinging on in the Premier League. That Kinnear talked for almost two hours says everything about how much ground there was to cover in the failure of last season and the gathering doom from the summer of 2021 onwards.

Even if one issue was bigger than most others, there was no single factor alone that explained why Leeds had gone down, no single point of failure. Kinnear was asked if Orta was the closest thing to it. “We look at these things collectively,” he replied. Which really, everyone should.

And collectively this is how it looked, by Kinnear’s own admission. Player recruitment: wrong. Managerial hires after Bielsa: wrong. The timing of Jesse Marsch’s sacking in February: wrong. Waiting until this summer for ownership of Leeds to pass from Radrizzani to 49ers Enterprises: wrong. Radrizzani’s wealth vis-a-vis the outlandish amount of money needed to thrive or survive consistently in the Premier League: wrong. The structure of Leeds’ recruitment department: if not wrong then due a change, which came with Orta’s exit and the external appointments of Nick Hammond and Gretar Steinsson.

By the time Orta stepped away, there was no longer alignment between him and other senior figures at Leeds. All that was left was Sam Allardyce and a flailing final round.

Radrizzani, it should be said, contested the claim that his wealth or access to cash had the limits indicated by Kinnear, saying Kinnear could not know “how much money I have or can invest in football”. That remark should not pass without pointing out that when an investment group involving Radrizzani arranged to buy Sampdoria over the summer, they mooted the idea of using Elland Road as collateral for a loan needed to fund the purchase.

Leeds’ former owner bit back at criticism of the relegation release clauses that gave players an easy route out of Leeds in the recent transfer window, many of them on loan. He argued in a separate tweet that contracts were Kinnear’s responsibility, that overseeing contracts was what “management is paid for” and that he had never actually read the clauses himself. That last part was probably not the ‘gotcha’ he was looking for.

Kinnear’s take on the loan clauses is that they were a product of an ownership setup led by Radrizzani that did not want to carry Premier League wages into the Championship — in essence, compensation for expecting players to take chunky cuts in wages after relegation. Orta is of the same view: however much criticism should be aimed at him for signings or managerial appointments, agreeing to allow players to leave on loan post-relegation was the only way of instigating salary reductions of up to 60 per cent.

Kinnear thinks it will be different with 49ers Enterprises. He implied more than once that an earlier buyout of Radrizzani might have done Leeds a favour. In football club ownership, half of the battle is knowing when to get in and when to get out.

The idea of Elland Road as bank loan collateral was a line in the sand for 49ers Enterprises. The fund had no idea about it and if there was any remaining thought that its takeover of Leeds would go ahead with Radrizzani retaining some form of influence or shareholding, the controversy over the stadium was a step too far. The buyout was agreed 11 days later. Radrizzani would leave in the wake of Orta cutting ties, the whole thing a busted flush.

Kinnear remains in situ, his position consolidated by his work in ensuring that Radrizzani’s sale to 49ers Enterprises went through despite the complexity and tension of negotiations. He said in last week’s interview that, when it came to his own role as CEO, one relegation should “not be viewed as a terminal failure”. That might be a fair comment but it could also be pointed out that the same principle was not applied to Bielsa (even considering the differences between the job of a CEO and a head coach, and the reality of how tense the mood was in February 2022).

Across the peak and the decline, there was arguably no bigger single point of failure than knowing what to do when Bielsa was sacked.

As it is, life has gone full circle for many involved in the drama. Radrizzani is back in Italy. Orta is back at Seville. Bielsa is back in South America, back in coaching with Uruguay. The past week has made the tingling summer of 2019 feel incredibly distant, loaded with mea culpas and providing a definitive blueprint on how to get relegated. It is easier than ever to understand how and why it happened.