The company parts company - The Square Ball 27/2/22

Written by: Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

Leeds United have confirmed half of what the press told everybody at full-time on Saturday, hiding the loud bit by saying they’ve ‘parted company’: Marcelo Bielsa has been sacked from his job managing Leeds United.

They haven’t announced a replacement, so Leeds United are spending Sunday rudderless, as well as bottleless.

It might work. Leeds United might get the wins and points between now and the end of the season to keep them in the Premier League. We’ll never know if Marcelo Bielsa would have got the same wins, the same points and the same end result. Bielsa has been making this point about the demands for him to play a different striker, or a different system: the things you don’t do are always the best ideas, because you never get the evidence to prove they weren’t.

Leeds’ owners have stopped being brave and decided to gamble. Their resolution has snapped into risk taking. Brave resolution helped them succeed when everything else they tried was failing, but now when it matters most they’ve abandoned the best idea they ever had.

Hiring Marcelo Bielsa in 2018 was brave. Plenty of people said bringing El Loco to the Championship was a mad idea. Bringing him back after the play-off defeat to Derby County, when he was ready to leave as a failure if Leeds wished, was brave. Getting through the winter of our promotion season, when Leeds won two in eleven and what had been the best defensive record in Europe collapsed in spectaculars against Cardiff City and Birmingham City, was brave. Giving him the first year in the Premier League was brave, when with promotion complete it would have been easy for everyone to shake hands and ‘part company’.

The team’s first season made keeping Bielsa in the summer easy. Now, stuck in another difficult winter, as Leeds have been every season with him, I thought they were going to be brave again. To get through January all in on Bielsa’s insistence that what he had to work with was all he needed to keep Leeds in the Premier League was brave, when every instinct, every cliche about how football is done, was saying sack him and spend. Having roughed that out, Leeds have arrived at a point where they can only try half of the things that were available to them in January. That’s not brave, it’s foolish.

Bielsa should be a football club owner’s dream. In some ways he is tiring, exacting, demanding. It’s well known that he had all the plug sockets in Leeds’ new Academy facilities moved by centimetres. Satisfying his requests for improvements must be exhausting but it is also very clear. The risks are low, and the benefits stay with the club. And after you’ve moved every tree and installed every piece of gym equipment he asks for, he will defend you like no other coach. Bielsa has never once said that he has not been given every tool the club can provide. This January, when asked why the club hadn’t spent in the transfer window, he told everyone the club had already spent more than anybody could reasonably ask it to.

Leeds won’t get that from another coach. Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard were the two big name appointments of winter. Lampard added a quarter of a million to the weekly payroll before he’d taken a week of training. Gerrard’s solution to any underperforming player has been an expensive replacement, no matter what the club had spent already. His aim, at Villa, is the Liverpool job. Lampard’s aim at Everton is probably the same.

How much easier life must be, at the stadium and at the bank, when your manager is the vastly experienced former coach of Argentina, Chile, Athletic Bilbao, Marseille; when he has proven his ability to wring extraordinary results from the resources you’ve given him in your time working together; to hear simply that he has everything he needs to achieve the season’s objective and keep the club in the Premier League. Can you help him? No. He is here to help you.

Now Andrea Radrizzani and 49ers Enterprises have no choice but to rely on themselves. I don’t know why they would choose such a fraught path now. I’ve always thought Radrizzani bought Leeds for the fun and the kudos. After making his fortune when broadcasting rights business MP & Silva was sold, and seeing his former senior partner Riccardo Silva enjoying himself as president of Miami FC, what better way for a lifelong Juventus fan to fill their days than living out the club owner fantasy? He set sensible limits on how long and how much he was prepared to commit to getting Leeds out of the Championship, and gave himself a challenge. Radrizzani’s non-Leeds businesses have struck me the same way: Aser Ventures has been diverting itself into LiveNow, livestreaming Ellie Goulding and K-Pop concerts, and buying up various sports and e-sports YouTube and gaming channels. What better use for the wealth you worked hard for than making more money from football and music? The 49ers investors seem like a group similarly trying to dissipate their billions into their passions. When he’s not working for the 49ers or Leeds, Paraag Marathe is trying to make cricket a success in the USA. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley invests in fantasy sports websites and real sports clubs, part of the appeal of the latter being teams to root for on TV. Zappos co-founder Nick Swinmurn does the same, with an extra burst of enthusiasm over the last six months for his NFT platform. Australian Westfield Group billionaire Pete Lowy, who was at this weekend’s game, does stand-up comedy for a hobby and as a Leeds fan since the 1970s presumably bought into the club for the same reason.

In a way football has shifted back to the old local mill-owner model but on a global scale. Rich retirees used to buy football clubs for pleasure and clout. There was a brief time when clubs were first floated on stock exchanges that they were run by people trying to make quick bucks for shareholders, but the Premier League has become so successful that clubs are again only affordable to rich retirees looking for pleasure and clout. Being post dot-com boom, though, means retirees are younger than they ever were, and richer. But the character traits seem to be the same as the 1970s, when Leeds United’s most successful manager, Don Revie, had constant conflict from — not with — a board that wanted more credit for his achievements, who in other words wanted to meddle and prove their football intelligence. Revie always said he left them a world class team and £2million in the bank when he left for the England job. In six weeks their chosen replacement, Brian Clough, spent more money on transfers than Revie had in twelve years, and made the owners a laughing stock.

What Leeds United’s board learned then was just how much Revie had helped them by keeping them out of the way. All they’d had to do was stand back, write the cheques and take the plaudits. It’s rare for a football manager to give their board such an easy life. United’s owners don’t even need to look so far back for the lesson. During the recent NFL season, there was tremendous pressure on the 49ers’ owners to get rid of head coach Kyle Shanahan, tear up their project with him and start again. They resisted and he took their team to the Super Bowl. They lost that match, but afterwards, all the brickbats being hurled at the owners when they didn’t sack Shanahan had turned to praise for bravely keeping faith in him.

United’s owners can’t hide from this season now. With the transfer window closed, they also can’t do anything about it apart from pick a different manager and hope for the best. The quotes from Andrea Radrizzani in the club’s statement say little that we haven’t read in other statements from other clubs that have sacked other managers. “This has been the toughest decision I have had to make during my tenure at Leeds United,” he says, perhaps not realising what that means: when a decision is tough, it is because the correct path is not clear. Because it is difficult to be sure that what you’re doing is right. We could have more confidence in this decision if it came with the assured faith that Marcelo Bielsa brought to his decision making at the club. Bielsa has been proven right again and again. Who else at Leeds United can say the same?