Jack Harrison, Leeds, Newcastle and a transfer Jesse Marsch doesn’t want to happen - The Athletic 21/7/22

By Phil Hay

It was one of those quick, ambiguous remarks that invite equally swift interpretation. “We’ll see, we’ll see what happens,” Jack Harrison said, and for anyone expecting him to knock transfer speculation out of the park, his equivocation posed more questions than it answered.

Harrison, it should be said, looked and sounded as if a discussion about his future was the last thing he anticipated and it was hard to tell if he was blindsided by it or actually expressing what was in his head.

There has been talk about him throughout this close-season, but not too much at Leeds United. They were set up to sell Kalvin Phillips and Raphinha in this window and happy to say so. But Harrison, they intended to keep him.

The message is no different despite the events of Sunday. Leeds had just lost to Aston Villa in a warm-up friendly on tour in Brisbane, Australia and the allocation of player post-match interview duties to Harrison had him front and centre longer than the short time he spoke to the media for.

Tell everyone you’re staying, Harrison was urged. We’ll see what happens, came the reply, which naturally provoked a double-take. The temptation to read between the lines is never greater than during a transfer window.

Harrison, at face value, is not a crown jewel at Elland Road in the mould that Phillips and Raphinha were.

Those two were outgrowing Leeds in a reputational sense and there is a begrudging acceptance across the sport that very often, footballers of a high value only ever gravitate towards the elite clubs. So in short, Phillips and Raphinha flying the nest was the natural run of things, hype doing what hype does. But Harrison? Harrison leaving would signal a much wider break up of the band; almost like saying that everyone in the home dressing room at Leeds has a price and clubs are welcome to rock up and pay it.

They all do have a price, of course, because nobody is ever truly priceless, but it is not surprising that having conceded very openly that Phillips and Raphinha were on their way, Leeds are trying harder to paint Harrison as someone who will be in the building when the window shuts at 11pm UK time (6pm ET) on September 1.

He is a player Jesse Marsch likes and relates to, and any amount of digging into the 48-year-old’s psyche as a coach tells you that the players he relates to are the building blocks of his teams.

Harrison scored 10 goals in all competitions for Leeds last season and whether in its entirety it was a good one or not, he is one of those players who nobody at Elland Road has ever been minded to drop on a whim; not Marcelo Bielsa and not Marsch. All teams need a vein of continuity and Harrison, in a summer of substantial change, gives Leeds that.

There are reasons, though, that he is being spoken about as a transfer target elsewhere.

The first is that Newcastle United are genuinely taken with Harrison, without being laser-focused on signing him. Eddie Howe, Newcastle’s head coach, wants a forward who can play out wide and Harrison is his sort of athlete: tenacious, direct, built to run all day and all night. That goal output last season appeals too.

One of the reasons Marsch’s predecessor Bielsa used Harrison so much was that he soaked up instructions and, in the Argentinian’s eyes, rarely put a foot wrong when it came to attempting to implement them. Trying to do the right thing mattered as much to Bielsa as succeeding in doing the right thing, shown by the fact that when Harrison got into a rut last season, his then-coach simply backed him to play his way out of it.

Newcastle think they have the means and selling points to tempt Harrison but are understood to value him at a top price of £25million (around $30m) — some way below the fee Leeds would place on his head. At Elland Road, they would ask for upwards of £35million, based on Harrison’s progress with them, his 18 goals in the past two seasons (all but two of them in the Premier League) and the fact he is in the mid-20s age category.

He is not the only attacking player Newcastle like, though, and if money was no object (which it still is at St James’ Park, despite the Saudi gold rush) they would most likely have bent Bayer Leverkusen’s arm into letting them have Moussa Diaby, the German side’s 23-year-old France international. They were no less interested in French club Reims’ Hugo Ekitike but Ekitike has joined Paris Saint-Germain on loan and is now out of reach.

Leeds are well aware that Newcastle like Harrison but Newcastle’s only proposal for him to date came in at £17million — which was knocked back. Unlike Phillips and Raphinha, where it was expedient for Leeds to cut to the chase, they are not encouraging better offers either.

With Raphinha and Phillips both gone, Harrison is in a fairly unique situation contractually.

With two years to go on his deal, he is the one player of intrinsic value whose deal needs attention soon. The club have not opened structured talks with him yet but on the assumption that Harrison remains at Elland Road, that discussion is likely to start towards the end of this window or shortly after it closes.

Marsch was fairly blunt in saying it as he sees it last weekend: “For me, Jack Harrison is a big part of our plans moving forward. We’re counting on him this season, for sure.”

The nuts and bolts of Marsch’s football should suit the winger — who made his professional debut in 2016 for New York City against the Marsch-coached New York Red Bulls in MLS — and not because he can moonlight at left-back if Leeds need him to.

The pressing, the counter-pressing, transitional play and direct running: Harrison can do all of it, and did much of it for the duration of Bielsa’s reign.

Leeds have generally been very good for him, too. Four years on from the first of three season-long loans from Manchester City, he is more than 150 games into his senior career in England and he has reached the level people around him said he was made for.

England began looking at him back at the start of 2021, as one of the players under observation outside of Gareth Southgate’s core squad. Tottenham Hotspur came sniffing too, albeit briefly, after his hat-trick away to West Ham United during the most recent January window.

At Elland Road, Harrison has started to seem like part of the furniture.

Leeds, admittedly, have been renovating like mad in the past six months, changing head coach, selling their biggest names, recruiting in numbers and fashioning a clean slate.

Life moves on and it became apparent as soon as this window opened that Leeds come August would be hard to recognise in comparison to Leeds as they were 12 months ago, but they want Harrison to stay.

Adding him to the list of summer exits would not speak to a considered changing of the guard. It would look more like an overhaul without any limits.