What does Raphinha leave at Leeds? - The Square Ball 13/7/22

LEGACY PLAYERS

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

As Raphinha leaves Leeds at last for Barcelona, we’re left behind in West Yorkshire to pick through the dust blown off this inevitability and mull over an over-asked modern sport question. What is Raphinha’s legacy?

Matters of legacy are becoming ever more important, boosted by the social media con trick that makes people think like brands, even while our personal significance is being revealed as illusion. Ten hours before I started typing this out, Kevin Durant tweeted to ask, ‘Did u add to your legacy today? If so, what did u do?‘ A day before that, NASA published the first photos from the James Webb telescope, images of light that is thirteen billion years old, from billions of stars and galaxies shown in a viewable area equivalent to a grain of sand held at an arm’s length. I wonder if Kevin realises that, despite his 20.1m followers on Twitter, there are people reading this blog on the same planet as him who don’t even know he’s a basketball player. But still, he’s free to gaze out into a hardly known universe of impossible to imagine scale and decide that the important question is about what we added to our legacies today. The answer is dust, Kevin, the answer will always amount to dust.

As for Raphinha, I think what happens at Barcelona will have the biggest bearing on his place in the cosmos in the end. It feels like a mad time to be going there — last season, with Martin Braithwaite and Adama Traoré in the team, they were a Bamford, a Harrison and a Howson away from recreating Tony Pulis’ Middlesbrough at Camp Nou. But that is Raphinha’s opportunity. If he can be a guiding light for Barca’s return to greatness, maybe leading them to their first post-Messi Champions League, he could become a Catalan legend.

At Leeds? Here he’ll always be limited in our memories by what the team did with him in it: 9th and 17th. There were some special nutmegs along the way, and his coolness assisting Joffy Gelhardt for the goal that got us out of pure hell against Norwich was very important to that 17th place. (Did it also inspire Gelhardt’s own genius chill when he set up Pascal Struijk’s equaliser against Brighton?) But because it didn’t come to much, like a trophy or even qualifying for Europe, the best player Leeds have had since probably Harold Kewell is destined to be forgotten. At least that’s a better legacy than Kewell’s.

Forgotten is maybe overstating it. As he goes on and does whatever he does, Raphinha will keep reminding us of what we could be watching if he’d stayed at Elland Road. Hopefully the contrast with our future players will not be too stark. Then in decades to come he’ll become a sort of Tony Currie, the post-Revie dilettante whose thrilling shoulder-length blonde hair combined with the tallest floodlights in Europe and a beautiful late 1970s Admiral kit to make the teen fans of Leeds visibly swoon, and their elders pretend they weren’t just as impressed. ‘He was only with us for a couple of seasons before he moved to London, but if you saw him, you’d know…’ Alternatively, if Raphinha piles up trophies and a Ballon d’Or in the rest of his career, that might make his time at Leeds a footnote for trivia games. Over the years, it feels like fewer people know that Eric Cantona played for Leeds first, and I’m comfortable with that version of history. I’ll have to wait to find out how to feel about any future association with Raphinha.

But the whole notion of anyone leaving a legacy at Leeds might be redundant for the next few seasons anyway, because as much as we may love and enjoy our players, their opportunities for achieving career defining goals at Elland Road will be few. The new intake — Brenden Aaronson, Tyler Adams, Luis Sinisterra — are of an age, a cost and a contract length geared to following Raphinha. It’s the dream Victor Orta has been trying to sell to Charles De Ketelaere this summer, to convince him to choose Leeds over Milan: let Leeds help you by giving you a platform to prove your worth in the Premier League, and help Leeds by leaving for much more money than you were bought for. The legacy will be in the uplift. Leeds want to measure progress by record transfer fees received, not paid.

This sounds depressing but it needn’t be. If Aaronson or Sinisterra or even Rasmus Kristensen can entertain us as much as Raphinha in his two seasons here, time watching them play will be well spent. Raphinha’s spinning nutmeg through the embers of Gary Cahill’s career did not depend on the game situation or seasonal targets: it was just pure delight, a thing to admire in its own moment. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen a Leeds player do ever, and that it happened behind closed doors in a Monday night mid-table win over Crystal Palace didn’t make me any less happy to have seen it. If you watch enough cup finals you’ll learn it’s a myth that the best stuff happens in the biggest games, and those matches come so rarely that spicing up the everyday is more important than the big occasion. In the end it doesn’t add up to a ‘legacy’ but I have had plenty of nice experiences in my life that I remember gladly without them crossing some argumentative bar.

This is the way for a few seasons, then: no trophies, just vibes. If Leeds can only finish mid-table, let’s make it fun to watch. I worry about Jesse Marsch as the choice for delivering this joy, as he seems so focused on the technical side of the equation as practised at Red Bull; I’ve not heard much from Marsch about the aesthetics of football. He’s all about team performance delivering individual growth, so beauty to Marsch is a properly executed match plan and young men exceeding their target ‘attitude points’, a Rangnick inspired press ‘n’ turnover sending the ball into the net in ten seconds or less. How the ball looks going in is less important to Marsch than it counting on the scoreboard, but in a Premier League in which only eight teams won more than they lost last season, it can help the fans if the good times are also good looking.

Then again, Marsch might be the perfect coach for excitement. His targeted chaos in the box leaves a lot to the imagination of the attacking players. How getting the ball to the penalty spot with speed and aggression looks in practice depends a lot on their quality. In Neil Warnock’s world, that’s Browneh lumbering into someone and Luke Varney lumping the ball towards Steve Morison. In Marsch’s world, if that’s Adams clearing someone out with a tackle in the attacking third, then Aaronson and Sinisterra volleying backheeled one-twos into the penalty area where Joffy overheads his finish into the top corner, I will take a few seasons of that and not think twice about the legacy when the lot of them move on. Fans are for life, always here to see what’s next. Players? Here to give us a good time, not a long time.