Howling in Eindhoven - The Square Ball 2/9/22

DEADLINE

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

The reporting by Rik Elfrink in the Eindhovens Dagblad newspaper is vivid. It features Leeds’ director of football Victor Orta, flying in from Yorkshire to watch Cody Gakpo score a farewell hat-trick for PSV and gazump Southampton’s deal with a bid for him from Leeds United. Personal terms had been discussed with the player, and he was happy with the offer. PSV’s management, seeking a big sale this season to help them meet cost controls in the Eredivisie, were happy about Southampton’s €40m bid being replaced by United’s €43m. Now, sometime after midnight in the boardroom at the Philips Stadion, Orta was hearing bad news. Gakpo was changing his mind. He had decided more first team football and more hat-tricks for PSV were his best way of getting a place at the World Cup in November. He was staying in Eindhoven.

“This must have something to do with Louis van Gaal,” Orta shouted [van Gaal is the Netherlands’ national team manager], according to those involved … “This is not possible at all, I am completely flabbergasted.” The Spaniard was angry with everything and everyone and didn’t understand a thing. He tried to find Gakpo’s father as an ally, but he could do little about it. The PSV player himself was adamant, Cody Gakpo did not want a deal and did not have a good feeling about it. “I’ll be back in the winter,” said Orta, who felt that he had been tricked.

For what it’s worth, when Leeds United talk up their transfer strategy, I hear good things and see good actions. Five new first-team players were signed by the first week of July, two more Under-21 prospects added before the start of the season, even an experienced reserve goalkeeper turned up. Although many fans don’t like a low net spend, it keeps a club stable, and avoids PSV’s problems. It also leaves funds for tilting at windmills like Charles De Ketelaere, or even for snaring them on late deals, like when Raphinha suddenly became available in 2020, or Dan James went from playing against us to signing for us in 2021. There’s a pattern of Leeds quickly acquiring targets, then going outside the budget later for players deemed too good, at the time, to miss, and it feels like a good two-tracked approach, securing the definites and pushing for the maybes.

The club’s insistence on sticking to its principles over new signings has a lot of merit. Leeds say they only move with as much certainty as possible, using detailed long-term scouting, pre-transfer conversations and presentations, background checks to ensure the new player’s character and personality will fit the squad ethos, the five core values Andrea Radrizzani says Leeds rely on to guide everything they do: “Ambition, pride, family, graft and innovation.” They’re aiming to buy low and ride their players’ improvements until they sell high, following Leicester and Brighton. All this might not thrill anybody, and its application across the squad is suspect — no left-back this summer, no striker. But given every ‘model’ has its drawbacks, as a set of standards for Leeds to work to, I can’t find many problems in what they say they’re trying to do.

How, then, did this summer’s transfer deadline day come down to Victor Orta screaming in an Eindhoven conference room? To one of the most expensive signings in the club’s history, Dan James, chewing his nails after the deadline in Fulham, trying not to remember Orta’s anguished yelling in 2019? To a private jet standing empty on the tarmac in France, as Bamba Dieng decided to move up the road from Marseille to Nice instead of joining Leeds, the air crew perhaps scrolling Twitter and finding Andrea Radrizzani talking about welcoming their absent cargo to Yorkshire? To two days of bids and enquiries reported for Hwang Hee-chan, Joel Piroe, Kelechi Iheanacho and Ben Brereton-Diaz? To eventually bringing forward an unready eighteen-year-old prospect, Willy Gnonto from FC Zurich, only confirming him after the deadline, one of four late deals in the Premier League — two involving Leeds?

The contrast between this frantic 48 hours, and Angus Kinnear’s programme notes from 48 hours earlier, is obvious. Kinnear used his column this week to clap back at ‘doubtful’ and ‘perplexed’ supporters who, his tone suggested, simply don’t understand the level of expertise and intelligence driving the club’s work.

‘[This week] will allow us to reflect on how well we have executed our trading strategy … [we] will only supplement [our strikers] with an exceptional addition, rather than just a warm body … We will not compromise the longer-term trajectory of the club by making poor or high-risk investments … [before the window closes] if there is an opportunity, then Leeds United are best placed to judiciously capitalise on it.’

It all sounds very clever, until the period of satisfied reflection on executed trading strategy turns into Victor Orta splintering the Eindhoven air with curses upon Louis van Gaal, until the ‘opportunity’ is for Dan James to leave, until the refusal of ‘just a warm body’ turns into chasing cold trails all over Europe.

The plan is not the problem here. The problem is another example of the Leeds’ board abandoning their own ideas and principles under pressure. The standards and strategies are easy to stick to when things are going well, but as soon as stuff happens, they forget. See also: sacking Marcelo Bielsa. In mid-December last season, La Nacion‘s writer Claudio Mauri was told by Leeds’ ‘top management’ that Bielsa could lose twenty games in a row and they still wouldn’t sack him: ‘Although it was expressed off-the record’, wrote Mauri, ‘that support for Bielsa was genuine. No one imagined ending the season without him’. Bielsa had made Leeds everything it now is and all it can now become, but after heavy defeats in February the board’s nerve went, and so did he. From expressing total faith in December, they were the first to stop believing.

It’s easy to see the same ‘twenty defeats’ worth of confidence in Kinnear’s programme notes this week, and how Rodrigo popping his shoulder popped that bubble. The embarrassment is that an injury to a striker was just as likely after the deadline as before it, so when planning their strategy, Leeds must have taken the chance of that happening in September or October into account, and concluded that publicising belief in their ‘proven international number nines’ without any need for ‘just warm bodies’ was wise. Given the difficulties of Pat Bamford’s recovery from long term absence, Joe Gelhardt’s haphazard fitness and Rodrigo’s two inconsistent seasons so far, nothing changed on Tuesday night that should not have already been anticipated. Leeds will deny the subsequent two days were a panicked response, but the fact their deep research into candidates’ characters apparently didn’t uncover that neither of their main targets actually wanted to come and play for Leeds suggests this was not the ‘judiciously’ planned ‘capitalisation on opportunity’ they’d like us to believe. Kinnear said sacking Bielsa was all just part of the plan for ‘accelerating the coaching transition’, too.

Sacking Bielsa turned out alright: Leeds stayed up. Missing out on a new striker shouldn’t be a disaster, either. But the bigger worry is that if Leeds keep bending their big decisions away from their own stated principles when the pressure gets too much, they will eventually go wrong in a bigger way. A good plan is a plan worth sticking to. If you’re not sticking to it, was it a good plan? What we’ve learned this year, in February and September, is that Leeds’ board talk a good game about being committed to their carefully composed strategies, then crack. That is not a good look.

Given all the public jet-hopping and frantic cold-calling finally took Leeds no further forward than their original ‘no warm bodies’ strategy was going to, they’d have been better sticking to their principles instead of going out on social media to appease fans by tweeting welcomes to players who didn’t want to come. “We have been screwed up”, Radrizzani tweeted, but “We have done a great market, planned and executed our targets at very early stage.” And somehow still ended up with Victor Orta’s howling being heard across Europe from Eindhoven to Marseille, ‘angry with everything and everyone’, and a forward line weaker on Friday than it was on Monday. If this was ‘judicious’, I’d hate to see Leeds in a flap.