Leeds United, private jets and 24 hours that pushed them to the limit - The Athletic 2/9/22

By Phil Hay

The drama played out through the medium of private jets: one flew with all but one seat empty, another didn’t leave the runway and a third had taken staff from Elland Road to Zurich some weeks earlier, creating an option just when time seemed to be running out.

Leeds United’s attention swerved from Eindhoven to France, with some saved for London and enough left to turn to Switzerland before the transfer deadline late on September 1. The final 24 hours of their window set the gold standard for fraught, with deals slipping from the jaws of completion and no new striker in sight, until somewhere close to midnight in the UK, the club unveiled Wilfried Gnonto with very little warning.

Gnonto was Leeds’ last-minute fall-back, the player they gravitated towards after other targets hit the wall or went absent without leave.

The club had looked at the 18-year-old earlier in the summer and, in the background, negotiated a deal to bring him to England from FC Zurich in January. Zurich, in turn, allowed medics from Leeds to travel to Switzerland to complete tests. On Thursday evening, after one false start and no sign of alternative options materialising, the deal was brought forward and Gnonto signed on a five-year contract.

The Italy international’s move was announced 45 minutes after the 11pm BST (6pm EDT, 3pm PDT) deadline and the legwork done in Switzerland to provide assurances about his fitness was the reason Leeds were able to move for him at such short notice, despite Gnonto not actually being in England. Everything else had drawn a blank but Gnonto was a transfer they could do, with willing cooperation from the club who were selling him.

The people with responsibility for transfers at Elland Road — those who negotiate them, those who finance them and those who make the paperwork watertight — had been told to expect mayhem on deadline day or, if not that, a very busy time of it.

From the moment Victor Orta took a plane to the Netherlands on Wednesday in hopeful pursuit of PSV Eindhoven’s Cody Gakpo, it was obvious the tail end of the window would call for quick feet and competent administration if Orta got his way with any of the players he was chasing. All being well, the club would have an incoming deal to finalise.

All was not well on Thursday morning as Orta landed back in Leeds, minus Gakpo or any of the other people who were booked to travel with the winger. PSV rejected offers from Elland Road and Southampton and made it clear there was no room for more negotiation and no chance of a change of heart.

The failure of that flight sent Orta home to Leeds Bradford Airport alone and down the path towards Bamba Dieng, headlong into the most fraught deadline day the club have experienced since Huw Jenkins turned off his phone in 2019. Once again, and as he had been then, Dan James was in the thick of it.

Dieng came into play on Thursday morning, Plan B behind Gakpo, although discussions about Gakpo were themselves preceded by an offer to Wolves for Hwang Hee-chan. As Leeds waited for Dieng, Marseille’s Senegal international, to arrive from France on a 1pm flight paid for by the club, James was on his way to Fulham to undergo a medical and sign on a season-long loan with a permanent option.

It was not James’ intention to leave Elland Road in this window but Leeds and Marseille were in agreement over a £10million ($11.5m) fee for Dieng and James had been given the clearest of hints that Leeds would rather he moved on if another attacker was found. The club allowed him to miss training, making sure he was within easy travelling distance of various suitors.

At almost the precise moment, around 5pm, when it transpired that Dieng had not flown to England and was instead at a private air terminal considering a rival offer from Nice, Fulham were taking signing photos of James, threatening the worst case of deja vu in footballing history.

Three and a half years ago, he went through the same formalities at Leeds, so close to signing from Swansea City with the deadline upon him that he had chosen a squad number and covered every conceivable base, just for Manchester United to swoop in at the last minute. But this time there was no going back.

Having made it so clear that James was expendable, no amount of diplomacy was going to make an urgent recall palatable. How to tell a dispatched footballer that a peg was still free for him? How to pretend that he was wanted?

Dieng, before long, disregarded the flight from France completely, plumping for Nice’s offer and leaving Leeds standing in the wreck of a day where everything threatened to go wrong.

The first two months of their window were measured and proactive, but the last week of it dragged them into the madness which, at various intervals, visits Elland Road at this time of year. At points on Thursday, Leeds were in danger of exiting the market a man down, an inexcusable outcome especially because the recipient of James was another Premier League side. James was yesterday’s man and Dieng became the answer. And then, like that, Dieng was gone — off to Nice where, in Keystone Cops fashion, he failed a medical.

Andrea Radrizzani, Leeds’ chairman, had taken the risk of tweeting about “welcoming Bamba Dieng” a short while before the transfer veered off the road, blowing the tweet up in his face. The club’s promise about their recruitment department’s skill in pulling rabbits out of the hat in the nick of time was a hostage to fortune, forgetting that deadline day is when needy buyers are most likely to be stitched up.

Rodrigo’s dislocated shoulder meant a three-to-four-week absence and it felt that, five games into the season, Leeds were in need of a result at Brentford on Saturday, if for no other reason than to divert attention to a happier place.

The best part of the club’s window was what was wanted: players who had to go departing without dragging their heels, replacements targeted with strategic urgency and, as a rule, fitting the bill of both Jesse Marsch’s tactical model and Leeds’ resale model.

But latterly, the strategy strayed into misjudgments and dead-ends: votes of confidence in their forward line, only for Rodrigo and Patrick Bamford to pick up injuries; inaction from the middle of July onwards, only to find that the last couple of days of the window called for planes flying in all directions; a missive to Gakpo and PSV which came to nothing, and a call to Dieng which fell foul of him giving Leeds the right signals and then backing out on them. Leeds try to factor character into the analysis of players and there was Dieng’s, laid bare. Or perhaps he merely felt that with approaches arriving for him so late, he owed very little to anyone.

James, truly, has been through the wringer at Leeds. One move to Elland Road didn’t happen. The other that did went through incredibly late last summer and the coach who wanted him so badly, Marcelo Bielsa, was sacked less than six months later. He scrambled from the birth of his first child to helicopter down to a Carabao Cup tie against Fulham last season and spent the past fortnight getting the sense that his attempt to demonstrate a commitment to fighting for a place was not stopping Leeds listening to offers for him anyway.

Who knows if he will be missed? Who knows how much Marsch would have played him because the club’s head coach declined to answer questions about him on Thursday. But however it is, Leeds need to turn a good start into a good season from here. Deadline day will be revisited if the staying power is not there.

Leeds are understood to have asked Blackburn Rovers about Ben Brereton Diaz late on, but none of the clubs on the forward’s trail liked Rovers’ valuation of him. Swansea City’s Joel Piroe was linked but Swansea had already decided that he would not be sold, while Leicester City’s Kelechi Iheanacho was of interest but unattainable.

So, with the deadline closing in, Leeds reconvened and decided to speed up the arrival of Gnonto, increasing the fee slightly to around £5million to keep Zurich happy. Gnonto is pacey and a comfortable runner with the ball at his feet, a full international at the age of 18 and a bright prospect. He is also a player Marsch said was not Premier League-ready a few short weeks ago. He might have to be now, or at least show the nous to learn on the job if Marsch needs him to.

Deadline day has shown in the past that it has the capacity to deliver a Raphinha. It can also deliver a straight right to the chin and the peculiarity of Leeds’ summer was that five major deals done so efficiently gave them the chance to observe the bar-room brawl in the final 24 hours rather than participate in it. The joke in these parts is that the end of the window is always when chaos descends and lo it came to pass, with planes in different parts of Europe and phones ringing but nothing taking off — that is until Gnonto got the call.

“It’s all good,” Radrizzani said in a final tweet, calling it “the madness of deadline day”. Maybe it was. But you did not have to walk far in Leeds to find people who thought a finish like this might be coming.