Throwing more vibes on the fire - Square Ball 24/7/23

SQUAD POLITICS

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Football being how it is, Saturday afternoon’s friendly between Leeds United and Monaco became remarkable less for the playing in United’s 2-0 defeat, more for the injury and transfer updates from new manager Daniel Farke after the match. Coulda skipped the game and held a press conference.

Farke said that Tyler Adams and Jackie Harrison will be injured beyond the start of the season and the end of the transfer window. They’re predicted unavailable until September’s international break. There was something about Junior Firpo as well but pre-season injuries are just what he does, so we’ll see him again when we see him. We won’t see Max Wöber, though, whose contract has a relegation get-out clause that he intends to use. He’s Bundesliga bound.

The injuries mean that a season that was already lining up several intertwining personal and personnel subplots just had its squad-political factor multiplied. Getting the guys together after relegation was already one of Farke’s big challenges. If Adams and Harrison end up stuck here due to injury against either their will or their wisdom, vibes could become as important as tactics to Leeds United’s season. Maybe Jesse Marsch was right that he’d have been better at coaching us in the Championship.

This is not so much about individual character, although like many of United’s recently proud boasts, Victor Orta’s insistence that the personal element was as important as statistics when evaluating a transfer looked forgotten by last season. That always seemed to come down to just asking around and checking social media, and the story goes that Saïd Benrahma’s mini-movie about his holiday put Leeds off a transfer in summer 2020. Now Crysencio Summerville likes to do the same thing, but it must have been hard for Leeds to maintain a hardline against players having personal film crews when Andrea Radrizzani had his own production company following him into the boardroom, gathering footage not just for Instagram likes but for Amazon money.

In his exit interview with Sky Sports, Radrizzani ended up complaining about the lack of strong characters on the pitch, particularly the Austrian Bundesliga imports, and it’s true that neither Rasmus Kristensen or Brenden Aaronson turned out to have the temperament we expected. They’re gone for next season, and as Max Wöber follows them, he becomes the best example of how far Leeds strayed from the background checking diligence they used to claim.

Wöber seems like a nice lad and he was about as dedicated as we could hope for when a player turns up halfway through a relegation season. Or maybe he just looked good compared to Weston McKennie. But it’s not surprising Wöber is leaving because, of all the transfers Leeds made under Victor Orta, I suspect Wöber rivals McKennie as the worst of the lot in terms of the process. All the stuff Orta built his reputation on, about tracking three players for every position, about folders full of data gathered during years of careful scouting, about the detailed background information on personality and character — all that was forgotten. Wöber was Jesse Marsch’s mate, who he phoned up at Christmas like Neil Warnock speed-dialling Paddy Kenny, or like Jesse Marsch speed-dialling Chris Armas and Weston McKennie, asking for help.

All the principles Leeds were supposedly working to were gone by the time Marsch was clinging to his job in January. The theory: a sporting director model would allow Leeds to make careful investments into players who would appreciate in value, and ensure consistent strategies regardless of who the head coach was. The reality: all that was being overridden to help Jesse out of his depth.

Spewing those desperate gulps of Red Bull back up is an unseemly but necessary part of resetting the club back to something like its pre-Marsch state so it can try again. The second part involves Daniel Farke making amends with the friends who got gored along the way. Daniel James has always seemed a sweet sort of person. Joe Gelhardt comes with scouse amiability, rosy cheeks and a cute nickname. Both were elbowed out on loan last season to make room for, well, apparently Cody Gakpo, but in the end Wilf Gnonto and Georginio Rutter. It was not quite as dramatic as Mateusz Klich being discarded to make room for Brenden Aaronson, but at least Farke doesn’t have to fix that situation: one is in Washington DC, the other in Berlin, like some Cold War metaphor. But Dan and Joffy are back, and Wilf and Georginio are still here, and throughout the squad we have nice guys — Wilf and Georginio both seem lovely — wondering what the fuck the plan is for them.

Selling Tyler Adams and Jackie Harrison might have answered a few of those questions, by making more room for the players still here and more money to be spent on new ones. Keeping them, as 49ers Enterprises apparently hoped, would have answered too, putting younger wingers down the order in Harrison’s case, giving new midfielders a partner in Adams. Either way, this transfer window was going to be decisive. If these two are going to be injured through the other side of it, satisfaction will be harder to find. Keeping the players while they can’t play is the worst of both worlds.

The problem I felt with convincing Adams and Harrison to stay this season was that it relied on the idea of Leeds going straight back up. You can pitch a season outside the top-flight to them if that’s all it is: a season, ending in glory, that gets them and their wages straight back to the top level. I suspect Daniel Farke would like to answer anyone asking about the likelihood of promotion in May 2024 with a slap to the face if he could, but if it’s the club’s two most valuable players doing the asking, he has to stay calm. And if he, and Leeds United, decide to be honest, less than two weeks from opening the season against Cardiff, then promotion looks like a two year project at best.

Asking Adams and Harrison for one all-or-nothing promotion season has some romantic hope. Asking them to commit two years of their short careers to trying to get promoted from the Championship, with no guarantees that will be enough anyway, turns the question from potential heroism to boundless burden.

The twist is that they don’t have to decide while they’re in the treatment room, which gives Leeds a chance of keeping them, and gives Farke a problem. Assuming nobody will take a chance on buying them while injured, Leeds now have until the January window to build a season that could convince them to stay and be part of it. If the team are topping the Championship by the time they come back fit, staying to be a promotion hero becomes more appealing than mid-table Premier League temptations. Just stay and win the Champo and worry about the rest later.

But their return will be less appealing for the players taking Leeds to the top of the table in their absence. “I’m happy to be back,” Dan James said after playing against Monaco on Saturday. “I love the place. I’m really looking forward to being back at Elland Road and hopefully we can show what we can do this year.” If James does show that, he can help get Leeds to a position that will make fit-again Harrison want to be part of the new chapter. A chapter likely to involve taking James’ place in the team. At James would be making room for a real player this time, instead of Gakpo’s ghost, but I wouldn’t like the seat next to Dan as he fumes away on the bench.

That’s the squad-political balance Daniel Farke will be taking on this season, and given the constraints on finances, time and training hours, it might be his most important job. A lot of nice guys got a lot of bad treatment last season, while the supposedly ‘fine young men’ replacing them let the club down. By joining the exodus so soon after he arrived, Max Wöber is highlighting the line between players who came here for the club or came here for the coach. But the challenge for Farke goes deeper than working out who is in and who is out, to making sure that the players who are in, whether by choice or circumstance come September 1st, feel like they’re in a good place. It turns out that after one vibes-based manager, we need another to rebuild the mood.