Angus Kinnear breaks silence over Leeds United loans fiasco, reveals £30m transfer update in Thursday night meeting - MOT Leeds News 18/8/23

By George Overhill

Angus Kinnear has said loan departures have saved the club £30million to be “reinvested in players who want to play for Leeds United”, according to the LUFC Supporters Trust.

The trust reported on their website Friday (18 August) from a meeting they had with the Whites chief executive the night before, where they put questions to him regarding the concerns fans have over the club’s current situation, with Kinnear claiming that the extensive loan departures were unavoidable as relegation release clauses had to put into contracts at the time of signing.

According to the Supporters Trust he said that the previous regime “simply could not have funded the club in the event of relegation” if the 49ers takeover had subsequently not gone ahead, forcing Leeds United to insert wage-reduction clauses, with the trade-off of the exit clauses coming at the “insistence” of players and their agents.

Seven players have left on loan this summer after exercising those clauses, with Jack Harrison’s move to Everton last weekend the latest, as he joined Max Wober, Rasmus Kristensen, Robin Koch, Brenden Aaronson, and Marc Roca, with Diego Llorente also making another temporary exit.

Apart from the Spanish defender, all the other players were signed in the previous two windows during Andrea Radrizzani’s last year in charge, except Harrison who only signed a new contract in April.

It has become clear how the clauses got into the contracts but the reasoning for why hardly paints the club or the ownership in a great light.

Leeds United only escaped relegation a year earlier on the final day, so if the club had gone down then it appears there would have been an even worse situation than there is now.

Since the ability to survive in the second tier apparently relies exclusively the presence of the new 49ers hierarchy then it makes the fact that neither side had a deal lined up prior to 28 May even more alarming, with the belated announcement this summer and even later ratification pushing all sorts of crucial work back.

Who exactly would have known what details at which point is difficult to discern, but the current situation being presented as unavoidable suggests a lot of the bullish talk earlier in the summer never had a chance of being successful.

New chairman Paraag Marathe is not new to the club so should have at least had an idea the difficulties were on the cards, even if he wasn’t directly involved in contract negotiations at the time.

Kinnear himself, as the one key figure in the hierarchy whose status has remained constant throughout the handover from Radrizzani to the 49ers likely had as much awareness as anybody still at the club.

So if there is now £30m sitting there ready to strengthen the squad then fans will want to see it used, and if they are unable to thanks to profit and sustainability rules it will be little benefit.

Clearly relegation is never going to be comfortable, but Kinnear’s answers here suggest a short-term outlook where the key figures were hoping for the best and knew all along that the drop was going to be a struggle like the one currently being experienced.

And amid a general public silence for weeks at the top of the club it seems unlikely that the CEO’s response is going to comfort many in a fanbase that is seeing a potential promotion push disappear into the distance.