Caleb Ekuban ⭑ From A-Z since '92
It became easy to feel bad for players like Ekuban, who had been dropped into the Championship with little preparation and even less luck, and done their best, and suffered for it.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
Caleb Ekuban's time at Leeds United was a sort of policy failure, a glaring example of how Andrea Radrizzani and Victor Orta messed up their first year in the building. Their innovative, disruptive idea was to buy cheap and overlooked players from across Europe, develop them, and sell them for a profit that could be spent on slightly less cheap overlooked players, and so on etc. Call it the Brighton or Brentford model and assume promotion will happen as a natural consequence, eventually.
It worked for Brighton and Brentford because they did it well. Leeds? Leeds always seemed to be depending too much on magical thinking. Radrizzani and Orta were determined to pair their developing players with developing coaches, i.e. Thomas Christiansen, imagining that everyone would learn from each other in a holistic educational environment of exchange. The problem, though, was that everyone needed development because nobody knew enough about anything, so the players and coach didn't have many lessons to offer each other. It was an educational project without enough knowledge to go round.
Then there was the job of selecting players for this project, and it's telling that when Leeds did hire an educated coach who could bring the best out of talented players — Marcelo Bielsa — he looked at all the available footage and data on Caleb Ekuban and immediately put him in his 'no thank you' squad. After a year at Leeds Ekuban was off on loan to Trabzonspor, joining them for good at the end of that season.
It's hard to think Caleb Ekuban was anything more than a punt. Orta liked to talk about innovating with data, and how data had to be transformed into knowledge in order to be useful. But Orta left his job as sporting director of Middlesbrough for the same role at Leeds at the end of May 2017, and Ekuban was bought for £500,000 in mid-July. He fit what Radrizzani was looking for but he wouldn't have been on Middlesbrough's wishlist, so I can't imagine Orta spent much time having Ekuban's breakout season scouted. He'd scored seventeen in 34 games on loan from Chievo to FK Partizani in Albania and that, I assume, was the datapoint that brought him to Orta's team's attention. Six weeks and a few videos on WyScout later, Ekuban was moving to Elland Road with a four year contract and, as a striker with Ghanaian heritage, Tony Yeboah's boots to fill.