Fotherby on Tour: Rubén Sosa
Gordon Strachan had been worth two players to Leeds, but Rubén Sosa could be the one to replace him. But he would cost two player's salaries.
Transfers are one of modern football's obsessions, because they represent football without its messy reality: why watch some donkey playing for your team, when you can imagine the difference being made by a prime stallion? The best players are usually out of reach for all but the richest clubs, but in the 1990s Leeds United's managing director, Bill Fotherby, had his own ideas about the word 'unattainable'.
As the Peacocks returned from Division Two to Europe with one of the best teams in our history, Fotherby's pursuit of top transfer targets created a shadow team of world stars fans could keep in the back of their minds while watching, say, Carlton Palmer instead.
For the next few weeks, we're going to follow Fotherby on his travels around Europe, chasing the biggest and best transfers, wondering how close he got to his targets, who we signed instead, and what might have been if Bill's will could have forced history into being just a tiny bit different.
In case you missed the previous parts, so far:
Diego Maradona ⭑ Pairing England's most-hated footballer with England's most-hated football club would have sunk the likes of Emlyn Hughes into tabloid column apoplexy for months. Which would have been fantastic.
Trevor Steven ⭑ It's easy to understand from the adjectives — diligent, hard-working, cultured-but-disciplined — why Trevor Steven appealed to Howard Wilkinson. Besides, he already had Steve Hodge, so might as well collect another midfielder Diego Maradona had run rings around in 1986.
Duncan Ferguson ⭑ Jim McLean wanted a clause in the deal with Leeds preventing them from selling Ferguson to Rangers. But Duncan Ferguson really, really, really wanted to play for Rangers.
Des Walker ⭑ "Howard Wilkinson has been very persistent," about coming from Arsenal, said David O'Leary. "He would like to pair me with Des Walker if they are successful with a bid to Sampdoria."
John Scales ⭑ There were so many opportunities, and so many near misses, that if John Scales had been meant to play for Leeds, he would have.
Tomáš Skuhravý ⭑ Given his translator had instructions to fight an MRI machine rather than let it scan his legs, Leeds had a near miss with Tomáš Skuhravý.
Who was signing?
After trying and failing to sign Duncan Ferguson (tall), Tomáš Skuhravý (tall) and Karl-Heinz Riedle (not tall but great in the air), and succeeding with signing Brian Deane and Phil Masinga (both tall), the next stop-off on managing director Bill Fotherby's tour of European transfer targets indicated the aim was no longer height but excitement, bums on East Stand seats, sponsorship brass. If manager Howard Wilkinson wanted aerial supremacy then 5ft 9in Rubén Sosa, El Principito, The Little Prince, was not the player to spend £3m on.
But if the aim was reinvigorating Wilkinson's stale attack, then Sosa was just the player. Rather than a striker like all the other targets, he was a second striker, or what Wilko would more easily identify as the little man to play off his big man. A new forward, Wilkinson had said, "won't be at Brian's expense", so Deane did have a future: now, at least. If Skuhravý had signed after all, he and Deano would have been one unwieldy combination.
Sosa, instead, could be coming at Rod Wallace's expense, and David White's, which when it came down to it meant Gordon Strachan's. Strachan had been as good as two players for Leeds from 1988 to 1991, and his decline was taking a crucial element of creative dribbling out of the attack, and strong leadership and build up play away from wide midfield. Wallace, in his way, had been meant to inherit Strachan's role in the attack, as a tricky winger when he wasn't Lee Chapman's miniature shadow. Midfielder David Rocastle hadn't dislodged rejuvenated Strachan in 1992, and Leeds had swapped him for Manchester City's David White eighteen months later, hoping he could rediscover the explosive form that won an England cap.
Sosa, aged 29, a Uruguay international who had been playing in Europe since 1985, felt like an exciting answer to post-Strachan tedium. He'd won a Copa America with Uruguay, a Copa Del Rey with Real Zaragoza, a UEFA Cup with Inter Milan. As a runner up at the 1989 Copa America, he'd been voted the tournament's best player, better than Bebeto, Romario, and Fotherby's old target Diego Maradona. For Inter, playing alongside some of Serie A and Europe's best players, he thrived, scoring 44 goals in 76 matches.
And what goals they were. Bicycle kicks, chips, and left-footed free-kicks hit not just with astonishing power but with disguise, a power to deceive goalkeepers by not revealing which top corner they were crashing into until after they'd snapped the crossbar. On top of all that he was unselfish, using his creative freedom between midfield and attack to set up chances for the players around him. Watching a VHS of Sosa hammering free-kicks into nets all over Italy, I'm sure Wilkinson didn't just see a new Mel Sterland for his team, but someone whose set-piece delivery could be trained onto the heads of Deano and Masinga, Dave Wetherall, Carlton Palmer, the whole lanky bunch. Of course, if he wanted to just hammer the ball straight in from any angle, he was welcome to do that too.
Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
This is about Leeds playing a weird mid-season friendly tournament in January 1993
Wilkinson and several of the other Leeds players will have remembered their close up of Sosa's talents in the bizarre New Year's Cup they'd played one midweek in January 1993, when he'd run rings around United's midfield of — checks notes — Steve Hodge and Imre Varadi, setting up two goals in the 45 minute match between Leeds and Inter. He was unsettled in Milan, so it was time to tell him how Thornton's Arcade measured up to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.
How close did we get?
After getting Tomáš Skuhravý to Elland Road and watching him fly away again, Bill Fotherby was not deterred from putting in the air miles to get the player he wanted. The links to Sosa broke when Fotherby came back from 'a two day trip to Italy' in November 1994, although neither he nor Wilkinson would confirm what a source in Italy was saying: they wanted Sosa.
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