Someone Who Cares

It’s either very brave or very foolish to write about Leeds United’s transfer activity hours before the transfer window closes, with an extra layer of daft if you publish it too, but if you can’t act like a dildo on deadline day, when can you?

Besides, barring any late night excitements or disappointments, United’s business seems to have been done. Well, done yesterday, but not announced until today, because the Swedish media doesn’t count, right?

Two strikers are in to join Jay-Roy Grot, to replace the two most recently out, although Chris Wood is a bigger gap to fill than Souleymane Doukara. Pawel Cibicki has joined permanently from Malmo, and Pierre-Michel Lasogga on loan from Hamburg.

But. But but but. Where’s Gestede? ask some. Where’s Gayle? Where’s Rhodes? Where’s Gestede and Gayle and Rhodes, for god’s sakes? Andrea promised he’d spend all the Wood money on a proven replacement. What’s this Lasogga and Cibicki, are they buddy detectives from the 1980s? Where’s our Championship experience — and why the lies?

Well, first of all, Andrea Radrizzani didn’t promise a proven Championship goalscorer to replace Chris Wood in this window. What he promised was that the transfer fee, like the fee for Charlie Taylor, will be fully invested in the playing squad. “Supporters can rest assured that monies generated from the sale of Chris Wood will be reinvested into adding to the 12 signings we have made already,” he said, in a statement on the official website. We might go buy a centre-half with the money, or we might put it all into Andy Lonergan’s wages, but it’ll be spent on players of some kind.

And at some point. Because there was no explicit or implied time limit put on adding to the signings, either, meaning there’s no actual prerogative to spend everything in the bank now now now, whether it’s on Robbie Fowler and Seth Johnson or on someone else. Essentially Radrizzani’s promise amounts to a guarantee that he’s not going to steal or waste the club’s transfer receipts, which sounds so basic it ought to not need saying, but then I guess he’s seen where we’ve been over the last fifteen years.

At any point in the last fifteen years, though, Andrea Radrizzani would have been chased out of Elland Road in a Stanningley Cab for transfer window activity like this. “If Cellino had lost a manager and sold the top scorer ???” tweeted Sun journalist Alan Nixon, missing the point by miles.

When Cellino lost a manager, he found Dave Hockaday. When he sold the top scorer, he found Souleymane Doukara. This summer, by contrast, Leeds United’s game of lost and found has uncovered Thomas Christiansen, who in a couple of months has moved Leeds United well beyond the decent but one-dimensional football of Garry Monk; and Samuel Saiz and Ezgjan Alioski, and if Donald Trump and North Korea start World War Three and after the horror subsides Saiz and Alioski are the only two players we have left, I will still pay money to see them play.

Around them, Felix Wiedwald and Vurnon Anita have looked more than capable, Matthew Pennington and Caleb Ekuban looked decent before injury, Kemar Roofe, Liam Cooper, Eunan O’Kane and Kalvin Phillips have been playing like new signings, Conor Shaughnessy has been a welcome surprise, and only Mateusz Klich and Madger Gomes — the latter intended for the U23s anyway — have yet to impress. I reckon we’ve found more than we’ve lost this summer.

When Howard Wilkinson gave an interview to The Square Ball back in 2011, he spoke of his experience in the transfer market, outlining something we’ll call Wilko’s Ratio:

“When I started managing way back in the 1970s,” he said, “I realised fairly quickly that if you bring ten players in from transfers, if six of them are successes you’ve done very well. I think that’s true of any manager, even the great ones.”