Daniel Chapman har det med å cut the crap, og komme opp med det vesentlige...
(uthevet) - og nå er det altså Leicester som er forbildet til Radrizzani.
There are a lot of interviews being recorded and written up about all this, but it's one of those HUY-UGE DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS that has next-to-no significance for, like, this week. Lots of fans look at all the noise around something like this and ask, reasonably, 'What does this mean?' and get loads of flannel in response about synergising strategy and exploiting commercial opportunities that doesn't help to clarify anything. And in a way there's not actually anything to clarify, beyond:
Radrizzani and the 49ers, and now specifically Marathe, look like sticking around
And working together
It'd take a lot of money for someone to buy them all out
So unless things go wrong this feels like the beginning of the long-term
After the short-term (within five years) identified for getting the heck out of the EFL
A lot of the things we associate with promotion to the Premier League — stadium developments and Rodrigo De Paul, basically — feel dependent on the sort of certainty this deal provides. With the financial terms settled and something like the QSI factor now off the scene, those projects can get green-lights in earnest.
Well, the stadium can, RdP not so much, although Marathe did talk to Martyn Ziegler of The Times about transfers:
“This is not a flash in the pan where we just hang on by the laces of our shoes, this is somewhere we want to be here to stay, and as we are more competitive to compete within Europe and at bigger tournaments that brings with it more financial resources as well.
"There was some data that showed we are already the sixth-highest spending club this past summer so that’s already been demonstrated and the hope is to have more resources, but really the hope is to be sustainably competitive.”
But in this FFP age, owners can't just write Mbappe on a cheque and have him arrive tomorrow. Radrizzani told Ziegler — and it came up in everything — that stadium redevelopment is key to creating the conditions (of finance and facilities) for signing topper players:
“Our plan is ambitious. We see our objective very clearly. We want to build the club to be just next to the top ones. We have a three to five-year plan to reach the level we aim [for], and by staying in the Premier League for a few years we could aim to have a renovated stadium that could become a symbol of our ambition and modernisation of the club in an area the 49ers can add a lot of value.
“I respect and admire what Leicester has done so that is my model, I would say what we should aim to be — how they manage the club and keep their standards high. We are one of the few brands in the world which has a massive opportunity to build a club which can get next to the big ones because our brand is already well-known. We are working to become more relevant to the new generation.”
I was already thinking about Leicester ahead of recording the podcast yesterday that previews our game with them; their ability to extra mega-bucks prices from Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford for their players, while still keeping stars like Vardy and Schmeichel and recruiting to make their squad even stronger, is a fairly spectacular and by now consistent piece of conjuring. (I have a sneaky feeling they're going to just pip us to the Premier League title this season — every other club feels too caught up in psychodrama.)
Leicester came up again in Radrizzani's conversation with Tariq Panja in the New York Times, as well as his idea of a network of clubs, something that always gives me mild anxiety whenever he brings it up — concentrate, man! One thing at a time!
“Our model, I think, is Leicester City,” Radrizzani said. “We have shared this a lot internally. If there’s a club I admire for what has been done in terms of football management, it’s Leicester.”
Having completed the stake sale, Radrizzani acknowledged that he was now considering adding to his own portfolio, perhaps by buying other European soccer teams. The idea, he said, would be to find opportunities that would allow Leeds to develop players at smaller clubs, or to invest in larger ones that would allow him to develop their sporting and commercial models in concert with those at Leeds United.
He said he would not consider, however, emulating Manchester City’s model of multiple-club ownership, with teams spread across multiple continents. Radrizzani said his sole focus would be on Europe.
Leicester might hold a clue here, too. It goes a bit under the radar, but their owners — King Power — also own OH Leuven in Belgium. There's a good old article about the link up at The Athletic, that mentions Leuven is the home of Stella Artois — it's the headquarters of Anheuser-Busch InBev — and aspires to be more than a feeder club, publicly at least, perhaps to soothe the worries of Belgians who saw an influx of Leicester City staff and wondered what was happening:
There has been cooperation between the two clubs but Willems insists OHL are not a feeder club for Leicester.
“It has never been said that there would be five or six players from Leicester and there would be an obligation to play them,” he says. “If they bring an added value, they are welcome but it is more, ‘Let’s find some good players for Leuven and if they are really good, they might go to Leicester.’"
Since that article was written, OHL have won promotion and are now closing in on European qualification — but with a game coming up against Jordan Botaka's Charleroi, I don't give them much chance. Anyway, this sort of thing is happening:
Leicester City icon Andy King has joined sister side OH Leuven until the end of the season. After saying an emotional goodbye to City in the summer after 15 years at the club, King has been searching for a new home, and has found one in the King Power-owned Belgian side ... At Leuven, King will join a trio of City loanees in midfielder Kamal Sowah, goalkeeper Daniel Iversen, and forward Josh Eppiah
...and following him a week later was Filip Benkovic, on loan from, can you guess? Anyway, Leicester-Leuven might indicate a future direction for Leeds. Unless we can somehow convince Solksjaer to given us £80m for Alioski, and you know what, I think he just might.
Other bits from the deal: Marathe told the New York Times it took a while because of Covid:
While a deal is now done, it was not quick, smooth or simple, Marathe said, because of complications created by the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’ve been doing deals my whole career, and it’s always easier to have a meeting of the minds when the minds are actually physically next to each other, so that, first and foremost, made it very complicated,” Marathe said in a video interview in which he was joined by Radrizzani.
Radrizzani confirmed he had talked to other parties about investing in Leeds United, including the Qatari owners of Paris St.-Germain, the perennial French champion.
The 49ers’ plan in increasing their stake, Marathe added, is to bring the team’s N.F.L. experience to bear on Leeds’s operations on and off the field, through shared proprietary analytics tools to best practices on management and staffing.
And Radrizzani told The Times he wants to keep Marcelo Bielsa in post, although again, the pandemic has some influence, as well as Bielsa's preference for concentrating on the job he's doing:
“Marcelo is a man of his word, he doesn’t need a contract and we decide year by year because obviously he’s far from home, he couldn’t decide to stay longer in the Championship and at the same time especially in a year with Covid we need to respect the circumstances and decide in the right time.
“It is our intention to continue with him and we will open a discussion with him when he’s ready to do so, but at the moment Marcelo is very focused on each game so I don’t know if he’s really caring about his own future as he’s so analytic and focused on his job.
“I am ready to talk when he is, we have a continuous relationship and there’s a lot of respect and understanding between us.”
And still in The Times, the redevelopment of Elland Road is obviously going to be vital, and Marathe had a lot to say about what the 49ers did with their JeansBowl:
“At the 49ers we went through a long process — Candlestick Park was the oldest unrenovated stadium in the NFL, it had been our home for 50 years and finally after a very difficult process in 2014 we opened Levi’s Stadium and we hosted Superbowl 50 the next year.
“So we have the knowhow, the people, the expertise and the blueprint to go through that exercise of putting a plan together and executing on that vision. We went from being the second or third lowest revenue club at Candlestick Park to being a top five revenue club.”
“This is what we do, this is our bread and butter. We have people here at the 49ers who have done all this before and now we can take that and export it to Yorkshire and be able to help everyone there.”