Angus Kinnear explains Leeds United stance on Archie Gray sale, timing, exit clause and Marathe's final message to star

Gray was sold to Tottenham Hotspur in a £40m deal facilitated by an exit clause in a contract the 18-year-old signed in January of this year. His stellar Championship performances, most of which came in an unfamiliar right-back role, attracted the attention of top European and Premier League clubs. Aston Villa and Brentford both came close to agreements with Leeds, the latter even got so far as to welcome Gray to their training ground on Saturday June 29 as a deal looked imminent.

The prospect of selling to Brentford the academy's most talented export for years caused a backlash among supporters and on the morning of Sunday June 30 the YEP reported that Leeds had walked away from the deal with the Bees. Gray then travelled to Spurs' training ground later that day and all parties came to an agreement that saw the teenager join Ange Postecoglou's plans for their Premier League and European campaigns.

Leeds' statement upon confirmation of the sale said the club was 'heartbroken' and speaking to The Square Ball podcast Kinnear insisted it was an outcome no one at Elland Road wanted.

"Nobody wants to sell Archie Gray," he said. "I mean everybody at the club. I mean genuinely the club was devastated when we sold Archie Gray, he's been, he's been part of the club. People have seen him grow up. Everyone knows his mum, his dad, obviously, his uncle, his granddad. In fact his granddad's come back onto our scouting staff on the south coast across the summer. But you know, we have this fantastic relationship with the family. And of course he's got a very talented younger brother, and nobody wants to work at Leeds United to sell Archie Gray. So it's very difficult for the fans to see anything positive from that scenario. You know, other than the fact we got a fantastic price for him, and those funds will help support the club and will be reinvested, it's very difficult to see anything positive from that."

Although the date of the agreement reached between Leeds and Spurs coincided with the deadline for the P&S reporting period, Kinnear is adamant that Leeds did not need to sell Gray when they did. He says that was the last day before Gray's exit clause expired. But sales were necessary this summer to keep the club compliant with P&S.

"To hit the targets two sales would have done it across the period, but they didn't have to be timed for before June 30," he told The Square Ball. "The reality is we didn't have to sell him, but we did have to make two big sales. That's the position. It didn't necessarily have to be Archie. It didn't have to be on that timing. And they could have been some of our other players as well. So it could have been Pascal [Struijk], it could have been Willy [Gnonto] or Max Wober. There were other players in that mix as well. But the reality is when when you get relegated, almost every single club needs to sell players to stay within the financial rules. Normally it's a combination of the players wanting to leave, trying to meet the P&S rules and normally needing cash as well. In this situation, we didn't need cash, so we were fine from that perspective. I think [under] the previous ownership we'd have had a cash problem as well, but we were well enough funded by the 49ers not to need cash. But there was a PSR gap that we needed to close, and we had the issue of the players really wanting to leave.

"The PSR targets, it's really cruel, to come down from a world where you've got the gap from the one, three-year rolling number to another three-year rolling number. Plus the fact you lose all your TV revenue makes it really, really challenging to stay within those limits. We have stayed within them, but it does necessitate the only way you can do it is to sell the players.

"Whilst everybody was really disappointed to sell Archie for lots of reasons, actually, there's very few players where you get that amount of PSR credit and don't weaken your team as much as possible. So we think we've been able to get a right-back that will be able to perform this season at the same level as Archie Gray for an eighth of the value that we generated for Archie Gray. But the plan wasn't necessarily to sell Archie Gray, but in his contract, we did create the flexibility that if we needed to do it, we had some control over the time."

The exit clause was one of the summer's real issues of consternation for supporters, who watched their club negotiate from a position of relative helplessness with regards to outgoing transfer business for a second consecutive summer window. Gray was the first, but he was followed out the door by Crysencio Summerville and Georginio Rutter, both of whom had exit clauses. Kinnear sees them as a necessary evil if Leeds are to try and convince young talent to sign contracts.

"The important thing to recognise on the exit clause, there is no exit clause that the club, or any club I think, are wanting to put in a contract," he said. "There is no benefit to do that at all. That is driven by the player, and is normally a condition of them signing a new contract. So with Archie Gray, he is one of the greatest English talents in the game at the moment. And when he's signing a new contract, he and his representatives are not prepared to be just trapped in the Championship. They're just not.

"When we did that new contract with Archie, and in the two years before, Archie Gray could have joined any club in the country. In fact, any club in Europe. Real Madrid are interested in Archie Gray. Bayern Munich were interested in Archie Gray. So the way we were able to keep him was threefold. One, we gave him a really financially attractive offer, which matched what he would have been offered in the Premier League. The second was that we leveraged the pathway into the first team that we felt he had at Leeds United, and the fact that he had a relationship with the club and wanted to be here, which is really important. And then we also had to construct a contract which he was happy with and wasn't going to block what he saw and what his representative saw as his natural development. And if you don't do that, you simply lose them. And the other player in this, slightly younger, but you know someone like Finley Gorman. We match the financial offer. We've come up with his contractual terms, but he didn't have a relationship with the club that Archie Gray had, and so he left.

"We look at those academy players, we think, and I don't come in with a precise number, we think there's 39 players playing in the Manchester United Academy or the Manchester City Academy who live in Yorkshire postcodes. So you have this hugely aggressive recruitment drive from two of the biggest clubs in world football right into our heartland, where we've developed so much great talent over the years. So we're not in a very strong position when it comes to negotiating with these players, and we have to cede to their demands and allow them to create a career path or sign contracts which are going to facilitate the career path that they want. And Archie Gray, who is a player who I think will ultimately play for Real Madrid or Bayern Munich, isn't going to be allowed to sign a contract by his representatives, which forces him to play for an extended period in the Championship with Leeds United, despite the fact that his family loves Leeds United."

Kinnear went on to praise the conduct of Gray and his dad Andy, a fellow former Leeds academy export and now an agent, and insisted the club's bond with the Gray family remains as strong as ever. The CEO also claims that Gray could have stayed at Elland Road had he so wished but did not begrudge him the chance to take up a 'life-changing' deal at Spurs.

"Leeds United didn't approach any club to sell Archie Gray across the whole window," said Kinnear. "Normally, when you're trying to sell a player, you'd be offering that player around, you'd be speaking to the agent saying you wanted that player to leave. We could have kept Archie Gray. I spent a day at Tottenham Hotspur training around with [Spurs chairman] Daniel Levy and Archie and his dad putting the deal together. I mean, the deal is absolutely life changing. And let me be clear, Archie and his dad handled the situation absolutely impeccably. They will always be great friends of the club. They couldn't have done anything more in terms of the way they handled it, but the opportunity to play in the Premier League, and ultimately in Europe, for one of the six biggest clubs in the country, on a multiple of the money that he was ever going to earn at Leeds United - you can't begrudge the player that decision, but he wasn't forced out.

"We spoke to them on the final day. I spoke to him, Paraag spoke to him and we said: "Archie If this doesn't feel right. Just come back, just come back and train and just come back and give us another year." But I don't begrudge him the decision at all, it's just the reality of the difference and the gap between the Premier League and the Championship. When a player has that type of opportunity they really have to take it."