Leeds United transfer scepticism amid takeover wait as Whites prioritise key trio for Championship

He was clearly Victor Orta’s first choice when Jesse Marsch was sacked, and Orta is no longer here. Leeds is a huge club, even in the Championship, so the project might still capture his attention but I’m not sure the club will be so keen to specifically revisit the shortlist Orta worked on, unsuccessfully, earlier this season. They won’t lack candidates if the project is plausible and sensible.

Oh without a doubt. Gyökeres. There. See?

Ah, Georginio Rutter. How must he be feeling? Pretty low I would imagine. If any of that noise about him shedding tears upon a reluctant goodbye to Hoffenheim was true, then his mood will not have been helped at all by the way things have worked out at Leeds. He’s a very young player who still holds a lot of potential so there’s definitely a way back for him under the right man-management. There is no way anyone gives you all your money back for him this summer. Perhaps, if he isn’t quite to the new manager’s taste, then a loan back to Germany or his native France would be sensible to allow him to bounce back and prove to everyone that there’s a real talent there, one worth investing in.

Well he made it clear before the weekend that Rutter was not one for this season. So the assumption has to be that he’s on the bench to make up the numbers, or Allardyce simply does not see him as a centre forward but a wide player. It cannot have been easy watching Rodrigo limp around, then hearing your manager say after the game that there were no centre forwards on the bench to bring on. I don’t imagine for one second that Allardyce would dig out such a young player to try to protect those more likely to start. It’s just an unfortunate, yet very Leeds 2022/, situation.

We’re told the scouting team has still been running in the background but with no one to lead the project and no certainty of who will own it this summer, what concrete stuff can they actually be working on? This, in turn, makes me look at any transfer links in an even more sceptical way.

I suppose it is possible that Radrizzani decides that his best course of action is to stay, use the parachute payments and player sales to fund a real crack at promotion and then sell the club at its Premier League price next summer. If that was the case, how would fans respond? How many would tolerate his continued presence at the club? The Sampdoria stuff in particular makes me think an exit is nigh and the 49ers are said to be keen on a takeover regardless of Sunday’s outcome.

If Leeds are relegated then I’ll look forward, with a reasonable expectation, to reporting on victories again. I’ll look forward to Joe driving me to Plymouth on a Tuesday. And I’ll look forward to Archie Gray’s debut and proper involvement in the first team.

I won’t miss the Premier League anthem. I won’t miss travelling to Bournemouth. And if Everton escape the drop I won’t miss the Goodison press box. It wasn’t made for humans.

Jack Duckworth, without a doubt. If you know, you know.

This is an incredible question. Incredible. One day before the season leaves little time to work with, but you could still impact the club through recruitment because the window was still open at that stage. That said, what would have helped most? Telling Victor Orta to sign a striker instead of Daniel James would have put the side in a better place to deal with Patrick Bamford’s absence, but try explaining that to Marcelo Bielsa, who really liked Daniel James. Telling Orta to sign a midfielder, one acceptable to Bielsa, would feel sensible, wouldn’t it? It might have made a big difference.

The more I think about this the more helpless I feel to prevent the downward spiral. Telling Andreai Radrizzani to sell up there and then would, I suppose, give the 49ers a little time to work in the summer transfer window, then January and the summer of 2022 might have looked different. There’s no guarantees they would have got it right, though, or found players Bielsa actually wanted. There’s also no guarantee that if you prevented the downfall to this point, with Radrizzani therefore still in charge and Orta still in place, that the project would not have met its doom a little while later.

Maybe the most interesting spanner you could throw into the works, knowing everything that we know now, would be to tell Radrizzani to stick with Bielsa through that rough patch when the team looked lost. What would Leeds look like today, had he remained and either taken them down or kept them up? As much as Bielsa’s exit felt necessary to me then, you look back now and get a sense that the club lost someone of tremendous value, a unifying figurehead, and gained what? One more year in the top flight and a descent into madness no one could have envisaged back in 2021 or even early 2022. Was it worth it?

Jamaica Inn for nostalgia (it was accessible, shall we say, back in the day even for one as babyfaced as I but I’m sure the modern day bouncers carry out appropriate and stringent ID checks), views and the food.