Being the owner of Leeds United is never an easy job.
Leeds have achieved their best league finish since 2004 under the ownership of Andrea Radrizzani, but he’s still been subject to complaints from the fanbase as United supporters blamed his lack of investment last January for their failure to get promoted.
On the surface, that’s a fair complaint. Leeds haven’t spent a penny on signing first-team players for almost two years now as they’ve only dealt with loans and nominal fees for U23s, and despite the likes of Pontus Jansson and Kemar Roofe being sold during that time, the Whites are still struggling in terms of FFP.
However, it’s recently been revealed that Radrizzani is putting £1m a month into the club from his own pocket to balance the club’s hefty wage bill.
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Indeed, Angus Kinnear gave us some insight into the financial aspects of the club.
“The reality is that Andrea is still writing a cheque for £1m every month to subsidise a wage bill that we have consciously doubled under our tenure,” he said.
It’s easy to say that this is a sign of ambition from Radrizzani, to overextend the club’s finances and fronting the money to subsidise the wage bill, but the fact of the matter is that he doesn’t deserve any credit for that.
Kinnear says that the club have consciously doubled the wage bill under Radrizzani, but where has that actually got them?
This is a very similar group of players to the squad that finished 13th in 2017/18, and it was only when Marcelo Bielsa was appointed that United started looking like promotion contenders, as they finished in the playoffs last term.
The narrative shouldn’t be that Radrizzani has thrown every penny possible at the squad in order to make them competitive, just look at the list of United’s highest earners at the start of this season, and you can see that a lot of the Italian’s big investments haven’t worked out.
Patrick Bamford, Leeds’ highest earner, is criticised regularly by the fans, while United’s second-highest-paid player, Kiko Casilla, pretty much single-handedly cost the club a shot at a playoff final last term with a major error.
Helder Costa is next on the list, and he’s only contributed to four goals this season, while £20k a week goes down the drain on the constantly injured Adam Forshaw.
Radrizzani has got himself into this mess where he has to pump his own money into the club, and the worst part is that his biggest financial gambles haven’t really paid off.
In other news, Leeds may have downgraded by swapping Nketiah for Augustin.