If you needed any proof Andrea Radrizzani has one eye on his Leeds United endgame you have had it today. The appointment of Sam Allardyce, 14 months after the sacking of Marcelo Bielsa, signals the death of the project the Italian first set out on and the final, desperate scramble to keep the club in the top flight.
Legacy, philosophy, image and a five-year plan have been dispensed with. The Italian and his chief executive Angus Kinnear, a former colleague of Allardyce’s, have picked up the phone and plumped for the cliche that sealed a thousand memes.
Radrizzani and the board are so bereft of ideas and time they have had to reach for the Premier League handbook distributed every August. They have thumbed through the index, found the chapter on relegation escape and followed the regulations.
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They have indeed, after the iconic transformation of Bielsa and misplaced overinvestment in Red Bull 2.0, given it to Big Sam until the end of the season. With four games to go and a team looking like nothing but relegation fodder, more attractive, forward-thinking, high-pressing, play-it-out-from-the-back types were thin on the ground.
Rather than stand by his closest confidant and the man entrusted with the blueprint we have seen unfold since 2017 until the bitterest of ends, Radrizzani has sacked Victor Orta and found the antithesis of everything Leeds has looked to be for the past six years. Tearing it all down is not necessarily the wrong thing to do, especially if Leeds get their fourth handbook in August, but it looks and feels like the end of days for this Italian chapter.
After failing to reinforce Bielsa’s squad in 2021, however right that decision felt at the time, then failing to bolster a team heading for the trapdoor in January 2022 before failing to adequately replace him, Radrizzani took too long to sack Jesse Marsch. And now, in a final flourish, he has gone for the butt of many fans’ social media jokes when times got tough enough to look at managerial replacements.
He’s called the escape artist knocked back twice by Kinnear in the hours after Bielsa and Marsch were sacked. He’s called the 68-year-old who’s had one job since May 2018 and in that failed to keep a club up with six times as many games.
And yet it might just work. It was clear to everyone Javi Gracia’s time was up. The Spaniard has completely failed in answering the questions asked by Marc Guehi’s wrecking ball of a goal.
Match by match, the team have deteriorated, conceded more April goals than any Premier League side in history and Gracia’s press conference answers have grown weaker. In such unique circumstances, with so many other candidates demanding two-year deals, Allardyce, somehow, is returning to management where he left it with a 3-1 defeat to Bielsa.
Allardyce can’t lose on a personal basis. He’s back in the industry he loves and backed to make an eye-watering amount of money for 25 days of work whether they stay up or not.
If it is to be Radrizzani’s final successful act before handing over the keys to the other side of the Atlantic, it’ll save him hundreds of millions of pounds, but at what cost to his legacy?
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