November '22 Leeds were ordered to pay Leipzig £15.5 million compensation. It was agreed that it would be paid in installments. This is a constant drain on our resources especially in FFP terms in the Championship. Last summer, FIFA ordered Leeds to pay JKA himself £24.5 million (his lost wages on his 5 year contract at Leeds that was never honoured). Leeds have appealed and the hearing on this appeal is to be heard this year. If we lose that appeal then we pay £24.5 million AND hefty legal fees. Potentially means selling off our prized players to stay within tight championship FFP rules.It also limits spending to replace those players.
Fair play. Didn’t realise the wage appeal part was still pending. A catastrophe of risdale proportions
It's not expected that the full £24.5 million will have to be paid as it included all the bonuses being paid in full. I guess that is win bonuses and goal bonuses. Its a fair assumption that some of it will have to be paid though.
I’m guessing they will also take into account, in any calculation, the earnings he’s had since Leeds got rid. Might only reduce it by a drop in the ocean, but it might mean it’s a more manageable amount. Anyhow perhaps Radz will have to contribute a share as he was the majority owner when this decision was taken. So perhaps it might not be as bad as some are fearing.
Radz has nothing to do with it. 49ers took it on with the takeover. They probably got the takeover cheaper because of it. It has to be said that the 49ers are very confident that it will be overturned but IF we lose, it could be catastrophic to our chances of promotion the next few years. If its not managed properly it could even mean points deductions in the near future. That's why we need a plan A for promotion, a plan B for the Championship AND a plan C for Championship minus £24.5 million to JKA.
Surely whatever portion of that 24.5 m requires paying will be done over a few seasons and spread over those seasons in the accounts. I’m guessing.
We asked the first 100 LUFC fans:- If Leeds beat Saints on the last day of the season, ensuring promotion, will there be a pitch invasion?
Probably but we are already paying £15.5 million in installments to Leipzig in transfer fees. Add the £24.5 million and all of a sudden its a £40 million bill to take care of. That's pretty much a next seasons parachute payments gone.
That’s the price we pay unfortunately for being run by incompetent clowns for so long. Just have to hope current lot are a different breed even though they were in the boardroom when the big Kev debacle started
Sort of interested in what happens at Burnley and in particular with their manager Vincent Kompany. Last season in the Championship they played a very pleasing style and Kompany was rightly lauded as a talented young manager with a big career in front of him. However this season they've struggled and although they still play well at times it's just proved beyond their playing squad to get the necessary results whilst keeping true to Kompany's beliefs as a coach. Luton Town on the other hand have adopted a much more pragmatic approach to life in the PL and would seem to have a decent chance of staying up. Will Kompany stay and attempt to bring them straight back up again, or will his connections and high standing in the game lead to a better opportunity elswhere ? Admittedly part of my interest is down to how we would fare with Farke if we get back to the PL.
It was reported when Farke joined that the deal breakers was that he was the manager of the club and that he wanted backing if and when PL status was achieved. If we do go up, it will be interesting to see just how much backing he would get from the 49ers.
At least Farke has lots of experience dealing with pl relegation so should be better prepared than Kompany. Also didn’t Burnley depend heavily on loanees that needed replacing when promoted. I could be wrong there as didn’t follow them too closely. We appear to have a few pl standard players already playing a big part that Farke will be hugely familiar with be next season
Burnley were always competitive though during their 8 seasons in the PL and only went down by the finest of margins. Now they play better football they’ve getting tonked most weeks so is there an argument that you have to play a certain way to finish 17th in the PL after being promoted and then build from there ? Brentford for example have done well with a counter attacking style the last few seasons.
Just for fun, who are our PL ready players? I'd go something like... Ready to go Rodon Ampadu Summerville Rutter Could maybe do a job Meslier Gnonto James Kamara Gray Gruev The rest would be squad fillers at best unless I've forgotten someone.
Good post. So that’s about ten that can likely perform probably bottom half of pl. if we can introduce three 35m standard pl experienced pl players that would be decent. We’ve tried the not investing for a season approach that didn’t work and we’ve also tried buying the 10 to 20m ****e who had never visited England, let alone play in it, also a resounding failure
He’s too injury prone Jammy. Injured this time warming up and will probably miss another month. Piroe mightn’t be great but he’s usually fit to play
Not so long ago, an employee of Sky Sports asked a member of staff at Leeds United how the broadcaster should go about making peace with the club’s support. Like clockwork, every televised game involving Leeds was generating chants about Sky, chants no television company would choose to air before the watershed. The only answer Leeds could offer was this: perhaps stop sending them to Plymouth Argyle at lunchtime on a Saturday, which is precisely where Leeds were yesterday, completing their very concentrated trawl around Great Britain’s south west; so concentrated that Daniel Farke might as well have based his squad out of a party villa in Weston-super-Mare. They covered 2,200 miles in 15 days and, at last, his players are out the other side of a long, long road trip. They are emerging from it unscathed too — and for that, Farke will feel grateful and self-satisfied. The club had a plan for how they would manage their way through, using air travel and smart recovery processes to negate the kilometres, but although this leg of the season is done, the tussle with broadcast schedules goes on. Farke did not have much to say about a 12.30pm date in Plymouth specifically. What narked him when he griped about rearrangements last week was what comes next: night matches, midweek slots and a string of tight turnarounds leading up to a Friday trip to Sheffield Wednesday, much of it at the behest of Sky. Outside of the Premier League, no club attracts viewers to an English club match like Leeds United do. On the first weekend of this season, when four fixtures in the Championship averaged just over 630,000 viewers, Leeds at home to Cardiff City exceeded one million. In fairness to Sky, no broadcaster ever built a business by actively seeking to minimise its audience, and it will tell you it thinks hard about which games to show live. But time and again, it follows the numbers, and numbers in the EFL are what Leeds do better than most. For Farke and other coaches before him, annoyance with the disruption is a competitive emotion. Schedules become complicated, the knock-on effect can be dips in performance and the spread of televised dates is simply never even across the division. Now and again, someone will remember what football was founded on by pointing out that travelling crowds get the rough end of the stick too, although the sport’s interest in the match-going supporter is right up there with its commitment to sharing wealth. And over the years, the tension between Leeds and Sky has been fuelled by precisely that: the nature of TV contracts and the way income from them is divided. When Massimo Cellino threatened to shut Sky out of a game between Leeds and Derby County in 2015, dragging the EFL’s then-chief executive Shaun Harvey away from his Christmas holiday, the Italian’s public utterances about fixture disruption were a front for great annoyance with the rights deal done between the EFL and Sky. Live games paid additional facility fees on top of central distribution cash but in rough terms, Championship clubs earned much the same as each other from broadcast earnings. Cellino saw how often Leeds were televised in comparison to other sides and decided the club he owned were being short-changed. Briefly, he threatened to take legal action to secure oversight of Sky’s confidential deal. His successor as owner, Andrea Radrizzani, continued that fight and for a short time, pushed the idea of creating ‘Premier League 2’ to replace the Championship, a model in which TV earnings would be paid as a share of the Premier League’s broadcast income. The concept never got off the ground, and neither did a mooted friendly between Leeds and Derby that, had it gone ahead, would have been used to try to demonstrate how clubs could earn money by selling games individually themselves, rather than through a collective agreement. Leeds have long had the feeling that they are worth more to broadcasting contracts in the EFL than those broadcast contracts are to them. They certainly work for the EFL, whose latest deal with Sky came in just shy of £1billion. And so, as rearranged kick-off times aggravated people for months and years, choice chants aimed at Sky became prevalent among Leeds’ crowd, especially on the road. Yesterday’s game did not make it to the first whistle before the most familiar of them was aired at Home Park, where a 1,700 ticket allocation sold out regardless of the 12.30pm start. It persisted long after full-time, too, the away end going after the cameras with more bite than ever. To their credit, the schedule behind Farke has not hurt him or his squad. Their form shows eight league wins back-to-back and they had the sense and finance to fly to and from their spate of long away fixtures, stay overnight after games like Tuesday’s 4-0 win over Swansea City and keep their sleep and training patterns as sensible as possible. They were seven points short of second place in the Championship on New Year’s Day. Now, by virtue of yesterday’s 2-0 victory at Argyle, they hold second place by a margin of two. The ability to turn up and do it again and again, anywhere and anyhow, while barely shipping a goal, has been as impressive mentally as it has been physically, and unsurprisingly there were hints of tired legs and minds at Home Park, in between Willy Gnonto’s 10th-minute opener and Georginio Rutter’s 72nd-minute clincher. Since January, though, Leeds have been as inevitable as the Championship’s television picks and ahead of them now is the litmus test, Leicester City at home. Farke will not need to remind anyone that a team are only as good as their last performance. Or that nothing matters more than their next.
