There are no guaranteed timescales on promotion from the Championship, only the best intentions and sleepless nights of those who try to make it happen, but Andrea Radrizzani realised that not everything in football was dictated by results. As chairman, he set up Leeds United to pursue two short-term goals: to beat a path to the Premier League but also, and irrespective of the way results went, to push the club’s annual turnover beyond £50 million. Within two years of his takeover, the numbers were nearly there, a little way short of that target but ready to clear that mark in the 2019-20 season. Marcelo Bielsa brought home the rest of the bacon. Leeds’ revenue was unmatched in the EFL but compared to the Premier League, the cash streams were meagre. Tottenham Hotspur pulled in almost half a billion pounds in the 2018-19 financial year, an increase of £80 million in 12 months. Their wage bill totalled £178 million, the equivalent of three years’ turnover at Elland Road. The Championship had a ceiling that Leeds could only break with promotion. In a typical month, Radrizzani was loaning more than £1 million to cover their losses. Even promotion cannot bridge the gulf to a club like Spurs overnight. England’s most powerful teams have been consolidating, expanding and harvesting for so long that sometimes it seems as if the top end of the Premier League have dropped the pack behind them completely, turning the competition into two separate races. Project Big Picture, the drama of the week, exposed that split with aplomb: the big six in one corner and the remaining 14 teams in another, occupying the same division but living on different financial planets. Leeds, though, expect to make up some ground during their first season back. In these 12 months, they estimate that their retail arm will be the same size as Tottenham’s, enhanced by their change of league status and a lucrative change of kit manufacturer. With Adidas on board, the club’s projected shirt sales are a quarter of a million before training kit and other merchandise is factored in. By that measure, they are comfortably inside the Premier League’s top half. Towards the end of their time in the Championship, they were outselling numerous top-flight teams. Tottenham remain a mile out in front commercially but the retail comparison and the closing of that specific gap is an example of why Leeds, as much as any club, stood to be compromised by the finer details of Project Big Picture. There has been no comment from Elland Road since the Daily Telegraph let slip a plan to restructure the distribution of money and the distribution of power in the English game but The Athletic understands that like most Premier League sides, they were opposed to it from the moment they read about it in the national press last Sunday. Rick Parry, the EFL’s chief executive and one of the men behind the proposal, pitched it as a way of filtering more cash into the lower leagues but as one executive said this week, the trick with these inducements is to see what your attention is being diverted away from. Start with the question of why so few teams in the Premier League were briefed about it before it leaked. Had the Premier League, or Liverpool and Manchester United for that matters, found an altruistic side after years of digging for personal gold? Was socialism breaking out in a capitalist warzone? Or, to quote a question posed by a lower league director, was Project Big Picture “the biggest load of bollocks you’ve ever seen?” As ever, the answer depends on a club’s present state and their expectations of the years ahead. In the case of Leeds, every proposed concession worked against them. They spent 16 years trying to regain a Premier League place, only to find that Parry and others wanted the division cut down to 18 places (after a summer in which Leeds committed £100 million to the transfer market). They have a minority shareholder, the San Francisco 49ers, talking about increasing their stake in the club and in terms of affordability, Leeds are as marketable an investment as any side going but Project Big Picture envisaged a framework where the most powerful teams could veto takeovers. Their average attendance last season would have ranked 11th in the Premier League and their retail strength points to potential growth, yet they fell outside the clique who would have been entitled to special voting rights. In return? Well, not a great deal. Leeds would do well from the freedom to broadcast eight games a season internationally through their own digital platforms but not so well as to be moved by the prospect. A cap on away ticket prices and subsidised away travel would be great moves but they were tagged onto Project Big Picture in the way a couple of afterthoughts would be. While you get a bit of a reduction on your bus fair, Manchester United fly off to Europe and coin it a little more. The cynical view is that what the big picture actually amounted to was the teams behind it filling holes in their fixture list created by a smaller Premier League with more European adventures. As Scrooge once said, Christmas Day is a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket on December 25. You wonder what John Henry, the head of Liverpool owner Fenway Sports Group, and the Glazers make of Leeds. The presumption in English football is that the Premier League’s monoliths are too far out in front to catch. The ground they occupy is nigh-on impossible to invade commercially (and competitively too unless, like the Glazers, you make a meal of Manchester United). But then come Leeds, a newly-promoted side who succeeded in tempting Marcelo Bielsa to the Championship and spent this summer recruiting full-blown internationals at great expense. A newly-promoted side who expect to shift 250,000 shirts this season. A newly-promoted side with an NFL franchise behind them and a stadium which could be revitalised, in terms of capacity and corporate income. This, to a top-six owner, might look like the basis of a long-term threat; a long-term threat that Project Big Picture, in the form it was presented last Sunday, was hardly rushing to embrace. When the plan crashed and burned at a Premier League meeting on Wednesday, Leeds were on the side of the fence where the missiles came from. The protagonists behind it do not believe their vision is dead, despite a Premier League statement cutting them down, but they will be lucky to garner support for the makeweights they wanted in return for spraying more money into the EFL. There are winners and losers in all of these things and Leeds stood to take the rough end of most of what Project Big Picture was offering. It is not that the document was devoid of good ideas. But at Elland Road, there was nothing in it for them.
A great piece from Phil and it also says a lot about the fans like Chippy who went on a non stop rant about Radz filling his pockets and doing nothing for the club. Even though the rest of us could see the reality right from when he bought back ER. I also mentioned something about the arrogance of Man U and Victimpool, in the weekend thread.
As the effect of this virus continues to affect the ability to attend matches the impact on Championship and lower clubs will increase. The pressure to do something to maintain the structure will intensify and probably lead to more support for this plan. The smart people must be coming up with an alternative or this will become the go-to solution.
Telling that last weekend the big 6 said if we do what our proposal says the EFL get £250m which is the shortfall for every club for the whole season due to no fans. The FA get £100m and then every year going forward there will be a £50m payment to the EFL over and above the payment we already make to the EFL. This weekend well ok we wont do that so heres £50m bailout. shot themselves in the foot now because government already saying the prem will need to bail out the EFL and the £50m offered was rejected yesterday so ball back in prem court.
When I first looked at this 250million to the EFL and no parachute payments me being checked out the cost of parachute payments and would you believe over the past 3 years the average cost is about 250 million. So in other words it was not going to cost anything extra These yanks are just conn men fortunately we are not as gullible as the yanks
This season saw a surplus on parachute payments because Fulham went down and got back up after having just one payment so that means £50m back to the Prem and WBA were on the old 3 payment system so miss out on the final tranche of just over £20m which means £70m going back into the Premier League prize fund which Leeds will get an extra £3.5m this season
