Despite all the concerns about the injury crisis and a possible relegation battle, transfer deadline day came and went without a single senior addition to the smallest squad in the Premier League.
Amidst all the clamour for team strengthening and rumours of sightings of Victor Orta at various European airports during January, we were sure that Leeds would unveil at least one major signing on the final day of the transfer window. Our eager team of crack journalists were waiting at their laptops all day for news, but at the end of it all….zilch…rien…absolutely nothing.
As the Leeds fanbase in Twitterland digested the lack of news, some took time off from moaning about not getting tickets for the Man U game to moan about the lack of signings. While others kept faith with Orta and Bielsa and spoke of some of our less than successful ‘panic buys’ of Januarys gone by. There was mention of Jimmy Kebe, Kiko the clown, and even dear old Thomas Brolin.
I was definitely in the camp that thought we needed a few more players. Last summer’s transfer activity has left us with a rather unbalanced squad with it’s surfeit of wingers, and we needed another striker and an attacking midfield player, and could do with a bit of cover at full-back now that young Drameh has flounced off to Cardiff till the summer.
So our only signing in this window was 18-year-old striker Mateo Joseph Fernandez from Espanyol, who is a decent prospect for the future but unlikely to help the first team in it’s current hour of need. We did of course try to get Brenden Aaronson from Red Bull Salzburg, but the Austrians rejected our improved offer of £20m, though we will be back for him in the summer. If of course we stay up.
Victor Orta has come in for a bit of flack in the last month, but according to Phil Hay in the Athletic he offered Bielsa a choice of midfielders in the shape of Tottenham’s Harry Winks and Donny van de Beek from Manchester United. But our head coach turned them both down, and Hay’s report claims he was ‘adamant’ he would not sign players in January unless they were better than what he already had in his squad.
It may be that neither would get into our first team when the whole squad is available, but surely they are better options than players who are currently in the treatment room. Hay says that Leeds had the funds for at least one deal, but Bielsa is ‘conscious of the large investment in his squad’ since Leeds achieved promotion to the Premier League, and he did not want the club to pay over the odds for players.
And although Winks is an England international, Bielsa thinks the midfielder lacks the right profile to suit his system. Van de Beek might have been the better option, even though he has failed to establish himself at the theatre of wet dreams since his £35m signing. His compatriot Jap Stam has suggested he would have done better if Man U had used him in a more attacking role, which is surely where Bielsa would have played him.
Instead he has now gone to Everton on loan for the rest of the season, as one of a total of 27 signings during the window by other clubs in the bottom half of the table. And that is quite a worrying statistic, suggesting the clubs around and beneath us are improving their squads while we stand still.
We all knew that Newcastle would sign players in this window, but I hadn’t expected that we would be outspent by Watford. A couple of signings have a whiff of desperation, such as Chris Wood going to Newcastle and Dele Alli going to Everton for big money, but it still looks like Bielsa is taking a big gamble by relying on his youngsters to fill the gaps while key senior players struggle for fitness.
Now that the window has shut once again we now have to hope that it all works out, as our hopes of big investment from the 49ers in the next few years will depend on the club retaining it’s place in the Premier League.