The club announced on Friday that Max Wöber will be spending the coming season on loan at German club Werder Bremen.
Many fans posting on social media were surprised that he hasn’t left on a permanent transfer, and indeed that seemed more likely earlier in the week when we first heard that Leeds were in discussions with the Bundesliga outfit. The reason he is going on loan will undoubtedly be related to the dreaded PSR calculations.
A player's transfer fee is written down over the length of his contract. So as we bought him for £11 million in January 2023 on a four-and-a-half-year deal, that means a cost of over £2.4m a year gets written off in the books. So with two years of his contract still to run, his book value currently stands at just over £4.8m.
So that is the amount we would have to receive as a transfer fee just to break even. We have to assume that Bremen didn’t value the player that highly, so any permanent deal would cause us to have to report a loss. And with Leeds likely to be close to the PSR limit as we try to build a Premier League standard squad, that would be a loss we couldn’t afford to make.
With Leeds unable to recoup even half the fee we originally paid for the 27 year-old it looks like another awful piece of Victor Orta business. And yet Wöber initially looked like one of our better defenders as we slid towards relegation in 2022/3, having been one of three players of varying quality signed halfway through that campaign in a vain attempt to beat the drop.
At the start of Daniel Farke’s first season the Austrian seemed to be keen to stay at Leeds, and would have been a useful player at Championship level, with the added bonus of being able to cover at left back when needed. So it was very disappointing when he became one of the last players to take advantage of the relegation loan clause in his contract.
That angered a lot of our fanbase, so he wasn’t exactly welcomed back with open arms when he returned to Leeds in the summer of 2024. And that only happened by default, after Borussia Mönchengladbach didn’t take up the option of extending his loan for a second season.
He may yet have salvaged his reputation at Leeds as we made a fresh tilt at promotion, but injuries made sure his impact was very limited. And when Struijk was ruled out for the final month of the campaign Farke chose to play Ampadu out of position rather than give the Austrian some much-needed first team minutes.
On our return to the Premier League Wöber early June, Wober’s wages would have gone back up to their original level, which would have encouraged the club to get him off the books when he would probably have continued to be bit-part player at best. And last month the player told Austrian media: "Leeds has already made it clear to me that they want to sell me.”
And if there was any doubt about that, the signings of Jaka Bijol and Sebastiaan Bornauw made it perfectly clear that Wöber wasn’t going to be a preferred option in the centre of our defence in 2025/6. So it’s no surprise that he has been moved on, only that it was via a loan rather than a permanent transfer.
That may yet happen in twelve months' time, as his book value will be down to a mere £2.4 by then, and surely we can get a transfer fee greater than that for him then, even when he will only have one year of his contract to go. Can’t we?
On a more positive note, the word is that Leeds are close to agreeing a deal to sign Swedish international left back Gabriel Gudmunddson from Lille. More news on that when we have it.