Leeds youngster Archie Gray sold to Tottenham for £30m, new low for fans

The transfer, obviously, is a direct result of Leeds’ failure to step up last season, with four defeats in their last six games costing them top flight and then second place during the game. But it’s also a likely unintended consequence of the league’s profit and sustainability regulations, which generate a pure and greater profit from selling the best homegrown players rather than those that came at a cost. The good of the game is best served by development rather than speculation, but these rules, as they currently apply, do not prevent clubs from going to the casino, meaning that when you lose, the house, in this case, the rich six from the Premier League, literally take your kids.

Although it is also a fallout from two poor Premier League transfer windows in the summer of 2022 and January 2023, which saw Leeds deluged with overpriced ‘assets’ whose performances did not match their value and then left only on loan at relegation, the club’s long-term problems stem from a history of underinvestment. Since its founding in 1919, the club has tried all kinds of financial instruments, from equity issues to mortgages to bonds to loans to complex transfer financing to taking out the begging bowl to compensate for the absence of a person’s sustained investment or of a group. In 1961, president Harry Reynolds did just that and provided the cornerstone for the team that became two-time champions and had a 10-year streak of top four finishes. When Don Revie left the club in 1974, Elland Road had been radically modernised, his team had just won the title and had £2 million in the bank. In 10 years, it was demoted and the land sold, not for the last time, to avoid collapse.

Accounting will always trample romance

It is a story about the waste of a leading position in the European game due to lack of financial stability. Yes, the directors pocketed the money, but they all recovered once the club was sold several times over the past 40 years. And yet the only credible way to try to build a sustainable stream of higher income, the Elland Road redevelopment, which sells out every week and has a season ticket waiting list said to be more than 10,000, is always postponed. “Spades in the ground”, we are told, will come when Leeds establish themselves in the Premier League. Listen to people kicking down the road and you might assume it’s illegal or impossible to build in the Championship as if they’ve never seen the Field of Dreams, nor remember that Sunderland’s Stadium of Light and Middlesbrough’s Riverside have were built second. level. Countless others have rebuilt stands in situ during a season as well.

Without this solid foundation, you become a selling club of your best homegrown talent. In 1957, they sold John Charles, eight years after his debut as a 17-year-old, to Juventus to help pay for a new West Stand. In 1994, they sold David Batty to Blackburn Rovers to receive a payment in the East Stand and subsequently, since relegation in 2004, cashed in James Milner, Aaron Lennon, Danny Rose and Lewis Cook, who have have all become England internationals away from Elland. Road and had years delighting fans of other clubs.

That’s also the fate of Archie and whoever comes next, which will likely be his younger brother Harry, a 15-year-old forward, if they can’t break this cycle. Accounting will always trump romance in this scenario. It was inevitable that Archie would leave at some point. That is why he had a release clause in his contract and his family, with links to Leeds going back seven decades, are clear enough about football to make wild speculation that they will be devastated. His career progression is as well planned as Mark Bellingham’s for Jude and Alf-Inge Haaland’s for Erling.

It’s a shame that, unlike Charles or Batty or Kalvin Phillips, Leeds fans only had a year to watch him grow. They also know that if 17-year-old Billy Bremner came along now to make his Leeds United debut, as he did in 1960, or a 15-year-old Peter Lorimer two years later, they would be sold long before Billy could play. 772 matches or Peter scores 238 goals. And that really smells.