Victor Orta’s six-year spell at Leeds United is over, bringing a timely end to one of the Premier League’s most daring experiments with Elland Road engulfed in crisis.
Few directors of football have exerted quite as much influence as Orta did at Leeds since taking the reins in 2017. If it felt like he had found a magic formula for a time it has now blown up in the club’s face and his exit was inevitable.
Orta will be deeply wounded by the manner of his exit and how quickly things have unravelled in the last nine months. A man who viewed himself as a club builder with a focus on the long-term, he leaves with Leeds resembling the same basket case that they were for spells under previous owner Massimo Cellino.
Fans had certainly had enough and most will be celebrating his departure. The majority will say any success he had was more to do with Marcelo Bielsa’s brilliance than the director of football but that doesn’t quite tell the whole story of the journey Leeds went on in the Orta era.
Last year I sat in on a presentation Orta gave to the Training Ground Guru website intended for fellow football professionals. He spoke at 100mph with a clear passion as he rattled through slides on the different departments he oversaw at Leeds and how he wanted to empower everyone who worked at the club and inspire them by an overarching vision that they all shared.
Orta argued Leeds had to be different. They couldn’t compete with the nation states so would build rather than buy careers. He said others paid lip service to developing players while Leeds meant it. They would run with 18 seasoned pros and four development players under 21 every year and “build careers”.
“It’s true that it is risky,” he admitted. And so it has proved, his talk of methodical recruitment and utilising deep data exposed by the depths Leeds have plumbed this season.
His departure feels almost merciful. It was his call to row in behind Jesse Marsch, the majority of the transfer calls in the summer were his and then he was the driving force behind the dreadfully botched managerial succession that has led to Leeds being in such desperate trouble.
It was also his decision to build a custom-made transfer algorithm with data company Statsbomb that filtered out potential targets on the basis of whether they could fit into Leeds’ set style of play – an agreed set of principles which was meant to outlast any manager or director of football.
That it is likely to end with Leeds placing an SOS call to Sam Allardyce, a man whose win-at-all-costs and play the percentages values are so different to the playing principles inputted into that algorithm, is as close to a complete repudiation of his ideas as you can get.
For all the talk of doing things differently, in the end Leeds have proved themselves as bad as anyone at short-term thinking since Bielsa left and the Marsch appointment failed at the turn of the year.
Their three main targets to replace the American all rejected them flatly and then the board blinked first when their plan to appoint Alfred Schreuder inspired mass revolt from supporters.
The hapless Javi Gracia was meant to be an upgrade on interim Michael Skubala but was ill-suited to the players and the club and April was a nadir for Leeds. Four managers in one season is nothing short of a disgrace.
For all his troubles over the last year, Orta won’t find it difficult to find further work. He retains admirers in the game and just a month ago I spoke to someone involved in pioneering football work who described him as a “genius”.
They preferred to concentrate on how alarming it was that someone with a vision who was prepared to take risks was banging his head against a brick wall in a football world where finance is king.
Perhaps. But the argument loses weight when Brentford and Brighton are soaring and Newcastle’s smart recruitment sees them third having spent less in the last summer than Leeds did.
Orta’s favourite book is called Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which argues that certain systems and things need chaos to progress and survive. Perhaps this season in West Yorkshire took that theory to an extreme.
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