Sins of the past — and present

There’s something at Leeds United that has irked me for the entire past two years and I feel the need to get it off my chest: Paraag Marathe and co taking no responsibility for anything that happened in the two years prior to their full takeover of Leeds United in June 2023. Without context, that may seem like the ramblings of a madman — and it may well be — but it’s something that troubles me greatly and is all too prevalent in modern leadership roles.

49ers Enterprises first purchased 10% of the club in May 2018. They upped that shareholding to 37% in January 2021 and then again to 44% later that year. We’re supposed to believe that during the period of almost two and a half years, Marathe and his associates merely watched on and tutted quietly as the club obliterated three years of good work under Marcelo Bielsa?

I’ve watched the hit TV series Succession, so I think I know a thing or two about corporate culture. A bunch of people who don’t really trust each other sit around a table discussing who they should hire and fire in order to increase profit margins, right? In reality, it’s probably more a case of Leeds sporting director Adam Underwood texting his boss Paraag Marathe to see if they can sign Harry Wilson only to receive a reply asking, ‘Who this is and how did you get this number?’

But back in February 2022 when Leeds sacked Marcelo Bielsa and hired Jesse Marsch, who was sold by the board — headed by Angus Kinnear at the time — as a natural transition. Eighteen months later, Leeds were relegated and Kinnear told The Square Ball podcast:

There were some challenges with [Bielsa’s] man-to-man approach. We thought Jesse was going to bring a more pragmatic style of play, which was perhaps better adapted to the Premier League. Clearly, it didn’t work.”

No, it did not. And sitting on the board of directors at that time was Paraag Marathe, then Leeds United vice-chairman, now chairman and spearhead of the 49ers Enterprises ownership group. Marathe was appointed as a director in May 2018, when 49ers Enterprises made their first share purchase, and became vice-chairman in January 2021 when that shareholding increased. Almost lost among the sickening Andrea Radrizzani PR clips in Leeds United’s Take Us Home documentary is a scene in which then director of football Victor Orta presents the club’s January 2019 transfer strategy to the board, which includes Marathe and San Francisco 49ers CEO Jed York.

Marathe was, effectively, second-in-command at Leeds when the board ignored Bielsa’s warning that the squad couldn’t repeat the heroics of finishing 9th in the Premier League with the likes of Tyler Roberts and Jack Harrison in the team. He was there when they sacked Bielsa, hired Marsch, fired Marsch, bowed to fan pressure about hiring Alfred Schreuder, brought Javi Gracia in and then, at the very least, bore witness as Kinnear panicked and speed dialled Sam Allardyce with four matches remaining and Leeds circling the Premier League plughole.

Marathe’s vice-chairmanship also involved Georginio Rutter arriving for around £35m, a huge fee splurged on a 20-year-old attacker with twelve career goals to his name, tasked with saving Leeds from relegation. The club unveiled Rutter with director of football Orta pictured stage right wearing a San Francisco 49ers hoodie. Subtle.

The summer of 2023 was farcical at Leeds. After relegation from the Premier League and the agreed sale of the club from Radrizzani to the 49ers, every player and their granny seemed to be departing due to contractually agreed loan release clauses, a situation that the 49ers put down to the sins of the past, i.e. a problem they inherited.

It was at that point I started to feel like I’m being taken for a fool. How could they seriously suggest that Marathe was not involved in anything that occurred between his appointment as vice-chairman in January 2021 and the full takeover two years later. And if he wasn’t, what the hell was he doing? Was Radrizzani an autocrat? I highly doubt it, given he was mostly deferential to Orta and Kinnear on matters pertaining to their own ‘expertise’.

Maybe I’m reading too much into things and, in fact, Marathe was present at board meetings via Zoom, with his camera and microphone switched off as he Googled, ‘Do they use British pounds in Scotland?’ while reading an investor proposal for a football club called Glasgow Rangers, the club that he is now vice-chairman of. Does he take a seat in the corner of the boardroom and watch TikToks about leadership? Or does the extra 7% — 51% of Rangers versus the 44% while vice-chair of Leeds — make all the difference and turn Marathe into the man who once claimed: “I’ve negotiated contracts in my sleep.” That might explain the loan clauses, to be fair.

I find it hard to believe that he’s just there to quietly observe, but the shroud of secrecy around elite football is such that we’ll never truly know, not unless we can get cameras into the boardroom again, but this time without the spin of the Minister for Propaganda.

Harsh critics of the Radrizzani regime would suggest that the only decision they truly nailed was hiring Bielsa in June 2018 — critics like me — and that almost everything that happened beyond that point was down to Bielsa’s totalitarian approach to running the club. The unravelling in the fifteen months after that would suggest there may be some veracity to that theory. What if the same can be said of Marathe and co in their hiring of Farke?

He was the right man to get Leeds out of the Championship, certainly. But there’s no denying the noise coming from this ownership group’s favourite outlet, the Daily Mail, at the end of last season, suggesting that Farke’s position was far from certain and that the club were considering alternatives even after the century of points and Championship title. The delay in quashing those rumours was telling, as was the fact not a single name of note was mooted in the reports suggesting Farke could be replaced, nor any indication of whose job at Leeds it is to identify and hire a replacement.

Maybe the 49ers Enterprises contingent at Leeds are just playing the classic corporate game of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Sins of the past, the crutch of Profit and Sustainability Rules to justify paucity in the transfer window and everything else designed to make us believe that, actually, these guys are always the smartest in the room.

Hindsight always comes with 20:20 vision, but the 2025 summer transfer window suggested otherwise. ‘Football people’ like transfer guru Nick Hammond left for Everton, while technical director Gretar Steinsson moved into a wider role with the 49ers Enterprises and was busy hiring a manager for Rangers (who has already been sacked). What remained was a group of barely believable spreadsheets in suits.

Leeds spent the guts of £100m and twelve league matches later are in the Premier League relegation zone. Now we’re hopeful the same people tasked with finding a capable playing squad might, if called upon, need to do the same to find a manager deemed more capable than Farke. I’m not so sure, but maybe we’re expecting too much from people who come from a world in which they believe that pizza parties adequately deal with personnel issues better than pay rises.

(Photograph by Andrew Milligan, via Alamy)