The first time Victor Orta’s future at Leeds United was thrown into doubt was on the weekend after the Friday-night defeat away to Aston Villa in January.
In the 24 hours that followed, word went around that owner Andrea Radrizzani was considering sacking Jesse Marsch and taking on a different head coach. There was a genuine sense that Marsch would not survive until a board meeting eventually let the matter lie. Orta, the club’s sporting director, made it known to certain people that if Marsch went, he would consider resigning. A vote of no confidence in the American would be a vote of no confidence in him too, and he did not see grounds for change.
Orta, at that point, believed Marsch would hold it together, despite results suggesting Leeds were in for another dangerous dance with relegation. Marsch had been his choice 11 months earlier, his go-to after the dismissal of Marcelo Bielsa and an appointment made based on two years of analysis. He was convinced by Marsch and prepared to fight his man’s corner, with his own job if necessary.
That, in isolation, is Orta explained: a scout and a director of football with total conviction in his ideas, sometimes to the bitter end.
It was much the same after Sunday’s defeat to Bournemouth, a woeful game in which Leeds did nothing more than raise the white flag. Urgent discussions at boardroom level concluded that Javi Gracia — the coach brought in after Marsch finally departed in early February, three weeks on from Villa Park — should go. The alternative, persisting with Marsch, seemed the same to Leeds’ directors as accepting the end of their three-year run back in the Premier League.
Marsch was Orta’s choice in February last year (Photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
Again, Orta’s attitude differed. Gracia has been recommended by him, the solution to a fairly shambolic attempt to replace Marsch competently, and he still believed that enough points could be found under him in the four games Leeds have left.
By Monday evening, he and the club’s ownership were on completely different pages. The board had resolved to dismiss Gracia. They were reaching out to Sam Allardyce, perhaps the last manager Orta would ever go for. And so, on Tuesday morning, Leeds’ director of football exited the building, the book closing on his story at Leeds.
Orta, a fiery and emotional Spaniard, departs after almost six years that made him one of the most discussed and divisive figures Elland Road can remember.
For half a decade, almost everything of note featured Orta in its nuance and context: the good, the bad, the daring, the rash. He was passionate and volatile, a very visible face of the club and a director of football who operated in broad daylight rather than the shadows. That the public believed he should carry the can for the mess of the past two seasons was made clear by the chants against him emanating with increasing ferocity both at home and away games. Ultimate responsibility for the club lies with Radrizzani but Orta was where the incoming fire has turned as Gracia’s brief reign has gone up in flames. Orta was where the mood felt most toxic.
In the background at Leeds, behind the shambles of the past 12 months, is the proposed shift of ownership from Radrizzani to minority shareholder 49ers Enterprises. But even before that sale takes place, Orta’s exit signals the end of the Radrizzani cycle, one of the Italian’s right-hand men and closest confidantes conceding defeat.
The pair had spoken about sticking at it at Elland Road until Leeds qualified for Europe again — a pipedream as it turned out — and 49ers Enterprises was open to Orta staying on if its takeover went through. Whatever the feeling of the crowd towards him, they had come to respect Orta’s work. But among the many things Leeds need this summer, a new director of football is now one.
Opinions around Orta always depend on who is talking about him.
There are plenty of people in the game — agents and other club employees — who rate his talent as a scout and find him professional to deal with. He is unlikely to find work hard to come by, though it will not be a surprise if his next job takes him out of England and back to Spain. Some think he has suffered latterly from the split of ownership in the boardroom and the fact securing funding and the green light for transfers became more and more challenging this season as Radrizzani and 49ers Enterprises wrangled over who would pick up the bill for what.
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Under-fire Gracia has also been backed by Orta (Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Orta was known to be frustrated by the complications and increasingly convinced of the need for a US buy-out which removed any share of authority. It was never in dispute that he put in the hours. His recruitment database was vast, running to thousands of reports, and his air miles were extensive, too. By Premier League standards, the scouting department at Elland Road is relatively small.
But no amount of effort disguised the fact that Leeds were prone to errors. Either side of three years of exponential Bielsa brilliance, black marks began to mount up and as a director of football with a very high level of control and influence on Leeds’ transfer strategy, accountability for them led to Orta’s door.
The spectacular failure of Jean-Kevin Augustin stands to cost Leeds £40million, a monumental waste on a forward they never signed permanently. Other expensive deals failed to deliver too, including Dan James from Manchester United for £25million. Georginio Rutter broke the club’s transfer record when he arrived for £30million in this season’s winter window from Hoffenheim, but the 20-year-old has barely contributed to the season in a meaningful way. Given Marsch was already in trouble in January, an expensive acquisition offering so little to the team immediately made less and less strategic sense.
In his defence, it was not as if Orta operated in the market with total control or the final say on everything. Augustin and James were expressly approved by Bielsa, with the latter a player the Argentinian had tracked for months — something of a fixation. Much of Leeds’ recruitment in the past 12 months was specifically designed to fit Marsch’s way of playing, a gamble on the Red Bull model that failed to pay off.
But ninth place in the club’s first season back in the Premier League in 2021 leading into two relegation battles back-to-back is a damning indictment of the quality of their squad building. Leeds lost their way badly last season. And then, in this one, they looked like no lessons at all had been learned from that last-game escape.
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Bielsa was Orta’s appointment (Photo: George Wood/Getty Images)
Where Orta tended to score highest was in the purchase of prospects or lesser-known names whose values appreciated impressively: Illan Meslier, Willy Gnonto, Raphinha. Academy additions have been numerous on his watch, though relatively few have made a dent in the first team yet.
Orta would say that on the basis of the budget available to him, and given Leeds’ status, investing in potential and trying to exploit good resale value was the sensible way to go. And to a point, it was. But Leeds were prone to looking too clever, or being seen to be clever. They were medium- and long-term thinkers but, as this campaign is proving, at the expense of adequately managing the short term.
There was hubris in the appointment of Marsch, or at least an excessive weight placed on his track record. The current crisis appears to have blindsided them. Perhaps with hindsight, surging up the Premier League with Bielsa made them feel untouchable or over-confident. Reality has bitten in a big way.
Orta’s zenith was, and will always be, his suggestion of Bielsa for the head coach’s job in 2018. He had recommended Bielsa to Radrizzani as the pair sat in the back of a car discussing their next move after the latter’s first 12 months as owner ended with a tame 13th-place finish in the Championship. Orta brought up Bielsa’s name and set the wheels in motion, making the first phone call and securing a reply.
It is often said Leeds were blessed to land Bielsa, and they were. His first three years were beyond their wildest dreams, his football the envy of other teams and fanbases. He gave seemingly middling footballers the means to tear up the Championship and a mid-table squad turning into gold was the Midas touch as Elland Road had not seen it before.
With hindsight, it could seem as if Leeds merely got lucky. It could seem as if Bielsa made the ownership look good but they went after him at Orta’s instigation. It was Orta’s responsibility to manage him, and nobody would pretend he is an easy coach to please. The genius was Bielsa’s, but the structure around him worked.
What became apparent, though, was that Leeds were under-prepared for the day they and Bielsa went their separate ways, especially if that happened ahead of schedule; unequipped to move forward from an unparalleled era while maintaining continuity and protecting a powerful legacy.
So much went wrong from there.
Patently, Bielsa and the senior management team were severely at odds by the time he was sacked and in that process, the South American could not be considered blameless. The understanding between them had gone and it was most telling with Orta because he, more than anyone else, had a way of connecting with Bielsa, of keeping the peace. “The most important thing between a head coach and a director of football is synergy,” Orta once told me. “If the synergy isn’t there, it won’t work.”
Marsch would be next, proposed as a neat fit into the huge shoes Bielsa left behind but actually more like a sharp change of gears, a coach who seemed unconnected to his predecessor. And irrespective of any US presence in the boardroom, the American was Orta’s choice, someone he went out on a limb to court and present.
What precisely Orta saw in him, what made him so certain about his suitability, has never been explained but in the list he compiled, Marsch’s name was at the top.
Which, for Orta, was the start of the slippery slope.
Marsch ran into trouble, Leeds’ squad appeared inadequate again and they began circling the drain leading back to the EFL once more.
Gracia is on the brink just two months after being hired, with Leeds exactly where they were in the Premier League table when Marsch was ditched. Assuming it is Allardyce who sends the team out away to Manchester City on Saturday, he will be the club’s fourth different manager/coach, including caretaker Michael Skubala, in 16 league matches — a signal that Leeds have lost their grip and are in the midst of a turnover which is Massimo Cellino-esque. The philosophies of each do not remotely line up.
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GO DEEPER
When Massimo Cellino tried to ban Sky from Elland Road
Picking Bielsa was Orta’s finest hour but the choices that went wrong were as consequential in reverse, draining him of credit and leaving nowhere to hide.
Appointing Gracia was an ordeal in itself, a product of Orta trying to be ambitious in going after Andoni Iraola but hitting a dead end with his counterparts at Rayo Vallecano. Alfred Schreuder was considered and then abandoned in the face of public dissent, a situation so uncomfortable Orta wanted to fly to the Netherlands to apologise to the former Ajax coach in person. Gracia was the fall-back but failed to cope and so, last Sunday, Leeds gambled on a last spin of the wheel.
Once it was Bielsa, now it is set to be Allardyce. And nothing was more likely to spell the end of a man such as Orta.