January Window

As Shaun has said, Bielsa regularly said the squad was enough. If he felt he needed more he should have been beating down AR's door, who knows, maybe he was and just wanted to be supportive in public.

However, nearer the time, he did say he wanted 2 players.

If you're going to let Saiz go, you have to get a loan fee so that you can fund a replacement, that was poor dealings from Orta and AR and indeed you could go further back and say that Saiz should have been evaluated as too much of a risk in terms of his lack of longevity at clubs and would his personal circumstances work with a move to England.

That aside, I would not at all be surprised if Leeds would have been prepared to sell someone to fund James move, we are in the situation where we have to sell to buy.

Although I'm not a fan of loans and Orta's track record in this area is shocking, there have been decent loans available, as opposed to loans who are able to play for 7 months, but without any loan fee for Saiz it weakened our ability to go for any......

If we don't go up this year, expect some big departures.

We can name all the players we want but if Bielsa wasn't interested, it's irrelevant.

The idea that Rad is skint and didn't want to back Bielsa is obviously wrong because we agree what would be an expensive deal for Daniel James.

Phil Hay was talking recently about how the club were offering Bielsa a load of centrebacks in the summer but he wasn't interested.

Bielsa seems like the sort of manager who wants his first choice or no one. He said that much in the media - only players better than what we have. No point signing someone just to make up the numbers. That's the trade off for Bielsa- you have to accept it all, small squad is what he wants.

The idea that Rad is skint and didn't want to back Bielsa is obviously wrong because we agree what would be an expensive deal for Daniel James.
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We agreed a deal where we paid in summer after we hoped we'd get promotion.

It's a clear sign of not having cash available now, that along with not even wanting to pay the loan fee up front.

I'm a big supporter of Radz in many ways, I really think he's brought something back to Leeds United that was missing for years under the other idiots who have run the club in recent times.

that said, not strengthening well enough in January was a massive mistake, I concede that the keeper is a great signing, and James would of been too, but the fact is January was the time to invest on winning this league and going up - but he failed, on this matter he's failed the fans, and the manager.

If we'd got James, we could have said that we had a successful January as Kiko and James were the two players that Bielsa wanted.

The James situation was ridiculous - at the very least Swansea ought to have been straight with the club and said that the deal wouldn't go through unless the £1.5m loan fee was paid up front.

They didn't even have the guts to tell Leeds why they wanted to pull the plug.

No one here knows how transfer fees really work.

No one on here knows what happened between the negotiation with us and Swansea.

No one on here knows the current finances of the club.

None of the above doesn't me we can't guess and debate on here.

But tweeting abuse is idiotic.

Even worse are the comments to Roberts. Idiotic fans.

Transfers are obviously very complicated.
That’s why you need back up plans.
Hundreds of million of pounds are at stake, the club had a duty to pull up trees trying to improve the team.
It’s incompetent.

People come up with all sorts to try and defend the club.

Bielsa also was quoted saying that the players that left needed replacing.

January is where teams going for promotion strengthen their side.

Laughably, we made ours worse, in terms of both quality and quantity.

At the end of the day, we're 2 points off top as we approach the run, as it stands, short term, the club are proving some fans including me wrong.

comment by Shaun M - F**k off to the football league (U9955)
posted 1 day, 3 hours ago
At the end of the day, we're 2 points off top as we approach the run, as it stands, short term, the club are proving some fans including me wrong.
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Spot on, Shaun