Leeds United Chairman Paraag Marathe on Premier League Ambitions, Transfer Strategy, and What It Means to Be Leeds: Running the Game 08/12/26

0:00There's nothing like the American Express Platinum Card. Find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175 ,000 points. Learn more and find out your offer at americanexpress.com slash explore dash platinum. Terms apply. You're listening to the Men in Blazers Media Network, suboptimal radio. One thing that we ascribe to as a recruitment philosophy is love those who love you back. Someone needs to know what it means to be leads. Someone needs to appreciate and internalize what being a Leeds United player means. You know, we've been in some situations in the past and maybe even presently where sometimes the player has a tremendous amount of talent and can help us, but is shopping around and maybe that player is not best for us.

0:49My guest today is a remarkable man who's risen from working at his parents' pizza place in Saratoga, California, to become chairman of Premier League League United. After becoming the president of San Francisco 49ers, 49ers Enterprises, he's a gent whose journey's been as fascinating as his ability to articulate the decision-making process is smooth on the dawn of a new Premier League season. It's amazing to welcome back. It's Parag Morata. Thank you for having me. Excited here. Could not be more elated to see. Can I start by saying, Parag, your job is so high stakes. You know, we just get to watch.

1:26You have to plan, take responsibility. The repercussions of the decisions you make are enormous. Do you actually enjoy watching the games themselves? Are they like an agony to experience? You know, it's sort of like, this is maybe not a great analogy, but I sort of live for this. I'm addicted to it, the competition that is. I was recently doing some soul searching and thinking just about having a team, building a team, helping to build a team and having a team and celebrating a win and commiserating after a loss with your crew, with the players, with the people around you. There's just something special and romantic about that that I can't imagine my life without that competition.

2:09But without the 90 minutes themselves. I've become a shell of myself in terms of the superstitions I go through pre-match, the during match, post-match, the things I need to do. My daughter makes me a little arts and crafts thing that is every month or so that it's in blue and yellow Leeds United colors. I keep it in my pocket. I'm not the same human if I don't have that in my pocket. I have to pace a certain amount of steps before the match. I hate sitting during the match. I hate it. So you'll see me just bouncing around, going back and forth. And so just lots of things that I have to do. But again, like I said, it's just I can't imagine my life without it.

2:53I just I live for the competition. I love winning. I hate losing. I'm not sure which one is more, but it's just how my life is defined now. An entire season for Leeds Nation depends on your daughter's charm. Jason. It's a lot of responsibility. We are on season's eve. You wrote a beautiful letter to Leeds fans. You talked about last season's 14th place finish, the delirious trip to Wembley for an FA Cup semifinal. You called it, quote, a special campaign. Dream with me a little bit as we break down this period between seasons. On the eve of the campaign, what would make this upcoming year special for you?

3:31It would be unwise of me, just even personally, but as a group, to make unrealistic proclamations. But I do believe that the goal is to make today better than yesterday, tomorrow better than today. And I think that it is, we established something, we established identity. We were consistent in our strategy from the manager to the recruitment team, to ownership, to players. And there was a light switch that went on at some point during in the season. It wasn't at the beginning. Maybe it was that Wednesday night at Chelsea, versus Chelsea at Ellen Road, maybe in December. Maybe it was a little before, maybe it was a little after.

4:12But that light switch was a light switch of confidence and belief. And it's not just about player quality in any sport. It's about player quality and it's about belief. Belief in the purpose and the vision and what you're doing. And when that light switch went on, you could just feel it. It just permeated the whole building. And we went into every match believing that we can take three points from it. And I think that belief has carried forward to today. Last year, we're trying to prove to everyone we belonged and that we can stay up. And now it's show everyone we belong. So I want to dig deeper into that, particularly that Chelsea pivot, that light switch, that almost culture change.

4:49But ahead of last season, Leeds freshly promoted, you dug deep into the data about which teams survived that first season. And you talked about a plan. You said it will take three long-fought seasons before we can truly operate like an established Premier League side. Yeah. Those are your words. What does year two look like in that plan? And how is it different to year one in your words? We're still renting. We're still renting an apartment because I think it takes three years to establish full residency. We've got one year under our belt. But I think we did, like you said, we did a lot of research looking at what it takes to survive.

5:24and we went with a strategy of experience and size and physicality. Anton Stack is a good example of a player that fits that mold. A unit. And now we start to mix in a little bit of both, of experience and talent and youth. And so just the two signings that we have with Mujar Mavich being 23 with the sky's the limit for him and Harry Wilson at 29, but still a tremendous player, 17 goals and assists and player of the year at Fulham last season. And so trying to mix in everything. But I feel like it is more of the same plan, but also now sprinkling in a little bit of like, oh, wait a second, we do belong here.

6:02Let's start to do things that are conducive to long term sustainability, meaning it's not just experience. It's like let's mix in some good youth talent as well. So I want to talk about the newcomers and look at that season ahead. But simple question, if you were to describe your own role, the chairman of Leeds United, what would it be in your own words? Not just as a job title, but like what you do, what's the critical element? Yeah, I think it's the chief evangelist of the club and of the clubs of the agreed upon strategy, both internally and externally. My job, I feel like, is to always see the forest through the trees.

6:42And so if we have a bad result in a match or two, if we are playing the way that we said we wanted to play in the strategy that we all agreed that we wanted to, whether it's player recruitment or in a specific match, then my job is to keep us together. Like, hey, we're in a string of unluckiness. Keep the group together. That it is like we're on the right track. This will normalize. Same way if we happen to have a couple of fortunate results that maybe matches or strategies that shouldn't have gone our way that did. It's the same thing to keep us measured. And let's not get too excited. Let's not talk about getting into the Champions League in our second season because right now that's not the plan.

7:24The plan is to be better today than we were yesterday. You talked earlier about the alignment within the club. And the key part of that project is the leader, football in league, Daniel Farker, won the championship, kept the team up. You called him instrumental. What does he do? Because if a modern football coach has to do so many things, tactician, spokesperson, psychologist, trainer, sports scientist, culture builder, man motivator, all these things. When you look at it, what is the critical element? I think there's a lot of similarities with what his job and role is in mind in that we have to be very consistent.

8:00Consistent in say what we mean and mean what we say. And if we're inconsistent, then in his case, players are going to catch him on that. And then they're not going to have confidence and trust in his leadership. For me, it's the same thing, whether it's with supporters or our staff or with players or with Daniel. And so it's being consistent. I've seen time and again, so many clubs and teams that I've been a part of over my 26 years in the sports business of it's not just about the talent. And I said, it's about belief, but But the one thing that I have seen more often than anything else, taking down a club is not about player talent.

8:41It's not about even confidence or not. It's about inconsistency. And it's about people not being together on the same page. If you don't have that with between players and supporters and staff and ownership and coaches, you are dead on arrival. If you don't have the same vision, if not everyone ascribes to the same vision and the same plan, forget about it. Just lock the doors. Don't come in because you're dead. You have to have that. And so Daniel's job and my job is very similar in that we have to make sure that everyone is together on the same page, feeling the same vision. And we better be consistent in terms of saying what we mean and mean what we say.

9:22we're here leeds pre-season in new york a red bull new york training ground players took a break after the world cup before the season starts is there a holiday for sports executives or is this actually your busiest period yeah i mean there is no rest uh because you're always looking to how can you make the club better uh whether it's transfer windows with players whether it's off the pitch with maximizing revenue football clubs are an interesting thing because for the most part, most clubs, every penny you earn, you pour right back onto the pitch. And then some. Everything that you're doing is trying to make the football club better.

9:58And so if you waste a day, you're already a day behind. And so there is really no day to waste. You're always thinking about what can you do to make the club better. From the outside, the transfer window, there's the calm where you're working with strategy, Yeah. Patience, analytics, drawn out negotiations. And then it always seems to get, you know, as the season comes closer, just careens into our lives, a rush. Yeah. A chaos. Does it feel like that on the inside, that it stays calm and then gets hectic? Or does it feel the same planful all the way through? No, it's probably that's probably a fair assessment because there's nothing like a good there's nothing like a good deadline to spur action.

10:38Last year, we had the failed attempt to get Harry Wilson on the transfer deadline day. It literally felt like it went down to the last few seconds. And in the end, we were unsuccessful. Fortunately, we stayed on him and stayed close to him. And we were able to get it done once his contract expired. But it definitely gets more frenzied near the end. But at the same time, if you're chasing a player who has options with many clubs, that could happen in June, July and the same it could at the end because it's just when a player has decided when he wants to make a decision it might be a lot sooner than the transfer deadline day and so you're frenzied and stressed until the end but also it's important to keep a little bit extra in your kitty so that you have the ability to be nimble and flexible on that last day I guarantee you that I don't know that we'll get this player and I don't know who the player is But I guarantee you there's a player right now who we've been told is totally unavailable and off limits that come a month from now or 33 days from now suddenly might be available and may be available to leads.

11:50And so we need to be nimble enough to be able to make that move if that person becomes available to us. What's the most stressful aspect? Because with the 49ers, you used to, you know, the trade deadline is a little more. There's the draft day, that boiler room stress. But this is an ongoing agony from the outside. Yeah, that's pretty much how I would describe it too, an ongoing agony. Because if we're chasing a player and that we lost him today versus September 1st, it doesn't hurt any less. It's still the same agony, the same way the excitement. If we suddenly, hypothetically, were able to bag somebody in the next couple days that would just be a tremendous, tremendous asset for Leeds United, it's going to feel just as joyous as it would if we got said player on September 1st.

12:39One slight tweet this year said that the profit and sustainability rules is a new system. It's the squad cost ratio. Essentially, domestic clubs have to keep spending at or below 85 % of the revenue. Does that reality impact the market, the way you approach the whole strategy? I would say as a whole, it probably hasn't impacted the market in total. For us personally, it's probably, SCR has probably constricted us a little bit in the short term because we're still playing in Ellen Road that has 37 ,000 seats. But SCR does benefit those who have more local revenue and more local revenue is earned by having more seats.

13:15And so once we get to the stadium expansion in the midterm, it will benefit us more than PSR will. But for us, it's sort of on the margins. You know, we're spending strategically where, you know, where we think we can best help the club. And it hasn't really stopped us from doing anything yet. So you talked about how last year on promotion, 10 players scouted for height, for experience, for age. Those are the metrics that you needed. Physicality. God bless. And this year you've targeted quite a few more creative players. When you're scouting right now, what makes a potential sign-in a lead United player?

13:50What values, what attributes would you say you're looking for? You know, I said this a month ago to our local Beats. One really important thing I think for us is one thing that we ascribe to as a recruitment philosophy is love those who love you back. Someone needs to know what it means to be leads. Someone needs to appreciate and internalize what being a Leeds United player means. Harry Wilson gets it. Just using him as an example. Being from Wales, a lot of his mates on the national team there play for us. So he understands the commitment and the level of responsibility that comes with it. I think that's really important.

14:26And, you know, we've been in some situations in the past and maybe even presently where sometimes the player has a tremendous amount of talent and can help us, but is shopping around and looking at lots of different shop windows as to where he might fit best. And maybe that player is not best for us because maybe they don't fully appreciate and internalize what it means to be Leeds United. How do you test for that? By the way, I love that. I love those who love you, that mutual two-way. But how do you really test for that? I mean, it's a feeling. You feel it where, you know, do they get it? Do they say the little things about, do they understand the little nuances of, you know, what the Ellen Road environment is like, what Leeds fan base is like, supporter base around the world, wherever they go, you know, little things like that.

15:17And also how the player or the player's family or the agent is communicating with us. There's just an understanding that you come to appreciate that if they get it or they don't get it. We talked about Harry Wilson coming after scoring a career best 10 goals, seven assists last season at Fulham in the Premier League, really one highlight after another. When you look at the data for an attacker, what are you looking for? And what do Harry Wilson's numbers say to you that make him the one? The one thing more valuable, this may sound controversial, but let me just say as valuable as scoring goals is how many chances for scoring goals are you creating?

15:55And Harry Wilson, yes, with his 10 goals. But if you look at the degree of difficulty on those 10 goals, they were unbelievable. And so he created a lot of chances. And a lot of his actual goals came from low probability goal scoring opportunities. And so he was making something out of nothing is the short way of saying what I just said. And so creativity and guys who can find spaces. Harry Wilson has an incredible knack for utilizing the little spaces that he has or knowing where to be in the right place and creating a goal scoring opportunity out of it. Anton Stack, as an example, does an incredible job with the set pieces last season doing the same.

16:34Calvert-Lewin also has a knack in very tight spaces, and whether it's using his foot or his head or his chest, in one example, against Forrest to be able to create a goal. And so just those players who have the creativity to create chances. A lot of talk leads about the goalkeeper position and indeed about the role of the goalkeeper in the modern squad. The money invested in that position seems to be ballooning. And I know goalkeeping data is actually really hard to analyze compared to other positions. Can you talk about that act of decision-making as you try and fill that role? How much to invest?

17:07How do you view that balance? There's no doubt that the keeper is so important, and sometimes the difference between, can make a difference in three, four games per season. I mean, I was just thinking about, forget about said keeper's name, but if you look at Burnley's results two years ago, I think in 46 games they allowed about 16 goals. That's an unheard of statistic. in a championship season, right? G.J. Watts influence. Yeah, must be. That was the difference for them between getting 100 points and securing automatic promotion to maybe being a playoff squad. And so it makes all the difference.

17:48And I think making sure that you have that right keeper. And also the other thing about keepers is they're consistently good for a long time. There are many great keepers right now around the world that are well into their 30s and still in the prime of their careers. Last season, you were in 10 bodies. This season remains to be seen, but you know you can't fix everything in one window. How do you make the tough position about where you strengthen and where you don't strengthen, where you decide to wait? How does that work? Last season, we knew there was going to need to be a lot of turnover because a lot of the squad that helped us win the championship maybe weren't the right fits to start for us in the Premier League.

18:25So it was about improving the squad everywhere we could. This year, the bar's a little higher because of those guys that we brought in last season, a lot of them showed they belong and belong in a real positive way. And so that bar is lifted. So it's not just simply, let's just add bodies and spray them out on the pitch and let's see what happens. And so now for someone to get onto the pitch and unseat some of our established players, it's a lot harder. You need someone like Harry Wilson, who has a pedigree and a consistency of success and performance that, all right, he can come in and he's going to get on the pitch.

19:01Tarek Mohairmovic is one of the best young center halves in Europe. I think he showed yesterday, just like the class that he has, he's sort of a cut above. And so the players that we want to bring in now, because the bar has been raised, we want to know that they can actually, you know, really come in and help us.

19:21Fourteenth last season. Yeah. You will have looked at the data. You, man of goals. What data or inputs do you use to determine what's feasible? 14th, yes. And I would argue that we probably underperformed relative to our, the result was an underperformance relative to our actual performance. And if you look at the XG table, also, we are one win away from being 12th. We were two wins away from being in top 10. If you look at our performance from December on, you know, we were a top seven club. We just, we got better as the season progressed. So how do you see yourself? That weight class. And does each position at the table get harder and harder to climb?

20:01Yeah, of course it does, because it's not like anyone's giving anything to you. Just because maybe we feel like we have more confidence and we're better this season than we were last season. So is everybody else. Nobody else is staying the same. Everybody else is also improving. Everybody else is also out recalibrating their squad or getting unhealthy players back to health or finding new ways to win. And so everybody's trying to do it. It's a zero sum game. So the goal is just to be better than we were yesterday. And, you know, maybe after three years of being in the Premier League, our aspirations can maybe change a little bit.

20:37But right now, it's just about, you know, continuing to stay in and be better than yesterday. Do you have dreams about negotiations with aforementioned goalkeepers? The roles you've got, does that fill your dream life as well? Serious question. Yeah, it does. And, you know, especially when I'm sleeping in San Francisco and it's eight hours ahead of me in Leeds. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm checking my phone four or five, six times a night to see if there's an update. And so then that causes you to dream about it, right? I wake up at midnight or 1 o 'clock, it's 9 a.m., and I'll send a quick message on WhatsApp to my group, to the guys, and is there any update?

21:21And yeah, I go back to sleep, but then what am I doing? I'm dreaming about the last thing I did, and so I'm dreaming about it. How many hours are you working on? I don't even think about hours in a day, honestly. Hour sleep, you don't think? How many hours do I sleep? Unfortunately, my Oura ring tells me, and it's not good, so I don't know, five hours a night? I'd fight your arm off for five hours. You know, we're talking about being in San Francisco. Last time we spoke, you talked about the similarities and the differences between the NFL and the Premier League. Yeah. The main one for you is the jeopardy, promotion, relegation, enormous stakes, even just financially.

21:56Do you find yourself second guessing your decision making? My decision making process is I do like to get as much data as I can to help support a decision. So sometimes maybe I am a little bit more methodical versus just shoot from the hip. But once I make a decision, it is done. Move on. Burn all the evidence and not think about all the positives and negatives and all the diligence that I did that led up to the decision and move on. It's like that. I don't want to live in regret. And so I just want to think about moving forward. I'm fascinated by the cross-pollination between American sports and the Premier League.

22:34We've seen a World Cup where the players were elated to see SoFi, to see Levi's Stadium. like, wow, this is our future. And vice versa, American owners are like, wow, that's fandom. We want that kind of passion. Are there elements, you know, you began with Brendan Aronson. He worked with a 49ers performance coach. Are there elements that you see pollinating from the NFL that you can bring over that extra competitive advantage? Yeah, I think so. And I think you're already seeing it. And it actually goes both ways too. You know, whether it's health and performance and nutrition, coaching techniques, coaching preparation tools, integrating AI into some of the game prep, using data and recruitment, everything.

23:17Because let's be honest, we all maybe sort of over romanticize the complexity of a football club or a baseball team or an NFL team. At the end of the day, these are pretty simple businesses. It is about winning. It is about making money so that you can get better players and it is about telling a good story and having a good story to tell. That's pretty much what it is at its core. But every sports club is like that. And so it doesn't matter what shape the ball is. It's all the same. And so there's cross-pollination in any, it's not just NFL and primary league, but any professional sports organization.

23:57It's all the same. You talked about the performance coach, the mindset, getting a player ready, getting a player believing that I'm going to succeed or I'm going to die trying or I'm as good as anyone in the world. That's a mindset that benefits a player playing Premier League football, NFL football or IPL cricket. It doesn't matter. It's the same. Season ahead. What most excites you for Leeds United? And inside, what's the biggest challenge, as you say, your biggest fear? Most excites me is whenever that next match where we have a dominant performance and you hear that Ellen Road crowd and it gets the hair on the back of your neck going.

24:34I'm addicted to those moments and I just can't wait for, I hope that first feeling comes on August 30th against Brentford in our home opener. But I don't know when. That's what I'm most excited for. What am I most fearful of? I don't know. I don't think I really have a fear about it because it's a long season and there are a lot of opportunities to sort of course correct. But I think, I guess I'm fearful of not having consistency across everything in the club, but I feel like we are in such a good place and we do have it. And just keeping us together is the most important job that I have. To you, Parag, to your family, to your daughter's creativity, most importantly, to your football club, Mighty Mighty Leeds.

25:18Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Help, happiness. Thank you for having me. Courage.