‘Cellino will control most aspects of the club, including transfers. Hockaday will effectively train the players day to day’ — Phil Hay, June 2014

We are a decade removed from the most bantersome of the Leeds United Banter Years, a time characterised by Massimo Cellino’s frenetic stewardship of the club and his decision to hire Dave Hockaday, a manager whose greatest achievement was taking Forest Green Rovers to the FA Cup third round before getting them relegated from the Conference, only to be reinstated due to Salisbury City’s financial irregularities.

Once Cellino had wrangled his way past enraged fans (see Stanningley Cars) and legal issues (see boat import tax story), he set about building a team that would challenge for promotion to the Premier League.

Cellino hired Nicola Salerno as director of football from Cagliari, the club he had just sold. Salerno spent a year at Catania in 2012/13, who Leeds signed four players from, plus Mirco Antenucci, who played under Salerno and manager Rolando Maran at Catania in 2012. Maran had just taken the job at Chievo, who Leeds signed Marco Silvestri from. You get the idea.

Italy is a country that openly accepts the use of social connections to get things done. It even has a term for it, raccomandazione. The Italian transfer market runs on connections between clubs, presidents, sporting directors, managers and agents. Leeds signed twelve players from Italian clubs in Cellino’s first year in charge, and they were linked with many more. Some came close, some didn’t, and some probably never even existed.

Andrea Tabanelli

A mythical name from Leeds folklore. He was announced, sort of, as Cellino’s first signing after his takeover on January 31st, 2014. Cagliari had signed him on loan with an option to buy… a whole four days earlier, and their official website announced that Tabanelli had been ‘sold to Leeds United on loan’.

The EFL rejected the move, saying the paperwork hadn’t been submitted in time, which in hindsight was not a surprise given what we were to learn about Cellino. Tabanelli remained at Cagliari and seemed hopeful of a summer move, but it never materialised.

He recently told Cagliari News 24 that when his transfer fell through, Cellino convinced him to stay in Leeds until it was resolved, which amounted to him and coach Gianluca Festa — who was being lined up to replace sacked/not sacked manager Brian McDermott — spending “a month and a half running in parks, because they wouldn’t even let us enter the training ground”.

Tabanelli’s career fizzled out after the Leeds debacle. He broke his metatarsal twice in 2014/15 and even had to be talked out of retiring aged 26 by AC Milan legend Gennaro Gattuso, his manager at Pisa. He finally retired last year, after a final season at Ravenna in semi-professional Serie D, although he did briefly grace Italy’s top flight with Lecce a few years earlier.

It’s safe to say that Tabanelli’s mystique was greatly enhanced by the Andrea Pirlo effect. A tall, handsome playmaking midfielder with flowing long hair from Italy should be a sure thing. But it’s Leeds.

Leonardo Pavoletti

The one that got away. Twice. He was the man that Leeds were chasing on the most infamous of Deadline Days, when Leeds tweeted their fans, telling them: ‘Don’t go to bed just yet.’ An hour before the transfer window shut, Cellino told people at Elland Road that a deal was done. Neither he nor Pavoletti were in England. He was in Miami and our new striker was at home in Emilia-Romagna, presumably. He certainly wasn’t signing for a club in England.

The deal never happened and Pavoletti became yet another white horse, a figment of Leeds fans’ imagination. He was spotted at Elland Road on Boxing Day 2014, watching Leeds lose 2-0 to Wigan, and talk of a deal emerged again, but nothing materialised.

Pavoletti joined Genoa in the summer of 2015, before making a €17m move to Napoli two years later. He flopped in Naples and moved on to Cagliari, where he has spent the past six years — finally appearing at Elland Road in a pre-season friendly ahead of the 2022/23 campaign, captaining his side in a 6-2 defeat. Pavoletti is something of a cult hero in Sardegna. An Italian Carl Shutt, if you will.

He went five months without scoring from January 2023 until he appeared from the Cagliari bench in the 90th minute of the second leg of their Serie B play-off final. With the tie deadlocked at 0-0 and their opponent, Bari, set to go through having finished higher in the table, Pavoletti got on the end of a cross in the 94th minute to poke the ball past former Leeds ‘keeper Elia Caprile and send his team to Serie A.

Last season, he scored twice in injury time to hand Cagliari a 4-3 win against Frosinone, their first of the season, and scored a 99th-minute winner a month later against Sassuolo. At 35, his powers are fading, but Pavoletti remains something of a romantic icon in the backwaters of Italian football.

Federico Viviani

He travelled to England ahead of a loan move from Roma, witnessed Leeds lose a pre-season friendly to Chesterfield, and wisely hopped on the first plane back to Rome. After talks broke down regarding a move for the midfielder, Cellino said: “All last week it was demands about this, demands about that, asking for more and more so eventually I said enough.”

Were they demands, or were they reasonable requests? For example, sign a centre-back. Get rid of the PE teacher Hockaday. Demands like that. Really, it seemed as though the sight of Liam Cooper’s Chesterfield ransacking a woeful Leeds side was the kick up the arse that Viviani needed to return to Italy and spend another season on loan at Latina.

Like Tabanelli, he was another promising midfielder who Leeds missed out on. Viviani was a prospect, having broken into Roma’s team at 19 before being sent to Serie B to toughen up and get some experience.

His career flitted between Italy’s top two divisions and essentially ended in Serie B at Brescia. While he hasn’t officially retired, his president Massimo Cellino(!) decided he didn’t want to register him for the second half of the 2022/23 season — that was because he’d signed Adryan, a proper former Leeds player. Realising it was too late to sell Viviani, he simply locked him out of the training ground, a scene that played out live on Viviani’s Instagram account.

He threatened to sue Cellino and spent the remainder of his time at Brescia training by himself. He plays for Ternana in Serie C now, but minutes are few and far between.

Frederik Sorensen

A defender from Juventus, he had to be good. You don’t play for Juve unless you’re great, or you don’t actually play, like Ouasim Bouy.

He began training with Leeds in August 2014 ahead of a loan move, with Cellino even claiming a deal had been completed and would become a permanent £3m transfer twelve months later, but everything collapsed the following day after a fall-out with Sorensen’s agent. Had we signed him, there’s every chance that Cellino wouldn’t have ponied up the coin to sign Liam Cooper a few days after the Sorensen deal collapsed.

Sorensen ultimately spent the season at Hellas Verona, before moving to FC Koln. He returned to Italy a few years ago, most recently spending three seasons at Ternana. He’s now a free agent, having been released by the club after their relegation to Serie C.

Sorensen probably would have been a decent signing, but I’m glad that we got Coops. Eventually.

Armando Izzo

There were several other names mentioned that summer, but Izzo remains the headline act — for all the wrong reasons. The centre-back was about to leave Avellino when Leeds’ interest was first reported. Nothing materialised and he went to Genoa. Two years later, Izzo was banned for his role in a Neapolitan mob’s match-fixing ring, having been found guilty of rigging two Serie B games in 2014.

Izzo returned to football before long and has gone on to have a pretty successful career in Serie A, even picking up three Italy caps. He’s currently at Monza, owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi before his death, but is also awaiting an appeal hearing for his criminal conviction as part of the match-fixing scandal. If he loses, he faces a five-year jail sentence. At some point. The wheels of justice move slowly in Italy.

On the whole, it’s probably for the best we didn’t sign any of these players, because we’d have still been terrible. Maybe Izzo might have been fun, if he was offering any decent betting tips. ⬢