Andrea Radrizzani is giving Leeds United fans reason to hope at last

“Cellino opened up completely, saying that he was ready to sell,” Radrizzani says, “that he was a bit desperate because he was alone and his family was in London and he was in Leeds all the time and so he would welcome a potential investor.”

A few days later Radrizzani suggested that he be the one to invest, whereupon Cellino changed his tune and, realising that his fellow Italian could inject some energy into a tired project, suggested they enter an equal partnership with the understanding that, if the club did not win promotion, then Radrizzani would take full control.

“At the end of the season it was difficult,” he admits, “because I was supporting Leeds on the pitch, I was emotionally sad and disappointed with results when we were not making points in the last games. But I was also aware that my deal could be made easier.”

His priority upon completing the takeover on May 23 was to find a way to buy Elland Road, which had been sold off in 2004. Negotiations with Teak Commercial were tough, there was a dispute over the club’s option to buy back the ground and it cost him £20 million but it was an important gesture, a concrete way to let the supporters know that he has a long-term, serious plan.

Actually, he will give it five years. If, after that time, Leeds have failed to win promotion, he will accept that there must be someone better equipped to try. If Leeds do regain Premier League status, he might stay into his dotage.

“I am young, I can stay here for 20 years and enjoy,” he says. “It’s a dream, why do all of this if I then have to leave?”

Promotion will not be easy and the irony is that he has helped to fuel the very profits that give clubs relegated from the Premier League parachute payments worth £90 million.

“They can come and bid for my players on a much higher salary than we can pay, so it’s difficult,” he says. “Very quickly, I think they need to regulate the parachute payments because the reason they created them is to pay the contracts signed in the Premier League. Not to pay new players in the Championship. So eventually we have to sit around a table and try to regulate it.”

It is not essential to remove the financial advantages of the bigger clubs and he points out that Huddersfield Town and Reading reached the play-off final while working with a smaller budget than Leeds had. It is, though, Brighton, who secured automatic promotion, that he truly admires and he would love to sit down with their chief executive for some insight.

“I think my model is Brighton,” he says, “which has built their project over time and has finally achieved its goal.”

Brighton turned to Chris Hughton two and half years ago to achieve Premier League status but Radrizzani discovered thta the tap of British coaching talent was barely dripping when it came to replacing Garry Monk this summer. “It wasn’t easy to find a local English manager that could give me the comfort to play for a win with good football and purpose and achieve good results,” he says. “I couldn’t identify many options, honestly, unfortunately. It’s something that everyone in the English environment should work on.”

It led him to appoint Thomas Christiansen, fresh from winning the Cypriot League with APOEL, as the new Leeds manager in June. “I opted for another foreign manager because he had the personality and characteristics to play offensively and to try to build the game and I couldn’t find many options here.

“I liked Thomas, I liked his approach, very humble but at the same time very motivated to become the coach of Leeds. He loved Leeds, he chose Leeds, he was not, ‘OK, if I don’t sign this contract today I have another club.’ No, he really was super-excited for Leeds United and this was important to see. He was prepared and, for the first time, I saw a manager come in with a powerpoint [presentation] and details . . . with only two days’ notice he came prepared and knowing and talking about our current players.”

Leeds might be viewed as a poisoned chalice and not a project for a man from Milan acting on impulse but Radrizzani is used to cynicism. “All my career was about changing people’s mindset and this followed me all the time. When I started in the media rights business and I started to buy rights, ‘Who is this guy and where has he come from?’

“At the end everybody was questioning how it could last, how can they buy these rights? First time I bought Premier League [rights] the same, second time, again and then it became bigger. When I bought Premier League [rights] for almost half a billion dollars with 58 territories, people were still questioning.

“So all my life it was this. But I don’t mind, I am happy. I don’t care about gossip; I let everything flow around me and focus on the goal and the achievement talks.”