While the owner takes his enforced break, the club has been embroiled in some chaotic incidents that threaten to undo the progress made under Neil Redfearn

“I’m banned, I’m not talking to anyone,” says Massimo Cellino, the Leeds United owner, following a trip to Portugal while another storm brews around his bereft club. “I wish I could know,” the Italian continues, when asked who is making the decisions without him. “That’s the problem, nobody is making the decisions. That’s the truth.”

The thing is, decisions have been made at Leeds, a club whose default position these days seems to be turmoil. The suspension of the assistant manager, Steve Thompson, last month ranks at the top of an unsavoury list of recent developments which have undermined the coach, Neil Redfearn, to a remarkable extent.

The withdrawal of six players before Saturday’s defeat at Charlton Athletic is another example of the chaos. All those players involved – signed in the last year by Cellino – cited injuries, but more than a few eyebrows have been raised. The club attempted to explain the situation by releasing a statement on Sunday evening, at the same time that Lewis Cook, their 18-year-old midfielder, was named Championship apprentice of the year at the Football League awards. Some timing.

Cellino has been banned by the League since January after he avoided paying import duty on a yacht in Sardinia, a first-grade conviction in Italy that resulted in failure of the organisation’s owners’ and directors’ test. He will return at the end of the season yet, during his hiatus, the club had been making significant progress on the pitch as Redfearn’s young team of local talent assured Championship safety from a previously perilous position.

Things have changed somewhat and Leeds have lost five successive matches since Thompson’s suspension. Cellino has returned to the city and visited Elland Road last week, while the chairman, Andrew Umbers, has been running the day-to-day operations. Umbers assisted Ken Bates when brokering the sale of Leeds to the Bahrain-based investment bank Gulf Finance House Capital in 2013, and was appointed as chairman by Cellino who said in January: “Andrew has personally worked tirelessly with me in restructuring the football club from May 2014 and shares the same goals, strategy and insights that I do.”

Under the Football League rules Cellino, the former Cagliari owner, is barred from acting as a “relevant person” at Leeds. The league says a relevant person “means in respect of any club any individual person (and not any entity) operating the powers that are usually associated with the powers of a director of a company ... any ‘chief executive’ officer, ‘general manager’, ‘chief operating officer’ or any other person undertaking any duties which would objectively be considered to be equivalent to those roles; any person appointed by those with control over the club to represent their interests in the management of the club; and a person who exercises or is able, legally or beneficially, to exercise control over the affairs of the club”.

Cellino has not been attending Leeds games and has spent the majority of his ban at home in Miami. The club have asked the league to grant him special dispensation to attend the final match of the season at home to Rotherham United, and the organisation’s chief executive, Shaun Harvey, who occupied the same role at Leeds under Bates, will consider the request and make a recommendation to the board.

However, the question remains: who has been calling the shots at Leeds? Nobody is taking responsibility for the unpalatable decisions and, in particular, there has been little explanation given for Thompson’s suspension.

According to Umbers, it was the sporting director, Nicola Salerno, who made the call. Salerno – brought to the club by Cellino last year and responsible for the myriad foreign imports – signed a letter that was handed to Thompson outlining his dismissal, but in the aftermath he left the club and returned to Italy, with Cellino saying he had resigned. The League Managers’ Association is representing Thompson, but will not yet speak publicly about the situation.

Umbers has insisted the suspension of Thompson was Salerno’s decision. “Steve Thompson had one boss, Nicola Salerno. That boss decided that Steve Thompson was not going to be part of our setup,” Umbers told the Yorkshire Evening Post. “The issues that Nicola Salerno had privately and professionally with Steve Thompson were issues that led him to make that decision.”

Regarding the mass player withdrawal last week – which Redfearn described as a “freakish set of events” – the club insists those involved were all injured. Marco Silvestri was one and his father, Claudio, claimed on social media that the goalkeeper and his team-mate Mirco Antenucci were legitimately injured but the others – Giuseppe Bellusci, Dario Del Fabro, Souleymane Doukara and Edgar Cani – carried out “a stupid protest”.

It has all left Redfearn isolated at a club where he has spent six years, nurturing young talent in an academy that has produced a promising crop of players who have established themselves well this season. The fear is that Cook, Alex Mowatt, Sam Byram and Charlie Taylor will leave while the club burns, and they will surely be more vulnerable if Redfearn departs at the end of the season.

The situation certainly warrants scrutiny but the Football League chairman, Greg Clarke, said there are limitations as to the organisation’s powers. “We have banned him [Cellino] until the end of the season. He can’t go to the games, he can’t act in a way to be seen as relevant at the club. We monitor all our clubs to comply with our rules. But we don’t have anyone hanging outside the front doors with cameras, we’re not the KGB. We can only act on objective facts. Facts are hard to come by at the moment,” said Clarke.

“We spend a lot of time investigating clubs. But Massimo Cellino has not been going to games. I’ve had the conversation with him personally that if he does not behave in the spirit of the ruling we will go after him again. We have no facts, what we can’t do is infer things.”

It remains to be seen, meanwhile, if Cellino intends to sell the club on his return. The Italian has further tax allegations against him in Sardinia and an investigation into alleged misuse of public funds relating to Cagliari’s Quartu Sant’Elena stadium. He denies wrongdoing.

Cellino is a figure who has divided opinion since his takeover last year. However, the tide is seemingly turning against him, with the away support at Charlton voicing their vehement objection to his ownership.

Such is the turmoil at a club that had appeared to be heading for calmer waters. Instead, the Cellino soap opera gathers renewed pace, even when he is away.