Leeds and Bielsa are so close to a delayed redemption
Leeds fans waited 16 years for order to restore itself, then 18 more months to properly appreciate it at Elland Road. The wait is almost over.
Leeds United waited 16 years for order to restore itself. Elland Road is the beating heart of a sporting city. Rugby League matters. So does diving – just ask Olympic gold medalist Matty Lee. Cricket will always be on the agenda. But football is what keeps everything going.
Elland Road has been waiting longer than Leeds, sitting silent and soulless and hollow for a year while Premier League football returned. The pitch was graced by the best, but the stands were left dormant. Until now.
What happened to Leeds has been etched into football lore. Two decades ago they were in the Champions League and they reached the semi finals; Real Madrid, Barcelona and AC Milan came to town and England internationals Rio Ferdinand, Jonathan Woodgate and Alan Smith were mainstays in the team. Robbie Fowler would join them. Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, Lee Bowyer and Robbie Keane were there, too. Not all of them were individually world class, but the sum of those parts was something to behold.
The dream they were living, as chairman at the time Peter Ridsdale once put it, was temporary in the cruellest sense. Debt grew exponentially, the squad was dismantled and relegation followed in 2004, but when they didn’t return initially and the big media interest subsided, they kept tumbling, down again to League One, and suffered administration. Owner after owner came and went. So did the managers. Nobody could save Leeds and some didn’t even have that intention. The away dressing room was suddenly being filled by Colchester United and Exeter City. Their world had changed in under a decade and the only people who stayed were those most loyal; the same people who have been locked out of the return of the good times.
That particular cocktail of misery is now called ‘Doing a Leeds’ and it stands as a warning to other clubs to avoid the same fate. Mismanagement is common, even to the point of liquidation, but no case has been as prominent as theirs.
When Marcelo Bielsa arrived, Leeds finally began to heal. Play-off heartache in his debut season was seen as typical and part of the process. It showed that the club’s dominant and trophy-laden past was in another realm and that pain was now part of them. But he stayed and worked on his plan to turn the club into a dynamic, high-intensity machine. He has no off switch and the Championship could no longer handle Leeds. They were back in the Premier League last year, primed to overwhelm a division which couldn’t help but see them coming, yet couldn’t get out of their path either.
COVID-19, much as every other team, hampered them in a huge way. In the case of Leeds supporters, it punished those who had already been through everything football had to throw at them. Fans were not allowed through the stadium doors so the atmosphere, typically bombastic and thunderous, reflective of the city’s heat and passion, was subdued. Bielsa’s Leeds were everything they promised to be: a swarming, harrying nuisance who overpowered the elite.
But still the cauldron couldn’t be lit.
Capacity crowds are returning, potentially with some vaccination-related caveats, next season. With that Leeds ambition and Bielsa’s intensity, both in terms of tactics and personality, the myth of Second Season Syndrome is not expected be a problem. It halted their Yorkshire rivals Sheffield United in spectacular fashion. The noise and the throng at Bramall Lane helped take them to new heights before the pandemic. The way their fans greeted players, making that old, traditional, ‘proper’ ground bounce levelled the playing field as they rode a wave to the brink of Europe. Other factors contributed to their loss of steam and subsequent relegation, but losing that live, sizzling sense of anticipation was chief among them.
So what of Leeds now their fans are back? They never got their collective moment of restoration, when the past could be put where it belongs on a sunny afternoon watching top-flight football with an ownership who knows what the club means. It seems a little churlish to try and recreate that now. But it’ll be a special moment when a Premier League ball is kicked without the echo of a shout from the touchline, drowned out by the sense that the world is fixing itself again.
When Liverpool coined the phrase This Means More, they were rightly met with a backlash of anger. Who are they to claim their fans care more or that their club, while historically and commercially bigger without doubt, is more important than any other? But for Leeds, who welcome Everton to Elland Road the week after a clash with Manchester United at Old Trafford on the opening day, where that heat and ferociousness will be appreciated every inch during a clash of bitter rivals, having their long-suffering supporters back again will mean so much. For all the seasons for football to change and fans to be locked out, fate picked the cruellest.
Bielsa represents hope as much as he represents obsession, desire and heart. He is what Leeds have needed but Leeds is what he has needed too. With him in charge, horizons are long and potentially endless. To prove football is the city’s sport, all you need to do is go and stand on the Argentine’s very own street, named in his honour just months after his arrival.
When Leeds United have their roaring support back for a Premier League game, it’ll feel like something belonging in its rightful place. The completion of one of football’s longest and most deserved redemption arcs is now 18 months overdue.