Leeds United are better than you might remember — and here’s the proof — Square Ball 9/8/24
WGUAFC
Written by: The Square Ball
It seems strange to be looking back upon a season in which
Leeds won 31 games, scored 98 goals, and won ninety points, with anything other
than fondness. But following the play-off final defeat to Southampton at
Wembley, all that went before seemed to mean nothing. Promotion was denied and
another season in the Championship was assured. Misery. On the plus side, at
least you weren’t turning thirty on the day of the play-off final like I was.
It was a memorable birthday, at least.
Ninety points was enough to win promotion in every single
Football League season apart from 1997/98 (Sunderland in Division One, ninety
points, lost in the play-off final) and 2011-12 (Sheffield United in League
One, ninety points, lost in the play-off final). Leeds won 91 points in 2007/08
but, after fifteen of those were deducted, finished fifth and, you guessed it,
lost in the play-off final. I seem to recall that the club programme refused to
acknowledge the fifteen-point deduction and instead printed ‘the real League
One table’ with Leeds at the top after we won our first seven games that year.
Last season Leeds were competing in a Championship of almost
unprecedented quality. Leicester, Ipswich, Leeds and Southampton won 112 games
combined, the second-most between the top four in a division in the entire
history of the Football League. Ipswich were the first newly promoted team to
win as many as 28 games in a season since 1961.
Leeds were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s
something we’ve made a habit of, like finishing fourth in the Premier League in
the last season before that was worthy of a Champions League place, then
finishing fifth the season after. And then being relegated two years after
that. It’s what we do.
But 2023/24 was not a travesty. It is easy to forget that we
were subjected to losing 1-5 and 1-6 in consecutive home games as recently as
April 2023, one of which we led — against Crystal Palace — 1-0 until the stroke
of half-time. Last season had lots of wins, lots of goals, lots of positives.
It was not the total failure it can be looked upon because of ninety minutes in
London in May. We won nine games in a row at the start of 2024. We scored
nearly 100 goals and had three wins by a margin of four goals. We saw the
emergence of Archie Gray. Well, okay, let’s not dwell on that. But his little
brother seems pretty good as well.
So let’s take a look at all the good things about last
season.
Winning games and scoring goals
The Premier League was fun when it was behind closed doors
and we were hammering Sam Allardyce’s West Brom, but after that it wasn’t
exactly a bundle of joy. After beating Liverpool and Bournemouth, in our last
31 games of 2022/23 we won just five games and two of those were against
Cardiff and Accrington in the FA Cup. It was, in general, a miserable
experience.
Rediscovering the winning habit was fun last season. We won
31 games in all competitions, the most in a campaign since 34 wins in 2009/10
under Simon Grayson, when we were in League One and beating Scum, Oldham and
Kettering among others. When we’ve been in the top two divisions, it was our
most since 1999/00, when we also won 31 out of 55 games and reached the
semi-final of the UEFA Cup and finished third in the Premier League.
Goals were also in abundance last season, 98 in total, which
was again our most since 2009/10, when we netted 103. On a per game basis, our
1.78 goals per game were our best in a single season since 1970/71 under Don
Revie, a season we won the Fairs Cup and were unfortunate not to win the
league. We scored four goals in seven matches (always exactly four goals — we
haven’t scored five goals in a league game since December 2020 against
Newcastle), which was our most in a season since 2009/10 (again). Two of those
were against Ipswich, the first time Leeds had scored four goals home and away
against an opponent since 2010/11, against Scunthorpe. Unlike Scunthorpe, who
finished bottom, Ipswich were runners up. Football is weird.
Scoring first is the key
Leeds United were the only team in the Championship that
didn’t lose a single game when scoring first last season, winning 21 of 23
games and drawing the other two away at Rotherham and at home to Coventry.
Across the entire top four tiers of English football, the only other sides not
to lose when scoring first were Fulham, Liverpool, Man City and Wrexham.
Leeds won 91% of their league games when they scored the
first goal, the highest percentage of any side within England’s top four
divisions, and only dropped four points from winning positions — the fewest of
any Championship side. Scoring first is obviously a good thing, but especially
for Leeds.
Since that bizarre night against Derby County in May 2019 —
the highlights of which I still can’t bring myself to watch — Leeds haven’t
lost a Championship game when scoring first, with 47 wins and five draws in 52
matches. In those 52 games, Leeds have only conceded nineteen goals. Seven of
those were in two games in December 2019 against Cardiff and Birmingham.
Conceding first is not the end of the world
Scoring first is preferable, but if Leeds do concede first
they proved themselves to be resilient in 2023/24. In all competitions, they
won eight matches when conceding first, the most in a season since 1999/00,
when they also won eight times.
Leeds recovered 25 points from losing positions, with only
Ipswich winning more in the Championship last season. In 2022/23, Leeds
conceded first in 23 matches and didn’t score more than twice in any of them —
in 2023-24, they did so six times, including memorable victories against
Norwich (3-2 at Carrow Road), Leicester (3-1 at Elland Road) and Middlesbrough
(4-3 at the Riverside).
Although at an admittedly higher level, Leeds only won five
times when conceding first between 2020/21 and 2022/23 (and only twice when
winning the league in 2019/20).
If we concede first under Daniel Farke: don’t panic.
Georginio is fun
Aside from West Ham United’s Crysencio Summerville, the
standout player for Leeds United last season was Georginio Rutter. In all
competitions, Rutter assisted sixteen goals, the most by a Leeds player since
Robert Snodgrass in 2008-09 (eighteen assists).
In the Championship, Rutter ranked either first or second
for chances created in open play (85), assists (fifteen), dribbles (309),
completed dribbles (135), fouls won (119) and duels won (373). In other words,
Rutter was everywhere. The only negative of his game last season was the lack
of goals — seven in 48 Championship appearances — and a shot conversion rate of
a mere 5.5%, the lowest by a player with as many as 128 shots in a Championship
season that Opta has on record in the last eleven seasons.
We want to see more of that Georginio celebrating with a big smile after hitting the back of the net.
A youthful team
Leeds starting XI in the Championship had an average age of
a mere 24 years and 147 days last season, the second youngest of any side
behind Sunderland (an all-time Championship low of 22 years and 352 days).
There were a total of 172 appearances by players aged 21 or under, the most in
a season since 2008/09.
While many of these were by the now departed Archie Gray,
Leeds have a team whose main players have the best years ahead of them: Rutter
(22), Meslier (24), Gnonto (20), Ampadu (23), Gruev (24), Piroe (24), Mateo
Joseph (20). The oldest player to play for Leeds in the play-off final was the
on-loan Connor Roberts, born the same month eBay was founded in 1995.
With the departures of Luke Ayling and Liam Cooper, it is
not beyond the realms that we may go many consecutive games without a player
aged 30 in our starting XI next season, unless Karl Darlow surprises us all or
Sam Byram — a man who must surely still be asked for ID at the supermarket —
makes many appearances. The future is bright.
Daniel James and an end product
Although Leeds will rightly be trying to sign a replacement
for Crysencio Summerville, the form last season of Dan James was a big positive
that could have translated into a similar number of goals and assists as
Summerville had the Wales international played more minutes. James played over
a thousand fewer minutes than Summerville but had a marginally better minutes
per goal or assist ratio (one every 127 minutes) than the Dutchman (one every
129 minutes).
Before last season, James had only scored 16 league goals in
his career, but netted thirteen in 2023/24, only one fewer than Joel Piroe. At
Elland Road, James played 21 Championship matches last season, scoring eleven
goals and creating a further six for his teammates, the fourth-most goals and
assists on home soil by a player in the Championship in 2023-24.
James scoring usually means one thing, with Leeds’ results in the twelve games he scored last season as follows: WWWWWWWWWWWW. How we wish that late effort at Wembley had dipped under the bar, rather than against it.
His name is Junior, Junior Firpo
After Georginio Rutter and Crysencio Summerville, the player
with the most Championship assists for Leeds last season was Junior Firpo with
eight, all in open play from New Year’s Day onwards. From January 1 until the
end of the campaign, the only other player who could match Firpo’s total for
open play assists was some bloke called Luke Ayling for Middlesbrough. The last
Leeds number three to get eight assists in a season was Ian Harte in the
2000/01, with twelve.
Passing the ball
It sounds obvious, but a Leeds team accurately passing the
ball to one another was enjoyable to watch last season, given we had just over
a year of suffering through teams put together by the likes of Jesse Marsch and
Sam Allardyce.
Leeds ranked third for successful passes (over 22,000),
fourth for accuracy of passing (85.7%) and third for average possession (58%)
in the Championship in 2023/24. It is worth comparing this with some of the
numbers from 2022/23, even though admittedly this was at a higher level in the
Premier League: a 59.7% passing accuracy against Man City in May 2023; 189
completed passes and a 63.6% pass accuracy against Newcastle on New Year’s Eve
2022. In the latter match, Illan Meslier completed four out of 38 passes, a
completion rate of just under 11% — last season, Meslier’s accuracy dropped
below 50% in a game just once, against Blackburn in December.
Opta has analysed every Leeds league game since 2013/14.
Their top eight games for completed passes were all in 2023/24 and the top
thirteen Leeds games for pass accuracy were also all from last season (outside
of 2023/24, Leeds’ best game for passing accuracy was against Derby in July
2020, 87.8%, a game in which most of the team were hungover from celebrating
promotion).
Leeds also had two of the league’s most accurate passers in
the team — of players to attempt 1,000 passes, Glen Kamara ranked fourth
(92.7%) and Ilia Gruev ranked fifth (92.6%) for accuracy of their passing.
Kamara has departed this summer for Rennes but Joe Rothwell, who has arrived on
loan from Bournemouth, completed 92% of his passes in the Championship last
season. At least in that department, the numbers match up.
Looking ahead to 2024/25
Mateo Joseph’s form in pre-season should earn him the spot
as Leeds’ main striker for 2024/25, despite having never previously started a
league game for the club. His two-goal performance against Chelsea in the FA
Cup in February showed a glimpse of what he might offer as a more regular
feature in the starting XI, as did his goal away at Watford less than a minute
after his introduction from the bench.
If not Joseph then Patrick Bamford, who scored nine goals in
twenty appearances from New Year’s Day onwards last season, is still an option
— in his sixteen starts last season, Leeds lost just once. Joel Piroe’s
fourteen goals were the most by a Leeds player in their debut season since
Luciano Becchio scored nineteen in 2008/09, and while there are arguments about
where he best fits into the formation and style, his Championship pedigree
cannot be doubted — he’s the leading scorer in the competition since the
2021/22 season, with 55 goals.
New signing Jayden Bogle has inherited Luke Ayling’s number
two shirt. In his one full (40+ appearances) Championship season to date in
2018/19 for Derby, Bogle was the most creative full-back in the division in
open play, creating a league-high 53 chances and assisting nine goals. He will
offer a different option to Archie Gray, who spent the vast majority of last
season at right-back but ultimately was playing out of position (by way of
comparison, Gray created seventeen chances last season and assisted two goals).
There are the returning players who will have a point to
prove — Max Wöber spent last season on loan in the Bundesliga and comes into
this season fresh from playing three games at EURO 2024 for Austria (and
scoring one own-goal). Brenden Aaronson also spent 2023/24 in the Bundesliga,
at Union Berlin, enduring a tough start, but in April and May only eight
players created more chances in open play than he did and only one player
completed more dribbles.
In our relegation from the Premier League, only Jack
Harrison created more chances for Leeds than Aaronson — if he can produce
similar numbers and play regularly in the Championship, I would expect him to
be among the league’s most creative players, especially after seeing his
impressive assist for Ilia Gruev in pre-season against Hannover.