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.

Although he was criticised for failing to take Leeds up last season, Daniel Farke has the second-best win ratio of any manager in Championship history with 53%, behind only Marcelo Bielsa on 57%. He is a Championship expert and one of only two men to win the title more than once, along with Mick McCarthy. It took Bielsa two attempts to take Leeds into the Premier League. Let’s hope it is second time lucky for Farke, too.

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