Leeds United are building a negative narrative, they need a transfer window sugar rush to turn it — Yorkshire Post 21/8/24
By Stuart Rayner
Whether you are Manchester City or Forest Green Rovers, the
point of a new season is to come back stronger. With nine days until the
transfer window closes, Leeds United have not yet been able to say that.
Slow starts happen – they happened to Leeds this time last
year – and 46 games of Championship football means they can easily be made up.
One point from two games has not scrubbed Rotherham United
out of the League One promotion race any more than back-to-back victories
sandwiching a League Cup win is cause for Huddersfield Town to reserve an open
top bus for May.
Everyone is finding their feet and those who get carried
away – as some Sheffield United, Wednesday or Middlesbrough fans might have
been tempted to in the first week – soon get dragged down to earth.
But unpalatable though it might be, sometimes some teams
need a sugar rush to get things up and running, and the way Leeds' summer has
panned out, they were one of them. They do not just need to spend the West Ham
United and Brighton and Hove Albion money burning holes in their back pocket on
good signings but ideally at least one "Wow!" signing.
That will be far from easy now the rest of football know
Leeds are a) loaded and b) desperate, but the supporters who are so important
to their success need a lift even more than the team right now.
The financial chasm between Championship and Premier League
– bridged only slightly by a television deal which has set fixtures even more
all over the place – makes the play-off final every bit the cliff edge it is
hyped up as and its steepness makes the patience needed to do the job properly
harder to find.
The Hawthorns away end was mutinous on Saturday as Leeds got
their best result of the season so far (a low bar at a very early stage),
supporters booing the team passing towards their own goal during a
like-paint-drying 0-0 draw at West Bromwich Albion.
Manager Daniel Farke's team are far from boring but despite
their goalscoring record, nor are they great entertainers – not judged by the
bar so recently set by Marcelo Bielsa. When wins are flooding in, as when Leeds
powered towards a seemingly inevitable promotion at the start of 2024, style
questions can be parked. But only then.
The next time Leeds play at Elland Road, the transfer window
will be shut. Reasons to believe are needed to ward off more vocal dissent.
If anyone there is tempted to bleat about expectations, they
would be well advised to remember it was they who set them this summer.
Chairman Paraag Marathe promised via The Yorkshire Post and
other media outlets in May Leeds would not be stuck in the blocks for a second
summer running. Wrong.
Given their history, Red Bull’s sponsorship was always
likely to be controversial but there is practically no one most football
supporters will not accept their club taking money from if it improves the
team. Not yet.
Losing Archie Gray was a steel toe cap in the proverbials,
but at least Leeds could protect the rest of their crown jewels. Or they could
were it not for the pesky release clauses in Crysencio Summerville and
Georginio Rutter's contracts West Ham and Brighton triggered. Rutter’s £40m
sale went through under cover of darkness on Monday.
Still, as Marathe pointed out as the hangover of
Championship play-off final defeat was still raging, Farke would have a first
proper, planned pre-season to implement new ideas, double down on strengths and
brush up on weaknesses.
Six goals conceded in the first two home games did not
exactly point to that, and although the bleeding was stemmed in the Black
Country, it was with the sort of plodding football that tested fans' patience
when things went badly late last season.
Within seconds of making himself a hero against Portsmouth
on the opening day, prodigal loanee Brenden Aaronson missed a 24-carat chance.
Instead of scoring the winner, he wrote another sob story.
Mateo Joseph looks to have kicked on this summer, but from a
starting point outside the starting XI, Tottenham Hotspur will get the benefit
of Gray's development now.
If this is to be even a passable transfer window, the bulk
of players signed to strengthen the XI will have missed pre-season altogether.
With 132 points left to play for, panic is pointless.
Sheffield Wednesday took a big kick themselves at the weekend where it hurts
the most – on the scoreboard. Hull City, visitors the day after the transfer
deadline, have had an even more shambolic window. Spoiler alert: Leeds were
never going to win the League Cup.
But negative narratives are developing that need to be
nipped in the bud: that Farke is too conservative to regularly get around teams
parking the bus, that his squad is going backwards, that the owners lack
ambition, skill or both.
It does not matter how true they are, only that they have a
momentum which will snowball until Leeds can reverse it.