‘We’re junkies for chaos’: The siege mentality embedded in Leeds United’s DNA — i 20/8/24

Daniel Storey visits Elland Road to discover that Red Bull investment prompts as many questions as answers for the club's super-loyal fans

By Daniel Storey

The walk to Elland Road, from at least two directions, is one of the finest in English football. Sitting as it does in a valley, your best bet is to start at the top of the hill in Beeston, amongst its tightly-knit red-brick terraced houses, and thus approach from the south.

This allows for a cheat, the stadium revealing itself twice rather than once. As you walk down Sunnyside Avenue, a fitting name on this August evening, the floodlights peep over and between buildings as terraced homes become semi-detached dwellings. Turn right onto Wesley Street and the East Stand, renamed in honour of Jack Charlton, catches you off guard by its looming proximity.

Along Wesley Street, feeder pillars are painted in club colours – “Stand up and sing for Leeds United” – or pay homage to other club legends. In two back gardens, Leeds flags are displayed on over-long poles to ensure that support is seen. There is very little better in this country than a football stadium that has been nestled snugly into tumultuous suburbia.

On this evening, Leeds are hosting Middlesbrough in the first round of the Carabao Cup. Every club, every manager, every player, tells you in pre-season that starting the season quickly is desperately important, but it resonates here more than most places. Fine margins and an unprecedented automatic promotion race cost Leeds a return to the Premier League, but it was their sluggish form in August and September that made life unnecessarily difficult.

Only one manager in the last decade has kept his job at Elland Road for longer than Daniel Farke.

He must offer immediate evidence of learned lessons if he is to keep it into 2025. The season restarted where it ended, chaotic nonsense and a 3-3 home draw against promoted Portsmouth. The headline on the excellent Leeds blog The Square Ball said it best: Pass The Defibrillator.

Leeds is the biggest one-club city in the UK. As with Newcastle United, its only close rival, you feel that as you walk around the city, even on a midweek afternoon. Elland Road holds 38,000 souls and Leeds have 27,000 season ticket-holders. This cup tie, in an oft-maligned competition, is a sellout.

Such is the demand that one supporter recently spoke of being in a meeting at work when he learned by email that his eight-year wait to be part of that throng had finally ended. “I had finally secured a season ticket for a lifetime of pain, misery, anxiety and ecstasy,” he wrote. They are queuing up for this stuff and who would dare to blame them.

As with Newcastle, that unique one-club pride seeps in via emotional osmosis most on a matchday. It is clearly not true, but the atmosphere itself creates the sense that everybody has travelled here together: from the same place, to the same place. It manifests not in noise, but in an invisible, intangible togetherness.

That togetherness has been hewn over time and trouble; far too much of both. Where historic success meets a large fanbase meets an incapability to escape your own ill fate, something always rumbles.

“People refer to our historic success and the bad times as separate things, but they feel related, because among the first things young Leeds fans learn about our historic success is what a bad time it was,” says Daniel Chapman, owner of Leeds United website Leedsista.com.

“We see ourselves as robbed of the European Cup by Bayern Munich in Paris. Cheated out of the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1973. Denied a double by the Football League making us play straight after the FA Cup final in 1972. A league title stolen by Ray Tinkler’s offside call in 1971. That’s not even half of it.

“At its best all this creates an insurgent siege mentality that defines Leeds in rebellion against a world that hates Leeds. At its worst, though, it becomes self-fulfilling and self-destructive, as we oscillate between wanting to be successful and wanting to retain an identity made from not being as successful as we should have been. I don’t know what a contented Leeds fan would be like, because contentment does not feel very Leeds.”

In the Noughties, this was propelled to the forefront of the national football consciousness. Leeds suffered a collapse so spectacular and pronounced that it sparked one of the great football Wikipedia pages – “Doing A Leeds”. You know the actors by now: Peter Ridsdale, Terry Venables, Roque Junior, Peter Reid, that young lad crying on the telly, his distraught face the poster child of wanton waste and overreaching.

Leeds were too big and too well supported for that decline to last forever. They were never going to run out of outsiders who would try and, even less likely, they were never going to run out of insiders who would care.

But somewhere along the line their financial apocalypse became an intrinsic part of their modern identity. Rather than simple fuel for the recovery, Leeds became unwittingly committed to making life difficult for themselves. No football club in the country has more unrealised potential.

Unrealised potential, when played out on repeat, is no salve. Leeds supporter Alex says it simply and best to me: “Leeds are an exhausting club to follow because we never get any downtime from our own narrative.”

Flying too close to the sun and so falling back to earth with a heavy bump is forgivable. The willful blindness of ambition is a common affliction. Instead, it is the myriad missed opportunities and missteps of the time since their collapse that is most damning. 20 years ago this month, Leeds were beginning their first season outside the top flight since 1990. That they are still there is the cause of the greatest lament.

Examples are set by those at the top and, when their actions are divisive, everything else becomes window dressing. Leeds seemed to be governed either by people who had ideas but insufficient wealth or viable wealth but insufficient plans or expertise. From Ken Bates and the plunge to the third tier, to the disastrous Bahraini GFH Capital ownership, to the circus chaos of Massimo Cellino to the misguided entrepreneurship of Andrea Radrizzani. Leeds were caught in their own nets.

Then, perhaps even now, Leeds seemed to exist season to season at best and month to month at worst. Even the Premier League years that Radrizzani brought ended in a storm of big spending on unsuccessful players and a sense that nobody in charge would ever succeed in channelling the self-destructive, innate Leeds-ness of it all. Except one.

Marcelo Bielsa is still present at Leeds. Partly that is in the physical representations, the flags sold outside the ground with him sitting on his bucket and the occasional t-shirt with his face on or replica shirt with his name on the back. But it’s also in the emotional connection that nobody else has yet replaced.

It wasn’t just the style of football and its success – although both are clearly relevant – but how Leeds supporters missed the closest thing to glory days due to a global pandemic. They were forced out of Elland Road before the Championship title and promotion were confirmed. By the time they returned in full, Leeds were fighting against relegation.

“On the face of it, winning the Championship by ten points and finishing ninth in our first season back sounds idyllic,” says Rob Conlon, writer for The Square Ball.

“But to get there we went through Spygate, a ludicrous play-off semi-final defeat and a global pandemic, which also meant none of us could actually be in the season to experience the most serene and fun part of it. All of that was mixed in with the famously wild football of Bielsa and the unique values he represents.

“But then the club handled their succession plan terribly, and now a lot of fans are understandably yearning for what we previously had. I feel sorry for Daniel Farke in that respect. Last season we won more games and scored more goals than in any other campaign since 2009-10, including the Bielsa years, yet a lot of supporters think Farke’s football is boring and defensive. That probably says a lot about the psyche of Leeds fans. We’re junkies for chaos.”

It’s an attractive theory. The one person they connected with most became a purely televisual experience when they wanted to laud him face to face most. They say that nobody really dies until the last person who remembers them fondly also passes and the same is true of managerial spells.

Bielsa created something almost impossible to replicate: he showed Leeds what they could be and then they couldn’t quite touch it. That was glorious and it was dangerous and it still lives on.

Last year, the regime changed again when the 49ers Enterprises Global Football Group bought out Radrizzani’s remaining stake for around £170m. They inherited a Championship club that had employed Bielsa, Jesse Marsch, Javi Gracia and Sam Allardyce as their previous four managers. It is hard to think of a more disparate group of coaches.

They were welcomed into Leeds United as an alternative to chaos. Supporters, though most were adamant that the 49ers could have done more to arrest the post-Bielsa decline, cut them slack. Radrizzani and Victor Orta – his director of football – took the majority of the flak, largely for perceived transfer wastage. Leeds still fell over themselves at Wembley in the play-off final in May, but they also took 90 points in a league season.

This summer, when calm was the best recipe, another twist and another change. The announcement of Red Bull investment in Leeds, currently only as 10 per cent minority shareholders, represents a new era if only because it creates significant questions about the future of the club.

Red Bull GmbH are not an energy drinks manufacturer, although the only noticeable change on matchday at Elland Road is a full fridge of the stuff in the press room. They are effectively a company that advertises the energy drinks through their investment and sponsorship in sporting pursuits and enterprises from cycling to adventure sports.

Their investment in football has stretched to full or part ownership of five other clubs: RB Leipzig, Red Bull Salzburg, New York Red Bulls, RB Brazil, RB Bragantino. Their initial modus operandi was to rebrand everything: change the kits, redesign the logo, rename the stadium, prefix the club name, splash the logo on everything. It was, and remains, unpopular for the whitewashing of existing club cultures.

Leeds and Red Bull insist that this is not the same strategy on repeat. For a start, their stake is significantly smaller than elsewhere.

Leeds chairman Paraag Marathe, also president of 49ers Enterprises, stressed that the stadium name, badge and club name are not available to be changed by any owner.

The question for supporters is whether 10 per cent is a starting stake or the entirety of the ambition. This is something to be mistrusted by default.

“I thought: oh no, not us,” Chapman says. “And my feeling was supported by the club’s statement announcing the sponsorship ending with assurances that it wouldn’t mean changing the club’s name or logo. If the club has to say that, we need to think about why Red Bull’s track record means they have to say that, and whether these are the people we should be inviting into Elland Road.”

Fellow supporter Ian Burdin agrees: “There’s a nervousness around their involvement and specifically their motivations, given that we were told that the 49ers were shrewd businessmen and brokers of big deals. So how many more institutions that are driven by profiteering motives rather than sporting ones do we need?”

“The thing I find most depressing about it all is that Red Bull were known to be targeting Leeds as their avenue into English football for over a decade, and the only reason we avoided it was through the club’s own incompetence during the Ken Bates, GFH Capital, and Massimo Cellino eras of ownership,” Conlon says.

“As those owners all proved, you had to be an idiot to sink money into Leeds at that time. But that’s what makes it all the more bleak that it’s happened this summer — we’ve survived all that turmoil of the last 20 years, yet from what the 49ers Enterprises have been crowing is a position of strength, now is the time that they’ve acquiesced to a soft launch of Red Bull Leeds.”

At Elland Road this season, you will see far more of the new away kit than the home, an oddity in usual circumstances. That away shirt has an edited, blue version of the Red Bull logo. The home shirt has the typical logo, including red as the predominant colour.

They don’t much like red in Leeds, thanks to Manchester United, Liverpool and Lancashire.

Most people get it. When McDonald’s originally opened a branch next to Elland Road in 2002, the red of the branding was deliberately omitted. When 32 Red became the club’s shirt sponsor in 2016, they changed the logo to blue.

Some supporters will care and others won’t, but it was an easy PR win to allay concerns over mission creep and Red Bull chose otherwise. Around here, they have heard owners say one thing and do another for too long. That is not the fault of Red Bull, but it creates a greater responsibility.

More than anything else, this is purely logical. Having Leeds fans on your side is a good thing. Nobody here wants to be Red Bull.

But everybody here wants to be the best Leeds they can be. Hold your nose a touch and there is some reason to believe that this can work. While 49ers Enterprises is an investment vehicle and as such may look to make money, Red Bull are known for their expansionism.

Oliver Mintzlaff, CEO of corporate projects and investments, said as much: “The ambition to bring Leeds United back to the Premier League and establish themselves in the best football league in the world fits very well with Red Bull”.

“There are understandable concerns with the deal,” says Alex, who offers a slightly different perspective that it is only right we hear.

“But the sponsorship honestly doesn’t bother me too much. If it was £100, you can be picky, but not for the multimillions that are on offer. We have to be realistic about that.”

Ultimately, we know how the wind can blow. If Leeds progress on the pitch and consolidate in the Premier League, and if Red Bull and 49ers Enterprises stay true to their original promise of the new investor being an enabling partner, there may be a cool alliance.

The supporters are the identity of this club, loyal and voluminous and instructive as to the general mood. If they are happy, the club is happy.

Leeds didn’t lose at home in any competition last season until 13 April, a dominant force propelled by a swirling crowd. Repeat that feat and they will surely be promoted. Then acceleration is possible. Inglorious history can be an afterthought.

And… back to the sobering draught of the present. Leeds have already lost at home this season. They collapse against Middlesbrough, uninspiring in the first half and desperate in the second, conceding three times.

Farke’s football, at the start of this season, seems to involve slow passing that bars attackers from finding space, forces players to over-commit as a result and are then left exposed to the counter attack.

Boos followed the second goal and, after the third, a strong section of the crowd chanted “What the f**k is going on?” Asking for a friend: can you backdate a one-line chant to be the soundtrack of two decades? Supporters are reaching the point of mutiny already.

Off the pitch, similar uncertainty reigns, exacerbated by prickly financial limitations. Parachute payments have been reduced by 18 per cent this season. Earlier this year, the club’s accounts revealed that transfer payments of around £189m were owed to other clubs (Leeds were only owed £2m) – around £73m of that is reported to have been paid by the end of June. Rough translation: players were available for sale.

Even so, the regularity of the departures have offered swift punches to the gut of supporters. In isolation, Luis Sinisterra was always going, Glen Kamara could be replaced, Archie Gray’s fee was significant, Crysencio Summerville always seemed likely to want a move and Georginio Rutter had a release clause that has been met.

But Leeds – and thus their fans – have lost their best young player, their record signing and their Player of the Year and top goalscorer. The other 10 departures may have been squad filler, but they still leave holes. Is that how anyone foresaw this summer? Can you start quickly if you sell and don’t replace?

“Most are realistic to know that the previous shambolic trolley-dash transfer strategy has left the current leadership with little leeway,” Burdin says.

“But can we not give the people of Leeds something to cling to other than PSR latitude? Imagining Archie and Harry Gray under El Loco’s tutelage is sadly excessively misty-eyed, but what are we dreaming for now?”

Which leaves Leeds supporters, well, where it feels like they have been for the vast majority of my lifetime: not knowing whether to be hopeful or fearful, trusting or cynical, always looking for something to get behind but not quite understanding what that something actually is.

“There is no longer patience among the fanbase,” Conlon says.

“In the wake of the play-off final defeat, Marathe repeatedly insisted we’re now in a position of strength, ready to learn from the lessons of a standing start to last season, and are in the driving seat regarding player sales. None of those things have proven to be true.”

There’s something else to consider here too, in the light of new investors arriving into the mix.

The quicker patience evaporates with 49ers Enterprises, the more readily some supporters accept greater influence and control from another party: that is most likely to be Red Bull. Their clubs usually change overnight. What if Leeds are the exception, indelible change by a thousand brushstrokes?

The risks are obvious and laced with irony: the more you acquiesce to Red Bull offering their own undoubted expertise, the greater the risk of losing the elements that make Leeds United, smoothing the edges of something proudly spiky. What if success can only be achieved by losing an innate sense of what makes Leeds, Leeds? Is that even success at all?

And that’s all I’m thinking about as I file away from a shambolic home defeat, up along Wesley Street and up, more steeply, Sunnyside Avenue, where I do what everybody should and turn back to take a photograph of Elland Road in moonlight and floodlight.

It is, to an outsider like me, unthinkable that Leeds won’t eventually get it right – I’ve never seriously considered it as a possibility. Now there is an alternative spin that nobody has had to consider before: maybe they will get it right, but at what cost?