Ao, Let’s Go: Tanaka the Controller in Leeds United’s Quest for the Premier League — The Analyst.com

Jamie Kemp / Author, Ana Gonzalez / Design, Jonathan Manuel / Data Viz

Ao Tanaka might not be the name you see on the scoresheet or assist list week by week, but he’s the orchestrator of the choir. We analyse why he’s become the key component of Leeds United’s promotion charge.

Leeds United won 27 league matches last season; the most ever by a Championship side who didn’t go on to be promoted. And of the 4,878 minutes of league football they played – most of which were at the level of a true top-two calibre team – it would take only the last 107 of those to render it all worthless.

Of all the things that could be said, it was certainly a good year for the phrase “only Leeds”.

Indeed, the post-mortem of their non-promotion didn’t appear to be all that complicated. After crushing Norwich in the play-off semi-finals, Leeds came out on the wrong side of a 1-0 at Wembley; a game racked by the typical tension where neither they nor Southampton really played their best football. By the end, fleeting moments and small details locked within a single game had decided which of the two 90-plus point juggernauts would be considered good enough to move on.

Although it was widely acknowledged that Daniel Farke’s side had been hard done by with how the division worked out, it didn’t ultimately simplify the fan debate. For Leeds fans, it was still all too enticing to hash out what their team could have done differently. Recounting the nearly moments, all the small details that had big repercussions, and just what it was that they had been missing would comfortably fill the void in the months leading up to 2024-25.

Had you asked any supporter what it was that Leeds were missing last season, the list would have been predictably varied. Not many would have told you another central midfielder, though. Or at least, they certainly wouldn’t have told you another central midfielder who doesn’t score much, doesn’t arrive in the box much, and doesn’t create many chances – as had been the case with the then-starters Ilia Gruev and Glen Kamara.

And yet, as the business end of 2024-25 steams into view, Leeds currently sit in pole position to achieve what they couldn’t last year, where their best player might well just be a midfielder who’s directly contributed only 6% of the team’s goal tally.

The two big events of Leeds’ summer were the sales of Crysencio Summerville and Georginio Rutter to the Premier League – moves which earned the club north of £75 million in transfer fees, but stripped away 51 goals and assists from last season’s Championship campaign.

Instead of re-investing the money in similar game-winning talent, Leeds sacrificed some quality for quantity, opting to spread their attacking options wider and with more variety of attributes. The three positions behind the number nine are now made up of some combination of Dan James, Manor Solomon, Brenden Aaronson, Wilfried Gnonto and Largie Ramazani – none of whom are likely to invite mega bids from Premier League clubs this summer, but who have effectively covered the goal deficit and made Leeds less reliant on specific individuals.

Though Farke’s side may be less talented at the top end of the pitch now, at least in player-for-player terms, the difference this time around is that the machine itself has become more efficient than ever. And for that, they owe much to the midfielder that nobody knew they needed: Ao Tanaka.

As alluded to before, the Japanese isn’t obviously hauling Leeds out of the Championship on his own. He’s scored two goals and made two assists in 29 appearances so far. And behind that, he’s had 28 shots, 20 touches in the opposition box and created 22 chances – all fewer than one per game on average, if you’re doing the math.

What Tanaka’s presence has done, however, is help nudge an already-dominant Championship team further down that scale of dominance, creating the framework for games that look increasingly similar.

To be clear, Leeds aren’t just tearing through opponents and scoring their way into prime position. Their +47 goal difference tells you they’re pretty good at doing it, and they have flexed their muscles in some big victories since the turn of the year. But that’s not precisely what they’re about.

Farke’s Leeds remain a highly process-oriented team; one that plays in a way that attempts to stack the odds of promotion in their favour by reducing unpredictability. Even after their 4-0 win at Watford last time out, you could still hear it in the German’s voice that their lower-than-usual share of possession (39%) had bothered him. He knows his attack won’t always be as decisive as it has been of late.

What Tanaka represents for them is precisely what his manager wants: effective control of the game through possession, building attacks with precision, and being well-placed to recover the ball and restore that initial control before the game can fall into a different, more fragmented form.

Since his arrival in the team, Leeds have taken that to an extreme level. They play higher up the pitch, sustain attacks for longer, and limit the time they have to defend their own goal even more than they did last season.

Tanaka is averaging 90 touches per 90 in the Championship, squaring him as one of the most active ball-players in the division. Yet for all of the volume, he’s one of the most efficient players around in how little he turns over possession. Just 10% of his touches as a Leeds player have seen him lose possession, which is the second-lowest turnover rate for a midfielder with 900+ minutes played this term, after Middlesbrough’s Aidan Morris (though Tanaka has dealt with a lot more touches overall).

Playing from the base of Leeds’s midfield, Tanaka measures risk and reward perfectly to Farke’s taste. So much so that despite being an ultra-secure player in possession, few would accuse him of being overly safe with his use of the ball. Even compared to Joe Rothwell, a midfielder signed specifically to help provide spurts of more aggressive forward passing, the data still says that Tanaka has had a bigger positive impact in influencing sequences of play that end in shots.

The feeling with the Japanese international is that he simply has a keener sense for when to be ambitious and when not to be. Some days it falls to him to take charge of the build-up and be more of a covering presence in midfield; others he’ll happily squeeze up to the final third and look for his own defence-splitting passes (or put one in the top corner himself, as he did against Hull).

For Tanaka, it’s not about playing safe or playing expansively. It’s about making the decisions that keep Leeds in control of where the game is heading.

That’s important when you’re playing at the base of a team who are as aggressive in their attacking positioning as Leeds are. Though they’re a 4-2-3-1 on paper, you can often separate them by four non-attackers and six attackers in possession, with only Tanaka, his midfield partner, and the two centre backs not actively taking up advanced positions.

For Leeds, it has become a two-part equation. In flooding the opponent’s back line across the pitch and fixing defenders in place, they open up room for Tanaka and co to manage the ball in deeper areas. From there, the precision of play and limited turnovers mean that Leeds can dominate territory, pin opponents deep in their own half, and bank on their sustained attacks to find breakthroughs.

Precisely how to handle that has been a dilemma for teams all season. Even Leeds’ promotion rivals like Burnley and Sheffield United have felt it necessary to adapt to them, as explained by Chris Wilder after defeat at Elland Road earlier in the season.

“They put six at the top of the pitch. That’s their game. So we looked and we’ve done a heavy study of them tactically… what other teams have done that’s got them success. Southampton had success last year at the end of the season in the play-off final by changing around, and we felt that could work. They have six at the top line, so basically stretch your back four. And we felt they would stretch our back four too much, so we had to put one in there.”

Of course, it’s not merely a case of Leeds deciding they’re going to cause problems by placing a host of attackers up against the opponent’s defensive line. It’d be equally useless if they were shedding counter-attacks and consistently losing the ball with half of their team out of the picture. The key variable is that they’re able to position themselves so aggressively and sustain it, owing to the security and quality holding things up further back.

Leeds and Tanaka thus spend a lot of time in that scenario. They don’t average 100% possession, though, which means what happens when they lose the ball is crucial to re-establishing the status quo. And that’s the other side of what the Tanaka has helped to reinforce.

While he’s near-unflappable in possession, the 26-year-old has surprised many with his work without the ball. In watching him float around the pitch, directing passes and flowing through possession duties with such ease, Tanaka cuts the figure of someone who would be tagged as a ball-playing specialist – owing to quality on the ball at the deficit of defensive blind spots. And yet, the reality has been precisely the opposite.

Tanaka has averaged 4.3 tackles and interceptions per 90 in the league this season; the most by a Leeds midfielder in a Championship campaign since Kalvin Phillips in 2018-19. For those who don’t recall, that was the first season of the relentless Marcelo Bielsa era, and the first for Phillips after being re-positioned as a destructive defensive midfielder.

Casting the net a little wider, it’s clear that Tanaka is an unusual blend of cool on the ball and pugnacious without it. Looking across the top two tiers of Europe’s five major footballing nations, there are only two midfielders averaging 90+ touches and 4+ tackles/interceptions per 90 this season. One is Tanaka and the other is Paris Saint-Germain’s João Neves.

Though admittedly an imperfect comparison, the profiles of both are descriptive. Not many combine such tenacious ball-winning and high usage of the ball, which makes them rare players in having a high defensive activity on teams who spend most of their games dominating possession. They rebel against the reality that ball hogs don’t usually rack up defensive interventions, and fuel it through a mix of intelligent reading of the game and snappiness when engaging.

At the same time, Tanaka has also been able to turn his defensive contributions into quickfire scoring opportunities for Leeds. No central midfielder has initiated more goal-ending sequences in the Championship this season than him (5), while his side have produced 29 shots from moves Tanaka has begun through a defensive action.

It’s precisely that combination of Tanaka’s attributes – retaining the ball with purpose and recovering it with gusto – that is earning Leeds even more territorial dominance than they had last term.

The effect has often been a deflating one for Leeds’ opponents – especially when visiting Elland Road, where reaching the home side’s goal has looked like an odyssey for more than just a couple of teams. Their league record there when Tanaka starts reads: played 12, won 11, drawn 1, scored 34, conceded 3.

It says as much that while promotion rivals Burnley are on pace for the best goals-conceded-per-game rate in a single season in English league history, Leeds still have a lower xG against than the Clarets, and limit their goalkeeper’s input more, having held teams to zero shots on target on seven occasions this term. Where Burnley resemble a boxer with an iron chin, Leeds are the boxer who barely needs to absorb a punch, always just out of reach.

Following a win over Derby County back in December, the away side’s manager Paul Warne received a bit of backlash for articulating that feeling in his post-game comments. Speaking to the BBC, Warne said:

“I don’t know – apart from being tidier on the ball – how we were going to be able to create a chance. That’s the honest truth. I know that sounds really negative, but it’s the truth.”

Though it might have irked some, Warne wasn’t the first – and won’t be the last – to have felt little more than resignation having passed through Elland Road this season. On their quest for the Premier League, Leeds are engineering their journey along the safest and most secure route, stripping away the possibility of roadblocks to an almost unprecedented degree.

Though there’s much work to be done between now and May, Farke’s side have become the masters of their own Championship destiny, and Ao Tanaka the exemplar of that very exercise.