Leeds, a club not shy of mentioning its size and history, is finding its “sleeping giant” tag little more than a magnet for boardroom chancers. The much-desired Premier League return feels as far away as ever as a result.
What remains of Leeds United’s regular support at Elland Road still, on fairly regular occasions, collectively whirl their scarves above their heads and chant defiantly about being the "champions of Europe”.
They never were, of course, but chant it nonetheless in relation to a 1975 European Cup final against Bayern Munich which they lost 2-0, due in large part to some highly suspect refereeing decisions. A subsequent attempt to conquer the continent, early in the new millennium under the maverick/dangerously incompetent leadership of Peter Ridsdale, ruined the club and left the hollow shell we see before us today.
Those Leeds fans who remain, scarves in hand and defiance in mind, steadfastly believe and continue to forcibly reiterate that their club is a "sleeping giant”. There’s plenty of maths and stats to back this up, after all Howard Wilkinson remains the last English-born manager to win the league championship in this country and only Blackburn, Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea and Arsenal have done it since that triumph in 1992.
Elland Road holds 37,900 people at capacity, bigger than all but Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough in this league and larger than 11 of the 20 Premier League stadiums this season. Their average attendance is the third biggest in this year’s Championship (Brighton and Derby are pulling more with their highflying teams) and the television audience they draw is more than 400,000 on average, easily the highest in the second tier. In fact, the last time a live Sky Championship game got anywhere near the 400,000 viewer mark without involving Leeds was QPR’s 3-3 draw with Burnley two seasons ago.
What is rarely addressed is whether this "big club” tag is a help or a hindrance, a reason to raise expectations or a good indication that things aren’t going to go well. After all, below the Premier League’s mainstay seven or eight clubs it has been outfits that are, in theory, far, far smaller than Leeds United, with fewer seats in their ground and less floating support, that have made a decent fist of things in the top flight — Stoke, Southampton, Swansea, Palace, Leicester, West Brom… Leeds have been in League One more recently than they’ve been in the Premier League, and they currently look far more likely to return there than move up a division. Other clubs with similar delusions — Forest prime example — have also found themselves dropping into the second tier, still muttering about what Brian Clough or Don Revie might have made of it all.
Elland Road may once have been a feared fortress, and an asset to Leeds on and off the field, but it’s not any more. Three sides of the ground are hopelessly outdated; the facilities for both the everyday paying spectator, and the all-important corporate guests, vastly inferior to what even the likes of Middlesbrough and Wigan can offer — both of whom have enjoyed prolonged stays in the top flight since Leeds were there. The current average attendance of around 23,000 would be the fourth lowest in the Premier League, below even Palace, Stoke, Norwich and West Brom. And while a promotion would see that number rise exponentially, moving up a league isn’t really on the agenda for a team that has won just one home game since the first Saturday in March.
Elland Road is actually becoming a millstone for Leeds, rather than an asset. Since beating Ipswich at home (eight months and three managers ago) Leeds have won only once while losing eight and drawing five. Rotherham - Rotherham - have been to Elland Road twice and taken four points without conceding a goal. Blackburn have won twice in two visits, scoring five and not conceding. So bored of continued failure, so sick of extortionate ticket prices, so sure of their apparent rightful place in the league ladder, the Leeds fans have either stopped going or started losing their temper, leaving a young team choosing between a wall of empty seats or a bank of angry people slagging them off at home matches.
But the biggest problem the "sleeping giant” tag comes with isn’t the raised expectations, the impatient fans, the pressure to perform, the opposition seeing you as a scalp or any of this piffle. It is, as Sheffield Wednesday have found in similar circumstances just down the M1, a tag that attracts chancers. Chancers, cancers, con artists and out and out scum. The Premier League television money is colossal already, and about to move onto the obscene side of that. Foreign businessmen want a piece of that — for publicity, for prestige, for profit. It’s seen even smaller clubs like our good selves and Charlton bought by foreigners and tossed around like a play thing. At Leeds, and Sheff Wed, you have not only the incentive of Premier League TV money, but also the knowledge that the place would go fucking nuts if it ever got back to the big time.
So desperate are the Leeds fans for that return, so sure are they that it is some sort of right for a club of their size to be mixing it at the top, that all manner of weird and wonderful moron has been able to come through the door and be hailed as the next big thing, simply by pandering to the stereotype and promising to chuck a load of money at resorting the club to its "rightful place”. And by not being Ken Bates.
That has led Leeds through Bates, and administration, and League One, and weird consortiums from Dubai, and numerous false dawns and promises to the current situation where Massimo Cellino owns the place. Even the Football League’s pathetically paper thin, and rarely enforced, Fit and Proper Person test has disqualified the Italian from leading Leeds twice. His record at Cagliari suggested he would be a farcical owner of the club, firing managers at a rate of two a season while winning nothing, and he’s lived up to that to the absolute letter.
He has taken part in long, rambling, conspiratorial press conferences which break off for three minutes at a time so he can go outside to smoke. He has appointed failed non-league coaches, inexperienced academy heads, unknown foreigners and failed Championship managers to be in charge of the team and fired them all after ridiculously short periods of time. The team , despite an enviable conveyer belt of excellent youngsters like Sam Byram and Lewis Cook out of an academy that Neil Redfearn oversaw before he was made manager of the first team and then sacked, is playing poorly and dropping quickly. The decision to appoint Steve Evans, sacked by bottom of the table Rotherham, previously convicted of fraud for fiddling the finances at Boston United, the day before Cellino was suspended by the league for a second time was absolutely mind boggling.
And yet Cellino, when he first arrived, was heralded as the new messiah. This continued "sleeping giant” mentality means everybody who comes along with a bit of money and panders to the fallacy is welcomed with open arms rather than scrutinised and critiqued.
Cellino has, more recently, suggested he may sell the club lock stock to a supporters’ group which has raised sufficient funds. It’s the best possible outcome, because if Leeds are that massive and the potential is that great, then simply running the club properly with the vast income that comes from all the support base and stadium advantages they perceive they have over everybody else outside the Premier League will see them surface at last.
In the meantime, this Saturday is a meeting of two of this country’s most famous old football clubs who have both become, and remain, a farce under foreign ownership.
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