Depending on better teams to be poorer than you is not a sustainable strategy
Marcelo and Davey are 2 very successful managers who’s approach tends to be misunderstood by the majority of pundits in each sport. Simple really
The only comparison i see is they’re both small, fat lads, with a small grasp on the english language
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It’s Davy, or it’s Fitzy
Fuck Leeds.
Are there many “we” Leeds fans around Ireland singing songs in fake Yorkshire accents ?
MOT mate, MO fuckin T.
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A decent striker would go a long way
Norwich tried to play ball and look at them now.
Ayling looks a very decent player to me.
Going up like true champions 
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Brentford shit their togs at the death after West Brom draw. They’ll never have a better opportunity
Pissed it altogether in the end
That Championship trophy pisses all over the dreadful premier league one
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How about this lad?
https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/sport/leeds-united/leeds-united-news-cavani-bielsa-18638522
And the “most valuable game in world football “ yet to come .
All the big names will want don the white jersey
And ibrahimovic.
the Peter Risdale /David o Leary Days are back baby!!
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FOOTBALL | RICK BROADBENT
How Marcelo Bielsa helped rehabilitate a football team – and a whole city
Manager has tapped into Leeds United’s identity and rewarded them with a Premier League return, writes Rick Broadbent
Bielsa celebrates winning the title and promotion with his players
GREIG COWIE/BPI/REX
Friday July 24 2020, 12.01am BST, The Times
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Marcelo Bielsa is sitting on Tony Clark’s sofa. Sometimes Clark puts him in the car. He cannot put him on a pedestal because the subject has sent word that he does not like admiration. Instead, Clark is raffling off his 75kg statue for a mental health charity. The old Yorkshire saying claims that where there’s muck there’s brass, but Dirty Leeds are changing. Now there’s just brass with a shiny finish.
Premier League lucre looms for a renascent club and city. The reckless spending of the Peter Ridsdale era, living the dream but renting the goldfish in the office, meant Leeds United fans were let down even before they went down in 2004. A few months after that relegation a Leeds band called the Kaiser Chiefs released a song called I Predict a Riot . It became a terrace shouter and is now played while the team stands in the tunnel before games. This January the band played a gig in Bournemouth. “When we went on stage Leeds were losing 2-0 to Millwall,” Simon Rix, the bass player, says. “Our guitar tech kept holding up fingers and I was looking at him going, ‘What?’” By the time they played their last song, with its refrain “Oh my God I can’t believe it”, Leeds had won.
When Josh Warrington, a former dental technician, won the European featherweight boxing title in 2014, he grabbed the microphone and chanted another club anthem: “Champions of Europe.” When he won the world title by beating Lee Selby at a febrile Elland Road in 2018 Lucas Radebe, the former Leeds captain, led him into the ring while the Kaiser Chiefs played live. Warrington still has the blood on his shorts from that night as testament to the price of success. “That year Leeds finished 13th,” he says. “I think my win brought a buzz and energy back to the city, but this is tenfold.”
On Friday Warrington was back at Elland Road, celebrating with the players as promotion was confirmed, on Liam Cooper’s shoulders, on top of the world again.
Simon Clifford brought South American values to Leeds long before Bielsa. He set up Brazilian Soccer Schools from an office above an Italian cafe in Albion Place in 1996. Harvey Nicholls opened its first store outside London that year. “Leeds was called the Knightsbridge of the North but it’s a working-class city, Clifford says. “When the team got good again in the late ’90s and early 2000s there was this great optimism. Buildings were going up everywhere. Labour had got in again.Then the team went out of the Premier League and it was as if the city lost confidence.”
Bielsa’s coaching ability makes him popular but his decision to walk among the people makes him loved. He lives modestly, drinks in Costa Coffee, gives sweets to children and never refuses a photograph, not through vanity but knowledge of what the images represent. “They are not asking for a photo of me,” he said. “This is something which unites people.” Side before selfie, as Billy Bremner would have said today.
The not-so-wide world of English football was slow to catch on. Old pros-turned-pundits did not get Spygate when Bielsa admitted that he had sent an intern to watch Derby County train. His exhaustive PowerPoint presentation explaining his methodology was mocked by some and taken as an elaborate V-sign by others but it seems most likely he was aghast that his ethics had been questioned.
“I think Leeds has always been undervalued as a city,” Rix says. It is changing. He says the city has suffered from too many people leaving. In 2018 Rix moved back from London to get better use of his season ticket. That same year Channel Four announced it was relocating to Leeds instead of Manchester or Birmingham.
The football club’s rehabilitation has taken far longer. “When I fought Selby people wanted me to lose just because I had the link with the club,” Warrington says. A documentary about his rise was called Fighting for a City and its motif fits the football team. “I felt a city was behind me the night I fought Selby,” he says. “I remember looking at the fans. Emotionally they wanted it as badly as I did. The recent players have grasped that too. They have got what it is to be Leeds. It’s a certain type of feeling, a certain type of emotion.”
Cosmopolitan but complicated, Leeds still has its troubled past. In the 1980s it was tainted by racism and violence. In a book I edited in 2018 called Tales from Elland Road , Brian Deane, the Leeds boy-turned-club-striker, told Daniel Chapman about growing up in the city. “There was a lot of racial tension in Leeds at the time and certainly Elland Road was a no-go area. We’d heard horror stories about the National Front, who had a big presence in the city, and it was frightening.”
The club has toiled against that image. The 2000 court case of Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate — the latter was convicted of affray — after an attack on an Asian student in the city centre opened old wounds. So too this year’s Kiko Casilla case, with the goalkeeper found guilty of racially abusing Charlton Athletic’s Jonathan Leko.
Clark and his Bielsa statue prove what the club’s promotion means to the city
Bielsa is changing perceptions. In 1990 Liverpool and Leeds won the top two divisions. The parallels do not stop with this year’s repeat. “Jürgen Klopp and Bielsa are not leading a team, they are leading a city,” Clifford says. “Bielsa thinks the players are playing for the fans. That’s what managers used to be like. But we’ve been in an era where fans have almost been dismissed.”
The year Leeds got relegated Clifford persuaded Socrates, the hirsute doctor-philosopher-Brazilian great, to put out his fag and make a 12-minute cameo for Garforth Town on a freezing day in Yorkshire’s mining belt. Yet Clifford says it was not the tricks and treats that made Yorkshire warm to South American ways. “It was the hard work,” he says. “In Brazil they were training six hours a day whereas here we trained four times a week. The Leeds people responded to that. The people here have no time for chancers.”
A year after falling out of the top flight, the Financial Times stated that Leeds “was desperate to be loved” but had a “weak profile” in Europe because of its team’s relegation. “After all, the only reason most people on the Continent have heard of Manchester is because of Manchester United.” Now Leeds is the UK’s largest legal and financial centre outside London, one of three places in Yorkshire to vote Remain only for Brexit to kill off its bid to be Europe’s capital of culture in 2023.
The Kaiser Chiefs have made much of their Leeds roots
MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS
Can you really remove the prejudice and scrub away decades of ingrained dirt? Warrington is friends with Gaetano Berardi, Leeds’ hard-nosed defender who often seems on the brink of a fight himself. “You might think that,” the champion says “but away from the pitch he is very cultured, really into his art and photography.” Berardi signed a short-term deal to help Leeds’s promotion run-in. On Sunday he tore his ACL and now faces nine months out. Rix is among those signing a petition to get him a new contract.
The interaction with fans has never been this good. Clark commissioned his statue because he wanted to give something back. He says football helped him after being caught up in the Bali bomb attacks in 2002. The club told him they could not accept the statue while Bielsa remained and he had asked for it to be given to the supporters instead. Hence the Mind raffle. “You can go to dark places,” Clark says. “It can be something traumatic like I went through or something simple. Football is a sanctuary. Bielsa has given us passion. He’s created a vision. It’s electric in Leeds now. It’s madness.” Oh My God indeed.
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No doubt it will eventually end in tears at the end when he eventually leaves but Bielsa sounds like just pure class.