Goodbye to 2023 and, quite honestly, who in Leeds is mourning its passing? The past year for Leeds United, or more than half of it anyway, is what happens when a club gets so much wrong. No escape, no get-out-of-jail card, a team who worked so hard to get into the Premier League forced to start over in the Championship.
But in Leeds, the hope tends to kill you — and here they are with 2024 around the corner, wondering again what fate will smash in their collective face. A 1-0 defeat to West Bromwich Albion on Friday night was a turn for the worse in their league campaign, hot on the heels of a Boxing Day loss at Preston North End, the automatic promotion positions now looking less and less attainable.
As Leeds laboured through the second half at The Hawthorns, with attacking players stacked on the pitch, the art of creating and scoring deserted them; all the gear but no idea. Grady Diangana’s earlier strike was enough for West Brom, sending United into the New Year in fourth place.
What happens next won’t be dull because it never is at Elland Road and the wish for the New Year is that as a whole, it is happier than the creeping death some of the past 12 months brought to West Yorkshire.
This is The Athletic’s review of 2023…
The high point
Blimey. Fortunately for Leeds, life has been pretty good with Daniel Farke in the Championship, or until very recently anyway; better than it might have been given the hand he was dealt in July and the way the transfer window lurched from stress to stress. The temptation is to say that the critical moment of the year was former chairman Andrea Radrizzani agreeing to sell up and take his leave.
That had to happen. But from a purely footballing perspective, nothing has felt sweeter than Farke’s side going to Leicester City, turning it on and turning Leicester over on their own patch. These are small victories in the grand scheme — promotion is what will determine the meaning of results like that — but Leeds were starved of many nights like that in the first half of 2023.
Beating Leicester in November (Michael Regan via Getty Images)
The low point
April’s 4-1 defeat away at Bournemouth. Five games to go, Premier League status drastically on the line and Leeds go and play like that. Javi Gracia was on the verge of tears afterwards and could hardly bring himself to go into the dressing room. People picked up on that and at board level, the club felt they had no choice but to sack him.
The emergency call went to Sam Allardyce, which really was an attempt at a black ball along the cushion using your feet to hold the snooker cue. No offence to Allardyce, but survival was never happening, and it didn’t. One word stuck in your head after Leeds capitulated to Bournemouth: cooked.
The most surprising moment
At the beginning of May, The Athletic sent me to cover a game between Leicester City and Everton at the King Power Stadium, essentially to look in on a brawl between two other sides at risk of relegation. I’d finished filing my piece around 11pm when I got a WhatsApp message to say two things: Allardyce was highly likely to be appointed as Leeds’ head coach and Victor Orta might be in the final throes of his time as director of football.
The possibility of Orta exiting was not a surprise. His reputation among United’s support was shot and Allardyce was the last coach on earth he would plump for. But Leeds actively courting Allardyce starkly underlined the fact they were out of ideas and trapped in a corner where a wild punt was all they had left. That news provoked a double-take.
Victor Orta at Elland Road in May (Robbie Jay Barratt/AMA/Getty Images)
Best player
This can only come from the current Championship squad. In talking about last season, no one other than Rodrigo would get much of a look-in. There are quite a few candidates from August onwards. Ethan Ampadu has been a very good signing. Sam Byram looks like a steal of a free transfer. Georginio Rutter, an anonymous presence in the Premier League but a big asset in the Championship, is showing rare talent. Rutter does things very few others can at this level.
GO DEEPER
Leeds’ player of the season: Rodrigo – 13 league goals and he’s looked game for a scrap
The nod, however, goes to Crysencio Summerville. Leeds were initially minded to sell him in the summer and he did not start August as a guaranteed first choice. But he has so often been vibrant, electric and a precious source of goals and assists. To reach double figures for finishes by mid-December was no minor feat. Attacking players need a degree of cockiness and Summerville has it in spades.
Best goal
Farke’s side have been casually registering plenty of good goals. They have pace, they have precision, they have players who can finish and all of that adds up to some impressive attacking play. The best of the finishes, though? Joel Piroe’s first away at Millwall, a counter that sliced Millwall up and made full use of the pitch and the armoury at Farke’s disposal.
This Leeds side create a similar dilemma to that posed by Marcelo Bielsa’s team: do you press them high or do you sit back? Because if you sit back, they will happily dominate the ball. If you press high, they have the talent and the speed to cut you apart. Quite simply, Leeds never, ever win at Millwall like that. In the end, it was a canter.
The stat that sums up 2023
That by the end of the 2022-23 season, United had given away 112 big chances, nearly three per game. To put that in context, Opta defines a big chance as one which “a player should reasonably be expected to score”. To put it in layman’s terms, the club’s defending was utterly abysmal, not least on that metric.
Fulham, who also shipped 112 were fortunate enough to have a goalkeeper — Bernd Leno — in career-best form. Manchester City, at the bottom of the pile in a positive sense, gave away just 49 big chances throughout the campaign. Cut it any way you like, but Leeds were asking for it; they were tactically unsuited to retaining their top-flight status.
The most memorable quote
We’ll stray into the weird and wonderful. Radrizzani saying that questions about why Elland Road had been proposed as collateral for a loan to help him and fellow investors to buy Sampdoria was “none of your business” was a particular highlight. As was Allardyce complaining that poor old Sammy Lee had been forced to do jury service when he would rather have come to Leeds for a three-week blast of coaching.
But what we’re finding, and what they discovered in Norwich, is that Farke likes to throw in the occasional music reference from time to time. This was his response to a question about promotion prospects a few weeks ago: “It’s more like what Elvis Presley says — a little bit more action, a little less conversation. This is my topic, so the principle is Elvis Presley.” Cool.
(George Wood/Getty Images)
Piece I most enjoyed writing
Indulge me here — it was the long read on former Heart of Midlothian owner and submarine inhabitant Vladimir Romanov. Romanov and Hearts was some tale to tell and the stories got stranger and stranger as I spoke to more people about him.
From a Leeds perspective, I’d been very keen to do an interview with Sam Byram. I remember him emerging from nowhere as an academy player in 2012 and he has a way of being candid while keeping everything in perspective. His advice? Buy a Pilates machine (whatever one of those is). He swears by it.
A wish for 2024…
Promotion, obviously. It’s the name of the game. And on a serious note, someone do something about the Jimmy Savile chants, for God’s sake. The game turning a deaf ear to it is, and has always been, a complete embarrassment.
GO DEEPER
Farke: Trials, tactics and how he landed as Leeds United manager (without a horse)
(Top photo: Sam Allardyce; by Julian Finney via Getty Images)
