Two years ago this week, Leeds United’s players — Archie Gray among them — stood in the away dressing room at Brentford, drinking beer and letting the relief of Premier League survival wash over them.
When the adrenaline subsided, the squad packed up and travelled home in search of dark rooms to lie down in. All except Gray, who packed up, travelled home and sat a GCSE geography exam at 9am the next day.
“I honestly didn’t find it very stressful,” he says, which is his temperament captured in seven words. Football looks at him and sees a prodigy. Gray just treads the path as it comes. The depth of focus is uncanny, almost amusing, and it is often best not to think too hard about your own levels of maturity back in the day.
Now 18, life in a parallel universe would have Gray sitting his A-levels this week. “All my mates are doing them now,” he says with a grin.
Instead, it is Wembley for him on Sunday — the Championship play-off final between Leeds and Southampton. He looks relaxed, he sounds relaxed and the Championship has not done much to ruffle him over the past 10 months. A footballer who was 17 when the season started should have been ripe for bullying at certain points of it, not least because Gray has played out of position, but he has been bulletproof: 44 games, 40 starts, more minutes than all but three of the club’s other outfield players.
Leeds’ new manager Daniel Farke was initially inclined to protect him, until he learned that was not necessary.
Gray’s football speaks louder than he does, and his personality has that elite edge: not arrogant but weighty in self-confidence, a pleasant character free of equivocation. I ask him what was going through his head when Marcelo Bielsa first named him on Leeds’ first-team bench when Gray was 15 years old. Had he appeared as a substitute that day, he would have broken Peter Lorimer’s record as the club’s youngest-ever senior player. Was he ready for the leap?
“Oh yeah, definitely,” Gray says, as if it was the normal run of things. “From 14 or 15, I felt like I could start training and playing with the older ages, to get myself up towards the first team. From a young age, I felt good and I had trust in my ability. There wasn’t any trepidation (in stepping into the fold under Bielsa), no.”
The high levels of trust in his ability were not only Gray’s.
Leeds have rarely had an academy player they were more eager to see reach the age of 17, to allow them to give him a professional contract. Gray attracted interest from all of the great and the good in England, including Liverpool and Manchester City. But he grew up as a Leeds fan, wanted to cut his teeth at Elland Road, and it was agreed that if the club matched a certain percentage of the lowest offer received from elsewhere, he would sign for them at the first opportunity. Leeds were every bit as proactive in tying him to better terms again when he turned 18.
You wonder how life turned for him, a pupil at St John Fisher High School up the road in Harrogate, when weekends started taking him to Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, as a bona fide member of Bielsa’s camp.
Gray was so young that safeguarding rules stopped him changing in the same dressing room as Leeds’ other first-team players.
There was a photograph taken at a pre-season friendly at Burton Albion last summer of his kit laid out separately in the laundry room, a private space for the boy to get ready. His parents were invited to chaperone him on foreign pre-season trips, not that Gray was rushing for them to cramp his style.
Gray’s changing ‘room’ at Burton
“A lot changed,” he says. “I was out of school quite a bit and training with the first team most days, really happy to be around it. The intensity of the football compared to under-21s was different. I wouldn’t say I really struggled with it but it was definitely more intense. I noticed that straight away, but I was fit and I found it OK.
“The sessions with Marcelo, they were so good. People know how tough they were because a lot was said about it at the time but I took so much from him. As hard as it was, and all the running you did, some of what I learned was priceless.”
Gray has the advantage of a tight and savvy family around him, one steeped in football and Leeds.
He committed to his exams and did well, balancing a role on the fringes of a Premier League relegation fight in 2022 with his timetable of school tests. Brentford away on the final Sunday of that 2021-22 season ran the exam schedule closest. “Literally, I got back late in the evening and was straight in at 9am to do the exam the next morning,” he said. “But it went pretty well. It wasn’t a problem.
“Fitting in the time to revise and all of that sort of stuff was a bit of a challenge but I went with it and enjoyed it. I’m pretty lucky to have the people around me that I do, and my mates are really proud of me. They’d just never tell me that because they’d want to keep me on my feet. I’m lucky to be in the position I’m in, but I have worked hard for it.”
Gray’s family tree is always worth revisiting.
In footballing terms, it is a captivating genetic bloodline, and few names are as synonymous with a single club as the Grays’ is with Leeds.
His grandfather Frank and his great-uncle Eddie were part of the Don Revie dynasty in the 1960s and ’70s. Frank played for Leeds in the 1975 European Cup final, 49 years ago this Tuesday. On the last-but-one occasion when Leeds appeared at Wembley, for the 1996 League Cup final, Gray’s father Andy was a young member of their line-up. Eddie’s elder son Stuart was a seasoned professional too, and his younger son Nick had a promising reputation in Leeds’ academy until injury did for his career.
Farke has not had to hold back Gray (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
Behind Gray is another prominent talent, his 15-year-old brother Harry. Like the older of the siblings, Harry is making his presence felt at the club’s Thorp Arch training ground, a forward who scores goals by the dozen and is advancing in front of his academy age group.
Is Gray passing on his recent experience — not least the need to be adaptable? Gray’s longer-term career is bound to play out in the centre of midfield, the position which suits his skill set best, but most of his appearances under Farke have come as a right-back.
“I don’t think I need to help (Harry),” Gray says. “When I was his age, people just let me trust my ability. It’s the same for him.
“You’d get advice and you’d get help, but people didn’t tell you what to do. His ability for his age is unbelievable. I just don’t like to tell him that. With me, I always trusted my ability and other people did too. The only thing I can tell him is to work hard every day — always do the extras. And stay on your feet.”
The Grays’ pride in their younger brood never fails to shine through.
Years ago, I remember Eddie talking about how he had set one of his grandsons or nephews a keepie-uppie challenge. Eddie would pay them a small amount of money if they succeeded in doing 100 on each foot by the end of that summer holiday. Whether it was Archie or not wasn’t clear, but the veterans of Leeds are heavily invested in the new breed, just as they are in the club.
There was a lovely video of Eddie taken during last week’s play-off semi-final second leg win over Norwich City, up on his feet, all-in emotionally, singing along with the Elland Road crowd.
Got this video of Eddie Gray tonight at half time. A player way before my time, but the older generation with absolutely love this!#LUFC #Leeds pic.twitter.com/2VLhvQ2VgF
— Lewis Speight 💙💛💙💛 (@LewisSpeight) May 16, 2024
“Whenever we go to his house, we always play games of kids versus adults,” Gray says. “It’s always fun.
“Him and my grandad (Frank), theirs was the best time at Leeds. I’m lucky to have them and to have them speak to me about the experience they’ve got. I’ve found clips of them on YouTube and I wish I could see more of them. Games back then weren’t videoed as much as ours, so there’s only so much out there but my grandad played in the final of what’s now the Champions League. It’s hard to get any better than that.”
One aspect of this year has been tough for the Grays.
In January, Eddie and his wife Linda lost son Stuart to cancer. An accomplished midfielder who spent time at Celtic and Reading, he played his father in the movie version of The Damned United, the dramatised story of Brian Clough’s short reign as Leeds manager in 1974. He was 50, a father of five.
Football can bring relief in hard times. Wembley on Sunday, with the family watching, has the potential to be one of those moments.
“It would be massive,” Gray says. “I’d like to make him proud and, for the family, to bring some joy. He’ll be watching down.”
(Top photo: George Wood/Getty Images)
