A month ago, Leeds United were merrily on top of the Championship. They had just beaten Sunderland with two late goals and Sheffield United with three. They had gone 16 games unbeaten and were playing with authority and conviction. More than that, they seemed to have the deepest squad in the Championship. The Sunderland game had turned when they had brought on Willy Gnonto and Largie Ramazani; nobody else in the division could bring that sort of quality off the bench.
Since then they’ve won one of five games and slipped to second. It’s happening again.
Saturday’s game with Swansea was simultaneously thrilling and extremely predictable. US international Brenden Aaronson put Leeds ahead in the first minute, the sort of goal that is usually said to calm nerves. But there is such a thing as scoring too early. Leeds never really got going. Illan Meslier saved a penalty and Swansea hit the post before equalising after Meslier dropped a corner. Gnonto seemed to have won it with four minutes remaining but, six minutes into injury time, Zan Vipotnik’s drive went through the Leeds keeper. The 2-2 draw meant Sheffield United, who had beaten Coventry on Friday night, remained top and Leeds are now level on points with third-placed Burnley.
The automatic promotion that had seemed probable a month ago could easily become a spot in the play-offs – where Leeds have been seven times before, never having been promoted through them. It shouldn’t matter – Sunderland, in fourth, also lost in the play-offs six times before finally breaking the hoodoo in 2022 – but the mood of a football club is a strange thing and Leeds at the moment are firmly set in anxiety. This is what always happens to them; they always slip up at the last.
Clubs shouldn’t really have a personality, but they do. The managers, the players and the owners may change, but something fundamental always remains; an energy passed on through the generations from fan to fan. For Leeds that energy is oddly negative, something the novelist David Peace expresses not only in The Damned Utd, his novel specifically about the club, but also in the Red Riding Quartet, his disturbing and paranoid series dealing with police corruption in the years of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation.
In the late 1960s and early 70s Leeds United were arguably the best side in England, if not Europe. They won two league titles and an FA Cup, but they should have won far more: they also came second in the league five times and lost in three FA Cup finals between 1965 and 1973. Late-season slip-ups became habitual. Rationally, that was probably because they were trying to compete in multiple competitions with a squad that wasn’t big enough, but their manager Don Revie came to believe the club was cursed.
Revie was a details man. He meticulously researched opponents, planned for every eventuality, left nothing to chance. He did everything possible to give his side the best chance of winning, which stretched to an array of superstitions. He wore a lucky mohair suit and insisted his wife wear a lucky coat. He kept two lucky chunks of wood in his pocket. Whenever he checked into a hotel he would immediately walk to the nearest lamp post and touch it. He thought birds brought bad luck so he had Leeds take the owls off their badge and drop their traditional nickname of “the Peacocks”.
A local priest had a recollection that Leeds’s Elland Road stadium was built on an old gypsy camp, so Revie brought in a fortune-teller from Blackpool, Laura Lee, to take a look. She confirmed “the smell of a curse” and performed a ritual, scattering seeds on all four corners of the pitch and the centre-circle and doing, as Revie put it, “other things I can’t reveal” – widely believed to have been urinating. It didn’t help.
The dark energy remains, alleviated only twice since Revie left the club in 1974. First there was Howard Wilkinson, a man with no truck for the supernatural, or indeed anything beyond the most dourly pragmatic, who led them to the title in 1992. Then there was Marcelo Bielsa, Revie-like in his insistence on the most thorough research and preparation, but somebody who confined his search for a competitive advantage to the temporal. Bielsa changed the mood, but late-season declines were a theme even for him.
after newsletter promotion
When he was at Norwich, current Leeds manager Daniel Farke’s football was high tempo and high risk. What is happening to Leeds now is probably just the consequence of that as energy levels diminish late in the season, combined with an error-prone goalkeeper. The situation has been exacerbated by a crowd that has come to expect the worst, whose anxiety drifts down from the stands and infects the players. It’s all perfectly rational and explicable. But just because a curse doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that the belief in one can’t exercise a profound psychological effect.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.