Leeds United must grasp the nettles of a difficult campaign

Meetings this week between coach Jesse Marsch and director of football Victor Orta will be crucial.

Behind closed doors at least, it will even mean criticising Marcelo Bielsa – still heresy in some parts of West Yorkshire. When you get dragged into the sort of mess Leeds did in the season just gone, contributions come from everywhere, just as when they stunned those outside these parts with just how good they were 12 months earlier.

Bielsa was an outstanding coach who transformed a club not just in terms of what it did, but how it thought about itself.

But he was not flawless. The league table made that very clear.

It sounds very “small club” to celebrate finishing 17th in any division, let alone the Premier League but it was an achievement.

The second season can often be the hardest. Just ask Huddersfield Town in 2019, Hull City in 2015 or 2010, or Bradford City in 2001. Some clubs try too hard to kick on – the Terriers and Bantams were both probably guilty – and mess up the chemistry that made them so special in the first place, others do not kick on enough.

Most pertinently of all, ask Sheffield United.

It is incredible to think we were a Burnley equaliser and a Jack Harrison shot off target from two years running seeing a Yorkshire side follow finishing ninth in their first season back in the top flight with relegation in their second.

Although the Blades broke their transfer record again, both clubs were probably guilty of not strengthening enough. Sheffield United manager Chris Wilder was frustrated by his board’s lack of ambition but at Elland Road, Bielsa was most responsible for applying the brakes.

Whether the board had the will and wherewithal needed is open to debate but the Argentinian could certainly have allowed Leeds to spend more than they did. In his desire not to see them exploited into over-paying, for Lewis O’Brien for example, and an insistence that only the perfect fit would do which saw Harry Winks and (perhaps fortunately) Donny van de Beek knocked back to wait until Salzburg were prepared to come to the negotiating table over Brenden Aaronson, Leeds very nearly left themselves too weak for the challenges ahead.

Another centre-forward was essential too but Leeds had learnt to their cost the futility of foisting on Bielsa a player he did not want after Eddie Nketiah and Jean-Kevin Augustin.

Bielsa’s foibles, the price on the ticket of the journey he took Leeds on, are no longer a factor.

The fixation on man-to-man marking which top coaches began to exploit to a degree that reached epidemic proportions before Bielsa was sacked in February has already been addressed. Leeds are not better to watch under Marsch, but they are at least more solid.

An even more damaging principle was Bielsa’s on squad size. It is unclear if that will go too but it must.

Bielsa believed a club of Leeds’s resources should only have 18 senior players, backed up by 15 under-21s able to step in, to maximise the talent within that.

They got away with it in 2019-20, and 2020-21, and Manchester City’s championship-winning squad was not all that different (19 seniors registered with the Premier League), but the luck ran out at Elland Road.

Like many of those that made Bielsa so appealing, it was a high-risk strategy.

Allied to his notoriously demanding training – and, it must be stressed, misfortune – the physical demands proved too much for Patrick Bamford, Kalvin Phillips, Liam Cooper, Luke Ayling, Adam Forshaw, Rodrigo, Robin Koch and Jamie Shackleton at different times, and the losses were too great to cover effectively for in a league where nine substitutes are allowed per match.

Stuart Dallas will already miss a sizeable chunk of next season with a broken leg and Ayling’s knee operation could delay the start of his campaign.

The shallowness of the squad made game-changers rare on the bench and when he had one in Joe Gelhardt, Bielsa seemed reluctant to use him.

Nohan Kenneh – a regular substitute who never made it on – became the latest to lose patience yesterday, joining Hibernian on a free transfer.

What we saw in Gelhardt’s limited opportunities, and those for Sam Greenwood, Lewis Bate, Crysencio Summerville, Charlie Cresswell and Kristoffer Klaesson, though, vindicated another element of the blueprint.

Of the seniors Leeds have signed since getting the keys to the Premier League treasure chest, only Raphinha has been an unqualified success, something Orta must improve. But it has been a two-pronged strategy and the early signs are that enough of the juniors bought underneath can prosper to make that a big success.

Marsch already regards some as fully-fledged first-teamers, instantly deepening his squad.

You do not have to be much of a Leeds United historian to know they must not spend money they cannot afford but this season spelt it out loud and clear: there needs to be a focus on greater quantity as well as quality this summer.