Not even the 49ers’ cash can bridge the gap for Leeds United to Premier League elite

“We need to be in the range of clubs like Everton, West Ham, Aston Villa, the clubs that can challenge the top six and lie just below,” said Andrea Radrizzani.

Is that it? The best one of England’s great historic clubs can hope for?

Pretty much.

Leeds can win the Premier League in the five-to-seven-year window their chairman was looking through, because Leicester City, Radrizzani’s role model, did in 2016, but it is unlikely. Establishing themselves as a top-six club in that time? Probably not.

That is a depressing thought.

Even though 16 years ago Chelsea were one-title wonders and a smidgeon over 22 years ago Manchester City were losing 2-1 at York City in what, in old money, was Division Three, even though Tottenham Hotspur’s second and last title was in 1961, they and the rest of English football’s “Big Six” feel boxed off – catchable in any given season but so far ahead financially that consistently competing with them looks extraordinarily difficult.

Catapult them into a European Super League based not on merit or even history but simply the status quo and it will get far, far worse.

Football is too stretched-out already. It threatens the fabric of what makes the English game so fantastic – its incredible depth. In October, Leeds coach Marcelo Bielsa – an Argentinian who has also worked in Mexico, Chile, Spain and France – called Leagues One and Two “the essence of English football.”

Bielsa is doing an excellent job with a squad essentially enhanced by two top-quality attacking signings in Rodrigo and Raphinha, plus fleeting cameos from centre-backs Robin Koch and Diego Llorente when fit, yet the Whites will do well to finish in the Premier League’s top half in their first season in the division since 2004. Fulham and West Bromwich Albion’s struggles provide perspective.

Newly-promoted Sheffield United did marvellously to finish ninth last season but are now in danger of being relegated with the lowest points tally in the competition’s short history.

This season’s Football League salary caps show the widening gaps there. In League Two annual squad wages are not supposed to go above £1.5m, in League One £2.5m. Championship clubs rejected an £18m limit, highlighting the gap Rotherham United must bridge. Hopefully Doncaster Rovers and Hull City have the same problem next year but it is gargantuan.

If the Championship is too distant from League One, they are miles away from the Premier League, where last season the average wage bill was reckoned to be £158m.

Since automatic promotion in the mid-1980s, the smallest gap has been between the Football League and Conference with no side which has gone up relegated the next year yet Harrogate Town have felt the need to make 11 signings since winning the fifth-tier play-offs to tread water three places above the League Two relegation zone.

The plan is apparently for the 20-team European Super League to have 15 founding – permanent – members who receive more income than the rest.

The “Big Six” would be amongst them but no other English team could play in the competition.

Despite having won more league titles than Spurs, Huddersfield Town would be barred. Titles won nearly a century ago are irrelevant.

But Leicester would be kept out too, despite being a much better team than Arsenal and having won the league more recently.

Leeds are largely doing things the right way, using the San Francisco 49ers’ money and expertise to grow organically and sustainably.

“It’s very important that we bring players up from the academy and integrate them,” stressed Radrizzani.

There to talk about the investment, he was understandably reluctant to speak too much about breakaway super leagues, but did say: “The domestic league has a value that is extremely important.

“All of professional football benefits from the value of the top league. All the clubs in domestic football need to defend this value.”

Most of all, they need to preserve – and strengthen – the ability to dream without the risk of descending into the nightmares the Whites endured when they last over-reached for the stars.

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