Why Leeds United’s promotion is also a victory for city’s cultural scene: Anthony Clavane

This particular event will be devoted to Leeds United. Even if football is not your thing, I would hope to persuade you that the team’s return to the promised land (or Premier League, to those of a less religious bent) is worth celebrating in a literature festival.

Of course I would say that, having once written a book called Promised Land, which attempts to link the club’s fortunes to the culture of the city it has represented for just over a century.

The email inviting me to be part of the Milim festival panel – which includes a sports psychologist, the Head of BBC TV Sport and radio commentator Adam “Popey” Pope – arrived not long after a newsletter from Ruth Pitt, 
chair of the Leeds 2023 trust. It was entitled: “Why Leeds United’s Promotion is a Culture Coup.”

As Pitt, the woman in charge of plans for the city’s year-long cultural celebration, explained: “Anyone who doesn’t associate sport with other forms of culture is missing a trick. Leeds now has a Premier League club to put it on the global map and a festival of culture to aid recovery.”

Sceptics will insist that Marcelo Bielsa’s team and the arts are about as compatible as President Trump and coherent sentences.

However, as Pitt so poetically put it: “Leeds United’s poignant pandemic promotion provides a global stage for the city’s cultural life to dance upon.”

This is, in part, down to Bielsa. The inscrutable 64-year-old is a philosopher. According to one of his former players, “he’s got an amazing mind, an incredible intellectual capacity outside football”. 
The son of a lawyer, one of his siblings is an architect and the other used to be Argentina’s minister of foreign relations.

I recently turned 60 and two of my favourite birthday presents were a blue bucket emblazoned with the Mighty Whites crest – a replica of the one Bielsa perches on during games – and a T-shirt decorated by his bespectacled features and that marvellous Marcelo quote: “A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph.”

But long before the arrival of this god-like genius, the club were an intrinsic part of popular culture. This is why they are beloved by such big stars as Gladiator’s Russell Crowe, Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and, er, Finchy from The Office; in the final episode of the Ricky Gervais comedy, David Brent tries to ingratiate himself with Ralph Ineson’s character by observing: “Leeds are doing well.”

In the 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, Rigsby salutes the heroic failure of “our valiant-hearted lads” in United’s infamous European Cup final defeat to Bayern Munich.

And there have, over the years, been references in several other iconic comedy programmes, such as Frasier, Porridge and, strangest of all, Veep – where U S vice president Julia Louis-Dreyfus once sported an LUFC hooded top.

Then there is The Damned United, Amanda Palmer’s song Leeds United, the Kaiser Chiefs being named after a Leeds player’s former team, Colin Welland’s TV play… I could go on.

Bielsa’s boys aren’t the only side in Yorkshire tuned in to its city’s rich heritage; last month, the Sheffield Home of Football campaign launched a project 
to design an art and sculpture trail inspired by the beautiful game.

Even if you hate football, and sport in general, you can’t deny that it is often woven into a community’s cultural fabric.

This is certainly the case with Leeds. I had the good fortune to be born there in 1960 and to grow up in an era touched by a perfect storm of opportunity and talent. 
There was a feeling of hope, a sense of possibility, a desperation for change. Sixty years on, as Ruth notes, there is a similar revival of optimism. “Football at its best is culture at its best,” she notes. “People want, and need, something to look forward to. A renewal to hang their hopes on, a period of recovery that can heal the wounds inflicted by Covid-19.”

Let the cultural dance begin.

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