We can't compete with this

[Cjay]

When QSI take over we shall be fine!!!!!

Man City won't sign Grealish and Kane for £250mil this summer.

Grealish isnt worth £100mil anyway, then again Maguire wasnt worth £80mil so who knows.

[1964white]

That for me is why Bielsa's small squad with versatile players keeps the squad happier. Players know they will get minutes. Take Alioski as an example and he is a winger but because of Bielsa training him to play other positions he has started something like 30 matches this season. At another club he'd have been sat on the bench all season waiting for a winger to be injured. Same with Dallas he'd probably be back up winger at a championship team but instead he is picking up trophies and justifying a starting position as either full back or midfielder.

You also have to look at how teams like Wimbledon in the past were able to compete at the top level. Their players were nowhere near as skillful as other teams but they identified a way to play and a way to bring out their strengths. With Bielsa it is the same but whereas Wimbledon were long ball and set pieces we instead play to a fast tempo, run forever and have team that is so well drilled a lot of the passing is done on auto-pilot.Bielsa is the difference as to why we can look to compete and beat teams of so called better players.

I dread the day Bielsa departs Leeds United.

[Smudge3920]

At the end of the day, Marcelo has been a game changer in the English game...He has restored my belief in what can be achieved with a well run, well disciplined club, over open cheque books. Something we have not seen since the day of the Don. It is creating somewhat of a "moneyball" situation which occured in Baseball in the U.S. a few years ago. I honestly believe that there will be more clubs (trying) adapting to the Leeds standard...I don't care where Kane goes, or who gets Haaland, MB has restored my faith in what can be achieved by sheer hard work, determination and preperation.

[Gandalf]

I'm more concerned about who may eventually sign Haaland than Kane ( he's the striker we missed out on signing in 2018...)

For a club like ours to end up with someone like Haaland, you have to see the potential before it becomes widely known - we did that with Raph, but missed the opportrunity with Haaland. In the end that can be the difference between being a top 10 PL club and a top 3 club.

You keep banging on about his missing out on Haaland in 2018, and laying the blame on this not happening at Orta's door. When in actuality, the chance of Haaland coming to a championship club (even including his fondness for us) was virtually nil, and the combined fee and wage demands were over and above what we could realistically afford for a 17 year old. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

[Smudge3920]

Chappel said
you have to see the potential before it becomes widely known - we did that with Raph

Re potential before it becomes widely known...I contend Raph had been around long enough for clubs to see his potential he is 24 now, so when we picked him up he was 23... we took a chance with him, which he readily admits himself...he had been around long enough to be seen and it would appear ignored by the so called bigger clubs...I think this goes a long way to show the vision of Bielsa/Orta they look for players to fit the system for the most part not pure skillful individuals.

[Smudge3920]

I dread the day Bielsa departs Leeds United.

It will be a nightmare for the fans and club...Bielsa's system is so unique I cannot think of one current active manager to replace him...that very uniqueness, will be detrimental under a new manager/coach as they all want to stamp their own vision/version of the game on a club... it will be a very difficult transition.

[Leeds1000]

What happened to FFP... Didn't Citeh get fined 50m euros a few years back? I wonder if they paid it thru the back door. I don't begrudge Citeh owt they have been thru the mill like us. At one time they were going thru managers faster than Cellino (no impossible) The only thing that surprised me at the time is Sheikh Mansour chose Citeh over Leeds. As he not heard that accent!!

[1964white]

It will be a nightmare for the fans and club...Bielsa's system is so unique I cannot think of one current active manager to replace him...that very uniqueness, will be detrimental under a new manager/coach as they all want to stamp their own vision/version of the game on a club... it will be a very difficult transition.

As you say Smudge he is so unique!

[Denman]

The joy of Marcelo is both his fantastic coaching and exciting football, AND the spirit of humility and cohesion he brings to the team... and the whole club. It's absolutely priceless, but would he be appreciated the to the same degree anywhere else? I suspect not, which is why Leeds is his longest club tenure.

This is a brilliant post. A perfect summary of why we all love Leeds.

[visitingvillan]

the great awesome equitable FFP back at work ensuring that the scum 6 can buy whomever they want at any price and the other 14 can't invest as much because FAIRNESS

[CHAPELALLMAN]

You keep banging on about his missing out on Haaland in 2018, and laying the blame on this not happening at Orta's door. When in actuality, the chance of Haaland coming to a championship club (even including his fondness for us) was virtually nil, and the combined fee and wage demands were over and above what we could realistically afford for a 17 year old. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

So the 16 year old Haaland saying in 2017 that ' I want to be the best possible. The dream is to win the Premier League with Leeds ' doesn't count for much then ?

I totally disagree that a move to a championship club was not on the cards for him in 2018 - the club made an offer to Molde to sign him, but weren't willing to offer parity with the highest earning players at the club. One of those top earners would have included Kiko Casilla on about 40K a week...Haaland even came over to Leeds to look at the training facilities at Thorp Arch.

https://punditarena.com/football/oisinm ... -united-1/

Salzburg signed him for 7.2 million, which is about half what we agreed to pay Wolves for Costa whilst we were still just a championship club.

Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing, though it doesn't stop fans even now holding a grudge against Wilko for letting Cantona go for just over a million quid to that club over the Pennines ( I'm not one of them ) They are perfectly entitled to have that point of view though - undoubtedly it was just about the biggest own goal in the club's history.

[CHAPELALLMAN]

For me it is real simple...greed has taken over...to take it back to what it once was would take salary caps, complete and utter implimentation of FFP rules, very difficult to go back once passed, not impossible but very difficult....Players paid a decent wage as opposed to a ridiculous wage, squads limited to a fair competetative financial size would lose nothing by way of support yet free up more money to generate amongst lower divisions.

Comparing Capitalist football to Socialist football, will always be a losing argument irrelivent of your politics Capitalism always beat socialism... the facts are there to be seen, in 1980 50% of the worlds population was below the poverty line, following India's and China's abandonment of socialism (1980) and turning to capitalism it is now down to 20% (approx).

Greed is all that has to be dealt with.

China is still a a communist country Smudge in terms of social structure. It's just that the communist ruling party realised that the USSR fell to pieces primarily because it ran out of money, so they decided that a good strategy would be to play capitalsim at its own game and make the west indebted to China at the same time - look how the USA state has partly funded itself through China buying treasury bonds.

I regard communism as the worst ideological disease which has ever afficted mankind. At least national socialism in nazi Germany only lasted about 12 years in total. Communism has afflicted the human race for 104 years now, starting from the time that the Bolsheviks seized power. As well as the Cuban crisis in September 1983 we were an inch away from nuclear war when the Soviets mistook sunlight reflecting off clouds for an American first nuclear missile strike ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Sovi ... m_incident

In 1986 we had Chernobyl, which was an accident which could have destroyed large swathes of Europe and made the whole continent uninhabitable ;

"Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, explains: "This would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors."

Estimates suggest that had this been allowed to happen, half of Europe would have been wiped out, many millions would have perished, and the entire area would have been uninhabitable for over 500,000 years.

Soviet physicist Vassili Nesterenko said: "Minsk, which is 320 kilometres from Chernobyl, would have been razed and Europe rendered uninhabitable."

Now you have the Chinese equivalent of Chernobyl, which more and more people suspect was a leak from the Wuhan lab - despite up to quite recently an almost total censorship in the west regarding this possibility. That is all changing now with Biden instructing US intelligence to find out where the virus really originated from. In 2015 a paper was published by leading Chinese scientists in which they wrote about the use of coronoviruses as a form of biowarfare which would totally overwhelm western health services. French scientists helped set up the Wuhan lab and then they were kicked out when the labs were finished - why ?

[Leeds1000]

Its amazing isn't it? We spend billions around the world keeping people safe, we spend millions on creating vaccinations in record time around the world and yet we still don't know where the virus originated. Trump made it clear in plain English what he thought, and we all know what the establishment thought of him. Will we get to the bottom of it for the benefit of the human race, or will all investigations lead to a dead end? Imo Biden couldn't succinctly order a meal at a restaurant never mind order a US intelligence lead instigation. Credit his puppet masters for showing some intent. .

[Smudge3920]

China is still a a communist country Smudge in terms of social structure. It's just that the communist ruling party realised that the USSR fell to pieces primarily because it ran out of money, so they decided that a good strategy would be to play capitalsim at its own game and make the west indebted to China at the same time - look how the USA state has partly funded itself through China buying treasury bonds.

I regard communism as the worst ideological disease which has ever afficted mankind. At least national socialism in nazi Germany only lasted about 12 years in total. Communism has afflicted the human race for 104 years now, starting from the time that the Bolsheviks seized power. As well as the Cuban crisis in September 1983 we were an inch away from nuclear war when the Soviets mistook sunlight reflecting off clouds for an American first nuclear missile strike ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Sovi ... m_incident

In 1986 we had Chernobyl, which was an accident which could have destroyed large swathes of Europe and made the whole continent uninhabitable ;

"Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, explains: "This would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors."

Estimates suggest that had this been allowed to happen, half of Europe would have been wiped out, many millions would have perished, and the entire area would have been uninhabitable for over 500,000 years.

Soviet physicist Vassili Nesterenko said: "Minsk, which is 320 kilometres from Chernobyl, would have been razed and Europe rendered uninhabitable."

Now you have the Chinese equivalent of Chernobyl, which more and more people suspect was a leak from the Wuhan lab - despite up to quite recently an almost total censorship in the west regarding this possibility. That is all changing now with Biden instructing US intelligence to find out where the virus really originated from. In 2015 a paper was published by leading Chinese scientists in which they wrote about the use of coronoviruses as a form of biowarfare which would totally overwhelm western health services. French scientists helped set up the Wuhan lab and then they were kicked out when the labs were finished - why ?

Well I never...so they abandoned socialism... who would a thunk I had a lucky guess.

[Smudge3920]

Communism in its purest form is Utopia, at best an extreme form of socialism...trying to keep to the forum main topic, Football... A classic example of trying to mix Capitalism with socialism/communism is the Chinese Super league, which completely imploded on itself last year finally resulting in a complete shutdown of the league this year (Febuary)...Politics has to be kept out of sports.

[becchio bear]

Communism in its purest form is Utopia, at best an extreme form of socialism...trying to keep to the forum main topic, Football... A classic example of trying to mix Capitalism with socialism/communism is the Chinese Super league, completely imploded on itself last year finally resulting in a complete shutdown of the league this year (Febuary)...Politics has to be kept out of sports.

Absolutely.

[CHAPELALLMAN]

Its amazing isn't it? We spend billions around the world keeping people safe, we spend millions on creating vaccinations in record time around the world and yet we still don't know where the virus originated. Trump made it clear in plain English what he thought, and we all know what the establishment thought of him. Will we get to the bottom of it for the benefit of the human race, or will all investigations lead to a dead end? Imo Biden couldn't succinctly order a meal at a restaurant never mind order a US intelligence lead instigation. Credit his puppet masters for showing some intent. .

Communist regimes don't come clean about anything - remember how the west only became aware of Chernobyl when the Swedes detected radioactivity over their country - they were livid that they had received no warning from the Soviets.

Last weekend The Wall Street Journal reported that three lab workers at the Wuhan lab got so ill with covid symptoms in November 2019 that they had to get hospital treatment. Another smoking gun is the fact that unlike previous viruses like Sars and Mers, the Covid virus has not gone through the usual mutations in passing from animals to humans - it was already pefectly adapted to infect human beings. That fits in with the 2015 Chinese scientific paper in which the strategy of using coronaviruses in bio warfare was put forward. Anyway, the bats which supposedly infected people come from caves 1,000 miles away from Wuhan.

Interesting too that last weekend, in a conference, the leading infectous disease specialist in the US - after a year of dismissing lab-leak theories - was asked whether he is still confident that Covid developed naturally. He replied that he is not confident and that all theories need to be investigated.

[CHAPELALLMAN]

Communism in its purest form is Utopia, at best an extreme form of socialism...trying to keep to the forum main topic, Football... A classic example of trying to mix Capitalism with socialism/communism is the Chinese Super league, which completely imploded on itself last year finally resulting in a complete shutdown of the league this year (Febuary)...Politics has to be kept out of sports.

Except when politics is possibly directly responsible for the manipulation/cultivation of a deadly virus which kills millions, nearly bankrupts football clubs and results in stadia empty of spectators. Did any sports happen during WW2 ? You can't ignore the bigger picture of life.

[Gandalf]

So the 16 year old Haaland saying in 2017 that ' I want to be the best possible. The dream is to win the Premier League with Leeds ' doesn't count for much then ?

I totally disagree that a move to a championship club was not on the cards for him in 2018 - the club made an offer to Molde to sign him, but weren't willing to offer parity with the highest earning players at the club. One of those top earners would have included Kiko Casilla on about 40K a week...Haaland even came over to Leeds to look at the training facilities at Thorp Arch.

https://punditarena.com/football/oisinm ... -united-1/

Salzburg signed him for 7.2 million, which is about half what we agreed to pay Wolves for Costa whilst we were still just a championship club.

Salzburg didn't sign him for 7.2 Million - the article you linked above says that the fee was 21M Euros, and it also says that Salzburg came in with an offer that “dwarfed” what the we could provide. Signing a teenager for what would have been our record transfer and blowing our wage structure at the same time, would have been an extreme risk. Hence my mention of hindsight. Anyway we got Bamford for £7M instead, which helped us to get promotion and consolidation in the Premier League, so I'm happy.

[Cjay]

Tbf Chapel you can blame Victor Orta for plenty of things imo.

Not signing Buendia.
The JKA stuff.
The dross he signed when he first arrived like Cibicki.

But even i wouldn't blame him for Haaland.

At 17/18 he was scoring 12 goals in Norwegian football.

Decent but hardly earth shattering, its not Messi scoring 6 goals and 2 assists for Barcelona when he was 18 in only 10 games worth of minutes in La Liga.

Haaland was doing that at an extremely low level, without wanting to insult any Norwegian fans we may have what level is it comparatively? League 1 maybe?

He wasnt putting in earth shattering numbers and he wasnt playing at a decent level.

Even so according to Phil we offered him good money, better than many in our squad.

Thats a very fair offer for a largely unproven kid.

If he wasnt son of Alf and we spent £7mil on this 17/18 year old who had scored 12 goals in Norway most of us would have been horrified.

Obviously in hindsight we should have done more (same as Buendia) but unlike Buendia i can fully understand why we didnt do more at the time.