"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you." Kipling wrote those lines more than a century ago but it very much apply to the Premier League and where Leeds United find themselves this August.
Football365's preseason mood-check of the division tells a tale of a league in a state of near-total uncertainty. New managers everywhere. Arsenal, supposedly the one club with certainty on their side, being quietly gripped by nagging doubts. Aston Villa unable to enjoy good business without turning it into a grievance about the bean-counters. Newcastle apparently still finding professional journalists willing to argue they are not, in the technical sense, f*cked. It is chaos dressed up as a new season, everywhere you look
Everywhere, that is, except Elland Road. F365 put it plainly enough: the bar for looking like a settled Premier League club has never been lower, and Leeds clear it by some distance. Same manager as when last season started. A summer of evolution rather than revolution. A finish well clear of relegation trouble after a top-flight return that plenty had us down for immediate disaster. None of that sounds remarkable but that is precisely the point. In a league where standing still, gradually improving the squad without a massive overhaul and staying calm now counts as an achievement. That’s precisely what we are doing, and the outside world has noticed.
Having spent a season waiting for the roof to fall in on Farke's Leeds, adjusting to the fact that it did not, and does not look like doing so any time soon, the media and pundits are approaching the new season with a new found confidence in Leeds United. That matters less for what it says about us and more for what it says about everyone else. When the comparison set is this shaky, staying upright and on a clear course is enough to have people talking about Europe rather than survival, which is exactly the conversation now happening around Leeds and their prospects for this season.
But none of this should tip over into the complacency Kipling was also warning against, three lines later, when he talked about trusting yourself while making allowance for the doubting too. F365's own caveat is the right one. The crop of teams coming up looks weak, the 40 point mark doesn’t look as certain to assert itself as the boundary between survival and relegation like it did last time round. But should one of the promoted teams start to overperform, that calculation changes fast.
James Trafford's arrival gets talked about as a moonshot signing that heals old scars in goal, and it might well be exactly that, but new goalkeepers and settled dugouts do not by themselves guarantee anything in a division that has spent the last decade making fools of anyone who assumed too much too early. What we have, for now, is something better than false hope and more useful than manufactured crisis. We have a football club that, for the first time in a long while, does not need excuses prepared in advance. Everyone else in this division seems to be readying theirs. Leeds do not have to, and there is something worth enjoying in that alone.
