Leeds United's reaction to losing the play-off final shows what a testing season it is
There was a time when relegation or a failure to get promotion wasn't a life-altering disaster, but those days feel like a long time ago.
In many senses, it’s not difficult to understand the reaction of the Leeds United players at the end of their play-off final defeat to Southampton. To get this far requires a 49 match league season, and to get this far and fail to give a proper account of yourselves must, in its own unique way, be heartbreaking.
The same arguably goes for the reaction of supporters and the wider world. Promotion and relegation have become triumphs and tragedies with set parameters for how likely they are to be. As soon as you fall from the Premier League, a clock starts ticking. After one year, your parachute payment money falls by around £20m.
In other words, your first season down is by far your best chance of getting back up. You could see it in the whites of all eyes. Ten months work boiling down to ninety minutes with the prize of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The same went for Southampton, but with Leeds… they’d waited a long time for those three seasons, and we all realistically know that a city of this size, a club of this former stature, could support Premier League football.
Relegation had hurt, and the play-offs offered the opportunity to grab that final place in the lifeboat. A couple of years earlier the post-Bielsa haze was lifted by survival in the Premier League, but it can ultimately hardly be said to have brought improvement. Just doing enough and then doing not quite enough have been the motifs of Leeds’ post-Bielsa era. Relegation was tough to take after just three seasons, but the possibility of a promotion party was a way out for everybody.
Small wonder it was not a particularly aesthetically pleasing game. They seldom are. No-one has scored more than two goals in the final since Swansea City in 2011 and there was only one scored on this occasion. Indeed, there were only five shots on target all afternoon. Leeds came close when Daniel James had a shot bounce out off the underside of the crossbar, but in the end Adam “David” Armstrong’s first half goal was enough to win the game.
It makes you wonder what the Championship Play-off Final could be like if the pressure was lifted a little bit. Relegation has never felt great, certainly not for big clubs. Ask Manchester United, Chelsea, West Ham, Newcastle or Spurs about that, as recently as within my lifetime. But it never needed to feel like that much of a calamity, and it still isn’t really, the lower you go down the football pyramid.
Of course, the presentation is a big part of the issue. It is very much in the interests of media companies with one eye on making money from a larger audience or perhaps a few people chucking a few quid at a day pass, as it’s a Bank Holiday. Treat yo’self, and all that. Except… it wasn’t much of a treat of a game. This isn’t the fault of anybody involved. The practicality of the situation is that this one match is worth a lot of money, and a lot of prestige.
This is, of course, an argument against parachute payments. To oppose them is to want a level playing field in the Championship, to end a practice by which teams just relegated from the Premier League have a huge head-start over those seeking to break through. It can still be done—as evinced by Ipswich Town this very season—but it’s getting increasingly difficult.
But this Leeds team didn’t look like they'd do much damage in the Premier League. Those wanting to put an appropriate fig-leaf on an obviously enormous disappointing day for them could argue that maybe they weren’t quite ready for it, this time around. Perhaps another season will allow for the development of a team that was close but fell at the last in both their regular season and the play-offs. They’re not that far off returning, but they could return in a better condition than it seemed as though they might from this performance.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a desire on the part of the club’s owners to get rid of manager Daniel Farke, though he will now obviously be on considerably thinner ice than he would have been had they won. He’s a good coach, and it’s worth remembering that it was extremely competitive at the top of the Championship.
Leicester were deserved and not wholly unexpected champions. Few predicted a second successive promotion for Ipswich. Farke’s team picked up 90 points. This was, but every metric apart from their final position in the league table, a good season. Were he to be sacked, it’s reasonable to say that he would have been sacked because the other promoted teams had been so good rather than because his team had been appreciably bad.
And maybe things won’t be so bad next season. After all, Leicester and Southampton are both up, and Ipswiches don’t happen. Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton all dropped and none of those three particularly impressed in the Premier League. Leeds United should be able to be competitive in this environment. And it’s worth remembering that, in their second year of parachute payments, they still hold a huge advantage over most of the other teams in their division next season, even though it’s the one that they wanted to be in.