Det kommer nok mange artikler nå som skal forklare Leeds' come back.
Her er The Times sitt forsøk.
...noen liker det, andre mener det er klisjèfylt...
Leeds United finally reaching for the stars after years in the gutterLeeds United are top of the second tier of English football for the first time since Howard Wilkinson was the manager and the fans were enthralled by David Batty and Gary Speed.
Early days, perhaps, but when your last decade has been one of unremitting misery it has got Leeds buzzing as a club and city. For the first time in history, Leeds have won four successive league games by at least two goals. They have kept six successive clean sheets. This is not bad work given that it was only May when Andrea Radrizzani completed his buyout from Massimo Cellino, a deranged businessman who had said he wanted “big balls†but brought in Dave Hockaday anyway.
Few clubs have been as mismanaged as Leeds United and, in modern football, that is saying something. In 2001 they played in the Champions League semi-final but by 2004 they were relegated from the top flight. Three years later they were in administration, docked points and down in League One. Given the history of hooliganism, the riots of Birmingham and Bournemouth, the Bradford chip van fire, the racism of the 1980s and the one-eyed revisionism of Don Revie and his team, few neutrals mourned this demise.
Yet fans everywhere should have felt sympathy at witnessing how self-serving egotists could take a community stronghold and fleece.
There was Peter Ridsdale, a fan with his heart in the right place but a misaligned brain, seguing into Ken Bates and his yo-yo approach to administration. The ground was sold. There has also been Professor John McKenzie trying to sack Peter Reid in the public glare of a Halifax hotel lobby and falling asleep at his first Premier League meeting.
Eyes were not on the ball, however big it may, or may not, have been.
GFH also had a stab at running the club and achieved the remarkable in being even more unpopular than all who had gone before. If Ridsdale was likely to sign his own grandmother, GFH would have sold her. Their low watermark was when they accused David Haigh, their former employee, of embezzlement, and he spent months holed up in a Dubai jail denying all wrongdoing. Mind you, it was a close-run thing after the talk of Iranian money breaching a UN resolution, while the spy cameras and cocaine in the boardroom exhumed memories of the old story about getting Michael Duberry off the wage bill by sprinkling drugs on his pasta. An ex-director was convicted of blackmail. Inevitably. Damned was an understatement. It went further than being a bit mean to Brian Clough.
Now Radrizzani is giving a good impression of a rational human being, buying back Elland Road and bringing the women’s team back into the fold. His managerial choice, Thomas Christiansen, looked like a gamble. Not many were celebrating getting a man who had been big for a bit in Cyprus. They are now.
It will not all go right, of course. Leeds were on the back foot against Birmingham City at Elland Road yesterday. They held out this time. However, Leeds have also finished in the top ten in the Championship only twice since they were promoted from League One in 2010. They have never made the play-offs in that time. Their last cup final was the Coca-Cola drubbing by Aston Villa in 1996 that left Wilkinson “emotionally disembowelledâ€. Leeds are not so much a sleeping giant as a once-significant club put in a drug-induced coma by quack doctors.
Gordon Strachan, chief foreman of the 1990 rebuild, once told me: “It’s like David Bowie. Every so often you have to reinvent yourself.†Of course, there are reinventions and mad-cap experiments, but this is a club craving any semblance of success and they have got that. Top of this league, then, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (a few hours in 2004 aside). The new regime has made its mark.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/leeds-united-finally-reaching-for-the-stars-after-years-in-the-gutter-jx6km626r