And Leeds have every right to go mad

Once upon a time saying a phrase like this out loud — 'Leeds United are known for their sensible approach' — would get your listeners scowling, then bracing, then waiting for the punchline. They'd be expecting, 'Their sensible approach... to being completely crazy!'

You've never had to be mad to support Leeds United but, as Barry Davies said in 1971, Leeds do have every right to go mad. Not just when Jeff Astle and friends have been waved through by referee Ray Tinkler to score an offside goal that cost Leeds the league title, but all the rest of the time too. And it's a right that Leeds United Football Club has exercised willingly and enthusiastically.

But — no more. Nowadays, you say that out loud — 'Leeds United are known for their sensible approach' — and before you can go any further your big punchline is being drowned out by the sound of sage nodding. Those little muscles in the neck can get loud when a crowd is working them in unison, when all their specs are sliding up and down their noses, rising and falling on their ears. Sensible approach, yes. Leeds United, that's right. A well-run club. Very well-run football club, Leeds United.

And then I feel like the mad one and like I have to find the hood that's winking me, in hand with my theory that nobody in the business of football actually has a plan beyond dressing up in their dads' suits and and pretending they're in Glengarry Glen Ross. Part of the joy of football is not knowing what will happen after the ball is kicked, yet the idea propping up the industry of football is that the game can be made predictable. Take the goal that James Justin and Lukas Nmecha scored together at Nottingham Forest this week and show me a sporting director sipping a scotch because that went just how they planned it. 

Nobody can plan a goal like that. Only I suppose everybody sort of can, and Leeds United kinda did. Not in specific bounces of the ball, or Neco Williams' face in the way, but by bringing complementary elements together that contribute to an overall tendency. Big, enthusiastic lads who like each other, in Leeds' case, who have a healthy determination to win without their egos getting in the way. Bring enough of those sorts of fellas together, and you get more of those sorts of moments.

That's more than plenty sense for Leeds United, thank you very much, and it's telling that it still ends anyway with two blokes kicking a ball at each other from an inch out. But as our club becomes attached to this common sense chitchat around us, it's worth pausing to examine good sense across the Premier League. I think it's changing, and Leeds are changing with it, but perhaps not all the way.

This was prompted, as lots of these thoughts have been for a decade, by Brighton and Brentford and how their 'models' look quite different now to how they did when Andrea Radrizzani was angrily lusting for his own dose of Seagullism. What we got then was what everyone thought Brighton were doing, which was finding talented players for cheap, gussying them up and selling them expensive. Perhaps the platonic ideal of Leeds' following their example was reached this summer, when the Peacocks sold Ajax cast-off Pascal Struijk to Brighton for £18m of pure profit.

The problem Leeds had with that approach was their scattershot method that didn't help the first team. When sporting director Victor Orta set about replacing Marcelo Bielsa's players, he wasn't looking properly at what, say, Kalvin Phillips had been bringing to the first team. He was looking at what Marc Roca might be worth when he was sold a few years down the line, forgetting that in the meantime Leeds would have to endure him being worth much less than that.