Announce The Answer
Leeds have appointed the best coaches in the sport before, but they've tended to either walk out after 44 days, or be Terry Venables.
Appointing and then announcing Marcelo Bielsa as manager of Leeds United will jerk the nearly 99 year old club into a brash new era with reassuring echoes of the past. It might be a catastrophic failure, but Leeds haven't failed with such style since Brian Clough and Jock Stein in the 1970s.
Leeds have appointed the best coaches in the sport before, but they've tended to either walk out after 44 days, or be Terry Venables. The rest of the time, either nobody thought the coach was a good choice — Howard Wilkinson's Sheffield Wednesday team were not much rated — or Leeds were promoting from within, hoping to get lucky: Willis Edwards, Don Revie, Allan Clarke, Eddie Gray, Billy Bremner, David O'Leary. The middle ground is a wide range, from George Graham and Jimmy Armfield to Jimmy Adamson and Dave Hockaday. Our history is hardly audacious.
Hiring Marcelo Bielsa in the Premier League would be audacious. Snagging him from 15th in the Championship? You can see why negotiations might take a while. Sceptics are pointing to a lack of trophies on Bielsa's mantelpiece, contrasting that with, say, Neil Warnock's many promotions. That implies, however, that winning promotion from the English Second Division has some equivalence to not winning the World Cup with Chile, or that as Leeds United fans we're in a position to describe runner-up spot in the Europa League as failure. Even back when we were good, some of the greatest successes in our history were in second place.