Shambling back to football
Of course it was Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds that took on Pep Guardiola's Sham City and drew and won. And of course it was Bielsa who proposed wage cuts to mend football. And of course it was also Bielsa who took a Leeds team to City's ground in December 2021 that lost 7-0. Replay?
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I hope there's never an international break like that again. Twenty days between games might not sound like much but it's two days longer than the gap between the last day of last season and the start of the World Cup; within six days of the World Cup final Leeds United were playing a friendly with Wrexham. This has been a long break.
And a lot has happened, some of it the usual stuff — Ethan Ampadu being worked harder than a soap star in panto season — some of it the new, exceptional, the Premier League say Manchester City cheated to win everything sort of stuff. We turn our weary eyes back to football and find it completely changed.
I'm of the kind who thinks Manchester City's (offline, non-deranged) fans should still be allowed to look back at things like the Agüero moment and feel whatever they want to feel. We all should, because moments like that belong to football fans everywhere. Association football has a wonderful reductive power once the ball hits the grass, and the important components of that goal — the footage from Sunderland, of Alex Ferguson, Phil Jones and the away end dumbfounded — were independent of the executives who put the pieces together.
I won't stop revelling in Phil Jones' confusion just because I know now that Manchester City cheated to buy better players than him. That's maybe the advantage of being Championship bystanders through those years, as the Premier League looked from Leeds like what it really was, some money-driven quasi-reality TV show that was more scripted than anyone was letting on. If the Premier League are smart, and want to keep re-running the 2010s on Sky, they should lean into this and get all the alleged manipulators to go on camera talking about bending the product to their will. Like interviewing the producers and editors about old series of Big Brother.
The more immediate problem than history, though, is this weekend, and the Premier League-stuffed weekends ahead of us from now until May. Manchester City are playing Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday, and they have a full, normal list of fixtures to play after that. But what are they? They're the five games, five wins leaders of the Premier League right now. But will they be allowed to win it? If not, what are we doing? If the 'process' that's in train ends with them dumped in a railway siding, bricked up in a tunnel like Henry in Thomas the Tank Engine, aren't the games to come just a sad charade? Sure, everyone is looking forward to a gauntlet of scouse wit making Manchester City's players very sad and upset on Sunday. But, meanwhile, we've got a division of league football to play that we're all supposed to be pretending is very real and important.
At least when Leeds City were slung out of the Football League in 1919 the process was quick and clean. The inquiry was done and dusted in just over two weeks. (You can read about it all in this book, by me.) Burslem Port Vale took their place in the Second Division, inheriting the results of Leeds' eight games so far, and that was that. It's worth remembering, at this point, that Leeds City were not suspended for making illegal payments, but for refusing to produce documents for the investigation — something for the modern Manchester City to ponder.
It's also worth remembering that Joseph Henry, then the Mayor of Leeds, was convinced that if Port Vale hadn't lobbied the Football League so hard to take City's place, then the club would have been allowed to continue so long as its directors all resigned. No Leeds fan should ever forgive or forget what Port Vale did. While we're pondering whether Manchester City should still be in the Premier League, remember that Port Vale have played more than 100 seasons since stealing Leeds City's status.
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