This is what you get for buying a football club in the 2020s. Your key performance indicator is now the most rotten of metrics, social media vibes, and you owe your livelihood to Fabrizio Romano tweeting something positive.
2024 was going to be the Niners' big year, but they swung and missed. Oh wait, that's the other thing isn't it. Um, they dropped the puck? Does that sound right?
The single-minded objective is to get promoted. That sounds good. But that single-mindedness increases the pressure, turning this season into an inflection point, or as we used to call it, shit or bust.
Let's catch up with our favourite pigskin guys as they get hitting those pucks for some big homers this fall.
Outsiders might ask what the fun would be having a Premier League ready squad in the Championship and winning it by Easter while breaking records on easy mode. Leeds fans would answer that you shouldn't knock it until you've tried it.
The advantage fans have is that everything in football, whether it's comms or money or community, must ultimately be expressed with high visibility on grass.
Things may not actually be that bad. But they're bad enough to have me thinking about Peter Ridsdale, Professor McKenzie, Ken Bates and the parallels. So that is bad enough.
To look at Archie Gray playing for Leeds was to see a golden era come back, to forget all the market forces crushing modern football and feel the glorious 1960s and 70s again. A smiley badge on the away kit next season won’t do that the way Archie Gray could do that.
The best argument for convincing ourselves that Red Bull won't change Leeds United's name or colours is the weight of our heritage, but it is also the danger.
It's Orta and Radrizzani's legacy that, in the end, they don't have one — everything they tried to build last season, when after Bielsa they really tried to build their own thing, has gone, and they've gone with it. The legacy of this for 49ers Enterprises is that they're still here.