A man with new ideas is urgently needed

There are a few things to take from how Leeds United have turned the simple task of appointing a new manager for our Champo football team into a miserable slog of incremental fatigue. One is that a lot of us need to find new hobbies instead of refreshing Twitter in hopes of updates. Imagine an alternative scenario in which Leeds did not need a new coach this summer and the playing squad was only due minor updates — how to fill the hours in that case? Besides that is the futility of the thirst for news that social media has generated, as best exemplified by Fabrizio Romano and the other transfer pervs. Let's say they tell you now definitively: Rasmus Kristensen will be moving to Roma, here we go confirmed and all rest, and you find that out an hour before it's officially announced. Fine. Now what, and so what?

Anyway, all that's an old complaint of mine. A newer thought that has been creeping along through LUFC's year of managerial changes has taken a more solid form during this 'exhaustive' — maybe I mean exhausting — search for a new coach. Although it seems like Daniel Farke is going to get the job, you can still get odds on alternatives, and here are some of the other names the bookies have had in the running: Patrick Vieira, Carlos Corberan, Lee Bowyer, Scott 'Scottie' Parker, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Aitor Karanka, Steve Bruce.

I've skipped a couple of candidates who were never coming — Graham Potter, Brendan Rodgers. Exceptions like those, though, feel like proof of the rule: that this is a very uninspiring list of quite bad coaches, and as such it's no wonder waiting for Leeds to announce they're hiring one of them has felt like purgatory.

I'm quite optimistic Farke will turn out quite well for Leeds. His preferred style of play — possession based attacking football combined with reacting well defensively — sounds ideal to follow Marcelo Bielsa's, so if Farke could come in a DeLorean, that could be helpful too. Winning the Champo twice with Norwich, with some swagger, is good grounding for the job we need him to do but that. the relegations, and last season's mid-table finish with Borussia Mönchengladbach does not exactly set my heart racing. Even looking at him on horseback, I'm not feeling much. He might be good. I hope he is.

At least, though, he has had some success. I suppose Parker took Fulham up through the play-offs and Bournemouth up in 2nd place, but he didn't ever look to me like he knew much about it. Gerrard won the Scottish Premiership unbeaten but then arrived at Aston Villa apparently without a thought in his head. Corberan, fine, He Knows The Club. Bowyer too, and he's done well in difficult jobs. But Patrick Vieira has been fighting an unsuccessful war against averageness, I've never figured Aitor Karanka out at all, Steve Bruce is a joke now but I'd still take him over Frank Lampard Junior. What exactly is there about any of these guys for any of us to get excited about?

I don't think this is really a Leeds thing, it's just affecting us now as we have a vacancy. Last season's Premier League set new records for managerial churn, and the League Managers' Association say that sacked managers in all four English divisions are in post for an average of eleven months. More clubs than ever, more often than ever, are looking for new managers. But that demand does not seem to be getting met by supply. Leeds are picking from a fairly mundane list. Crystal Palace, looking at the same pool of talent, are opting to give Roy Hodgson another year despite him already being a million years old. See also Huddersfield and Neil Warnock. See also Leeds United last season, scraping the stray bytes from Victor Orta's database, then trying out a futsal coach, then trying out the one guy who would try doing the job, then just giving up and giving Sam Allardyce half a million quid.

The problem that seems to be revealing itself is a lack of quality coaches at a time when quality coaching feels incredibly important. The reasons for that are probably bigger than this little essay can handle, taking in factors like job insecurity making the job unattractive, a lack of visible diversity turning young coaches away from the career path, wealthy ex-players taking other opportunities after playing. Those situations and others helped create chances for lower-level ex-players — Jurgen Klopp or Daniel Farke — or bloggers like Rene Maric and journalists like Victor Orta, to enter professional football management and thrive. But the same circumstances of chasing short, high pressure jobs from country to country could also close that route to all but the bravest. I wonder if Orta ever wished, last season, he'd stuck to punditry.

This doesn't only affect the number and quality of applications for coaching vacancies. It makes it harder for managers to succeed, too. To give Orta a tiny sliver of credit for something I believe was a horrendous mistake, on paper Jesse Marsch did not look like a terrible coach. He was entirely the wrong person to follow Bielsa, but on his own merits, Marsch had a good competitive record in two decent leagues and a strong reputation for developing youth and coaching a defined style of play by creating a holistic environment at the training ground. All good stuff. Then he actually started doing the job in the Premier League and he was a disaster, and there went the next great coaching hope whom the USMNT had started believing could help win them the World Cup.

All this leaves us, then, waiting for a new manager who will be underwhelming, whoever they are. The Bielsa factor comes in two ways here. One, because even after, or even more so after Marsch, Skubes, Gracia and Allardyce, Bielsa casts a long shadow over any incoming coach at Elland Road. Two, because the work he did here made a lot of Leeds fans believe in the importance of coaching, right at the time when replacing that work seems to be becoming much harder. Palace are clinging to Roy Hodgson like a buoy out at sea, the one guy they can find who might know what he's doing. Leeds let go of Bielsa and have been splashing around in open water since, grasping at any passing driftwood they can reach. I hope that one belated lesson learned from Bielsa's time here will be that, if Farke does well, the club tries to do more to help him keep doing well. Meanwhile, football could do with working out where its next generation of coaching talent is coming from. If it's between Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Steve Bruce the next time the England job comes up, it'll be a moment of national despair. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)