Aapo Halme ⭑ From A-Z since '92

To introduce this a bit further: one of the most influential books I've ever read was Leeds United: Player by Player by Andrew Mourant. Published in 1992, it's a big illustrated hardback of bios of not quite every player — it sensibly begins with John Charles and moves forward chronologically from there, and just lists statistics for some who didn't feature much (poor Simon Grayson). Another wise move was varying the length of entries — Billy Bremner had two pages, Terry Connor had one page, John McClelland a half-page. But I read this thing front to back over and over, so even as a clueless twelve year old who'd been to Elland Road just once I could confidently assert that in the early 1980s Scott Sellars' skills and stature had recalled Terry Hibbitt. Reading about players like John Sheridan in this book, and then seeing how Shez played for Sheffield Wednesday or Ireland when they were on TV, was probably what made me think that writing about football made more sense than the old dancing about architecture trope.

It was published just after United's title win in 1992, also the beginning of the Premier League era. So that's what I'm beginning now: picking up where Andrew Mourant left off, with a list of more than 400 post-1992 players, eight years, and one dream. Which hopefully won't turn into a nightmarish albatross but we'll see how this goes. I have a few rules in mind: I decided to go alphabetically, rather than chronologically, to keep it interesting by popping from year to year. I decided to go alphabetically by first name because otherwise I was going to be starting with Brenden Aaronson or, after Brenden came back, Tyler Adams. I'm going to avoid players who are still playing. I won't be adding entries strictly week by week, as if I've got something better to write about one week than (looks down list) Alan Tate then I'll do that. I'll vary length, focus, detail, approach player by player, and for very minor guys I'll skip over them then round them up in batches. How minor is minor? Well, I'm kicking off with Aapo Halme. I hope you enjoy it. You're getting eight more years of this!

2017/18 was a frantic time for Leeds United, and new director of football Victor Orta in particular. The rationale was simple: the club Massimo Cellino had just sold to Andrea Radrizzani didn't have enough players for a proper Under-23s team. The solution was Orta's dream: load up the database, riffle through the sticker albums, and buy as many 'Ability < 10 | Potential >15' players as he could find before both his mobiles melted.

That in the social media age every signing, no matter how inconsequential, was announced to Twitter and hyped up by the cottage industry of YouTube highlight clippers, meant these were heady days. Madger Gomes, from Liverpool! Kun Temenuzhkov and Oriol Rey, from Barcelona! Ousama Siddiki, from Real Madrid! These players could be anybody, and could become anything, and their pedigree — or how it looked on Wikipedia — was enough to convince ourselves that, even if they weren't good enough for Barca or Real, they could still be more than good enough for Leeds.

Then, in January, there was Aapo Halme from Finland, from HJK to be precise. His delayed arrival — he was first being linked to Leeds soon after the takeover, in June — meant six months of clickbait hell about whether the Peacocks would 'win the race to sign the highly-rated eighteen year old' ahead of Sassuolo, Hoffenheim or Ajax. The long wait also meant that, by the time Halme got to Yorkshire, Thomas Christiansen's brilliant start as manager had fizzled into frustration, and doubts about Orta's eye were being raised because if he thought Felix Wiedwald was good enough for our first team, what must the players he'd bought for the Under-23s be like?

But I liked the look of Aapo Halme from the start. You rarely see a centre-half looking so genial. It was his Finnish compatriot Tove Jansson who created The Moomins and now here was one come to life, come to play for Leeds, with a big soft jaw, calm yet quizzical eyes. If his pleasant demeanour wasn't likely to strike fear into Championship centre-forwards, at least he had his size to intimidate them, only that he looked as surprised as anybody to be 6ft 8in and as if he wasn't quite sure how to deal with it.

Which was fair enough: he was six-four, six-five at most. But that didn't bait the clicks the way 6ft 8in did. This was a great era for bad websites, and I used to enjoy a game of looking behind a headline about 'the Elland Road giant' or, my favourite, 'the Leeds United colossus' to see whether it was about Halme or, even better, Bailey Peacock-Farrell. The two footballing colossi!