Big Sam's Leeds United
Maybe we'll just go with what everyone wants: dugout cam. Forget the camera following the action, just focus one on each manager, split the screen, and we can spend ninety minutes wondering: can he do it?
Can he do it? That's the question of the weekend, the month, the season. Not just at Leeds, at every club that has jettisoned a coach, hired another, jettisoned him, hired another. Can he do it? Can he? Can he be the one to do it?
Anyway, team sport innit. Or was innit. This question has pretty much replaced all that. At the 2018 World Cup we got, as a treat, an all-22 view of the pitch for some games, a high level camera showing the full extent of the pitch and every move by every one of the players on it, and the ball. I didn't see any of this for 2022, and maybe by 2026 we'll just go with what everyone wants: dugout cam. Forget the camera following the action, just focus one on each manager, split the screen, and we can spend ninety minutes wondering: can he do it?
Even that might be too much. The idea that it might be fun to watch football teams, or just the managers, trying to win feels a long way out of vogue. Fun in... football? Not anymore. Not at the business end of the season. There's too much at stake! Like what? Like Andrea Radrizzani's sale price to 49ers Enterprises might take a $300m haircut? I'm not sure I should be feeling tense about this. Why is he making his problems my problems?
The cult of personality truly landed at Leeds this week. There was and is a cult around Marcelo Bielsa, of course, but that grew in the absence of what tabloids recognise as personality. Why was there so much disdain for Bielsa in the media, for him not speaking English, for him not looking up while his translator spoke? It was precisely because he wasn't giving them what Sam Allardyce gave them this week. A few good quotes, a few solid headlines, a bit of the old razzle-dazzle. There's been some talk this week about Allardyce and his clever psychology, taking the attention away from United's players and putting it all on him. But since Wednesday I have seen more banter videos on social media, more podcast episodes, more columns and more debates about the state of Leeds United than we ever did when Jesse Marsch thought he was getting a hard time over Ted Lasso. It hasn't felt so much like the build up to a football match as the reignition of a WWE storyline, an old character donning leotard one more time and leaping, ego-first, into the ring.