Elland Road in Andrea Radrizzani's post-enthusiasm era
Whatever shiny plans Radrizzani and his cohort had for the West Stand will be rolled up and filed, now, and without that to look forward to, what fun is refurbishing a few kiosks in some part of the stadium where you never set foot?
Spotlights are what football clubs go to the Premier League for, but the brightest illumination is found at the bottom of the table. And the least forgiving. When you're as close to the edge between relegation and salvation as Leeds United right now, every dim corner gets lit up, everything found there is dragged into daylight and scrutinised. And there are a lot of dingy crevices at Elland Road.
It's part of the charm. Back in April 2018, Jon Howe — who wrote the only book you need to read on The Only Place For Us, and I highly recommend buying a signed copy from him through our shop by clicking here — anyway, in April 2018 Jon Howe wrote in TSB about Entrance 7 on the north-west corner of the stadium, and how there had been a pallet of railway sleepers apparently abandoned on its roof for at least five years. Thinking it through, Jon estimated they could easily have been there since the 1970s, and possibly shifted around Elland Road since Pullan's Builders were building the stadium up in the 1920s.
Lest you imagine The Square Ball has no influence, by August 2018 the sleepers were gone, as Jon reported here, apparently being used 'to form a border on some banking' up at Thorp Arch. It wasn't all change — an old 'Entrance 7' sign was still dumped on the same flat roof — but it might not have been coincidence that this sudden stirring of action at Elland Road and Thorp Arch coincided with the arrival of Marcelo Bielsa. I can easily imagine, in that first meeting he had with Angus Kinnear and Victor Orta in Argentina, Bielsa telling them that if he came to work at Leeds they would have to build some new banking at the training ground, and he knew just where to find the railway sleepers for the job.
I'll try not to make this too much about Bielsa, but the year since he was sacked — and the six months before he was sacked — have felt like a slide back into those mid-2010s habits, when you could look around Elland Road and wonder why nobody was doing more with the place, and whether it was because the people in charge didn't care. And then you looked at the people in charge — Ken Bates, GFH, Massimo Cellino — and realised that was probably it.
It'd be harsh to argue that Andrea Radrizzani and his board don't care. He truly arrived at Elland Road when he made good on the previous owners' promises to buy Elland Road back for the club by actually doing it, and agreeing to the Supporters' Trust's request to have it registered as a community asset. Soon, there were big posters of the players on the north-east corner and each end of the East Stand, and a little while after that, Premier League football. At various points there were glimpses of plans for new stands, proposals for a training ground nearby.