What is Daniel Farke up against this season?

Pressure can come for football managers when their team's style of play, good as it might be, is not getting results even if it once was.

At the moment Daniel Farke's Leeds United team has good style by objective standards — possession based football in support of lively attackers — and is getting results. Three games out of six won by two goals to nil. One goal conceded in five games. One defeat, and that to one of the division's strongest teams. As Leicester City proved last season, that form will get you a long way in the Championship: they consistently rolled the division's mundanity but when it came to the top teams they lost twice to Leeds United and drew twice with Ipswich Town. Ipswich, for their part, also won promotion from the other end of those two Foxy draws, plus two defeats to Leeds United while only taking one point of six from West Brom. In the first half of last season Ipswich played three score-draws against what turned out to be the three relegated teams but it wasn't a problem in the end.

The bemusement of Farke is that, despite a 2-0 win at Cardiff City that does a lot for his team's promotion attempt, pressure is coming for him anyway because it didn't look like fun. Leeds had 79 per cent of the possession, had six shots on target, more than doubled their expected goals count from any game since the opening day, turned that into two exciting goals. But they did it all in a way that didn't quite engage, didn't quite thrill, didn't quite captivate. Nor did it elucidate what more the team could have done to engage, thrill and captivate.

The biggest problem Leeds United have at the moment is that there isn't really a clear problem with anything, which is one of the nicer problems to have. It might also mean that it's a problem in search of a cause, not the other way round. If Leeds get through the season beating most of the division's mundane-or-worse teams 2-0, what will be the problem with that? But barbs are swirling Farke, insisting that he needs to fix things and fast. What might take most time, from Farke's perspective, is working out what's broken in a 2-0 win.

I'm tempted into some thoughts that it's not him, but us, and the weird interaction of time and football. The coming season, in many of our minds, is already over, because it simply has to end with promotion to the Premier League. We're only waiting for May 2025 to confirm or deny the May we have already imagined. And football imaginations are fuelled by nostalgia, in this particular case for United's two top flight promotions of the last sixty years: 2020, when Marcelo Bielsa made football brilliant, and 1990, a long ago third summer of love culminating in once in a lifetime beachside revels. We forget the part when one win in the first five games had Howard Wilkinson's Leeds being booed off in 1989, while fans bellowed at the manager that he needed Marco van Basten to fix his team's lack of goals.

Even if we add promotion from League One, in our memories it can be distilled into one unforgettable match against Bristol Rovers in May 2010 — a better occasion, for me, than any of the Champions League nights around the millennium — and notions of Simon Grayson as a manager with a single mode, attack and more attack. That obscures the five month run-in before that final day: 22 matches only returning 1.2 points per game.

But the first half of 1989/90 or the second half of 2009/10 aren't what Daniel Farke is up against. Instead, with promotion predestined — and with the squad he has, the open top bus route should at least be pencilled in — he's responsible not only for getting Leeds to the Premier League but giving fans memories to compete with their fiercest nostalgias.

He's also up against a more general problem that football has given itself by turning a cheap pastime into a premium time and money drain and replacing fandom with resentment. Watching Wilko's Second Division football often meant a lot of offsides, even more backpasses into Mervyn Day's hands, and one goal. In the promotion season seven games were won 1-0, eight more were drawn 0-0 or 1-1. But at the price, and with the cash that left spare for a good day out, who was worrying about the niceties of style? In the pre-Sky TV era the only people watching the full matches were the few thousand there to see them, and many of them were too drunk or high or young to care.