Leeds’ strategy of buying for the future won’t work in unforgiving Premier League

If nothing else, Leeds United’s regression towards the end of Simon Grayson’s stint as manager allowed someone to do a decent trade in T-shirts. “Keep calm and pass to Snodgrass” was the slogan on the front of them and for as long as Robert Snodgrass was willing to stick it out, the slogan was not far wrong.

Good teams tend not to be excessively reliant on one player but poor or mediocre teams, of which Leeds were one throughout the 2011-12 season, depend more on isolated inspiration. Promotion in 2020, for example, was a sum of many parts, individual quality wrapped up in collective class, stretching across the pitch and into the dugout. But the club are back to needing a Snodgrass, someone untouched by the general malaise.

Money alone says Georginio Rutter should possess an ounce of that talismanic dust. Rutter is young, admittedly, and visibly raw but he is Leeds’ most costly signing and 25 benign minutes on the pitch against Liverpool on Monday were, in microcosm, a partial example of why their season has reached crisis mode for a second time. Here is where vision crosses the line into luxury.

As a club and a business, Leeds like to build or to tell themselves they are building: hefty academy recruitment, a squad intended to peak at a later date and stadium redevelopment ideas that might get off the ground some day.

In future years, the theory is supposed to speak for itself because the decisions taken now, the gambles on longer-term growth, will be justified in time. Except to the naked eye, the short term is on fire and what comes next is wholly linked to it. Put another way, the blueprint of growth cannot have included the process of Leeds going down.

The club have factored in the possibility that they might because, according to their latest accounts, they think they have adequate resources to recover quickly if they do. Maybe and if recent promotions are a good gauge, relegated clubs have rarely found the Championship easier to navigate.

But it is not the point and the purpose of recruitment in the Premier League, the expenditure of renewing a squad, to make a team competitive in the EFL. Leeds might be well placed to bounce back if the worst happens but not without reputational damage or consequences in the meantime.