It was contract time at Elland Road last week, bringing about the spate of renewals that Leeds United look for at the end of a summer transfer window. The extensions agreed will not stop with Kalvin Phillips, Liam Cooper or Stuart Dallas. Mateusz Klich is next in line to sign and Pablo Hernandez might follow, albeit a little further down the road.
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Leeds are ploughing everything they can into Marcelo Bielsa’s tenure as head coach, emotionally and financially, but they are obliged to plan for life after him too. Bielsa is a rolling stone in club football, never prone to gathering much moss, and it was understood when he took the job in Leeds that he was passing through for a few years at most. Promotion is the only conceivable way of stopping Bielsa going next summer.
He and Leeds are a long way from contemplating their next moves and with seven games of this season gone, there is no appetite to contemplate their next moves at all. Cooper, Dallas, Klich and Hernandez are proven assets in the Championship — Phillips, by comparison, falls into the category of footballers who Premier League managers would pay for tomorrow — but the new contracts imply that Bielsa intends to take them with him if Leeds beat a path to the top table.
There are coaches and clubs who embrace full-scale change in the Premier League, those who do what Fulham did last year and gut their squad at huge expense, but Bielsa prefers his teams to grow roots, evolve steadily and raise their levels over time.
Leeds’ cohesion did the trick again in a 2-0 win at Barnsley yesterday and as Bielsa’s side stepped back to the top of the Championship, the thought occurred that much of what was seen at Oakwell — the personnel and the methods — will be seen at Anfield, the Etihad and Old Trafford should Leeds finally smash through the ceiling above them.
Bielsa backs his players as he backs himself, trusting that Leeds will come good no matter if goals come quickly or in the last six minutes. They took 84 minutes to come at Oakwell but as ever, there was no deviation from the blueprint. Barnsley contributed to a very watchable derby, prompting Bielsa to lavish praise on them, but Leeds are too drilled, too nerveless and too patient for points to elude them regularly. Eddie Nketiah and Klich found a way through late on and matches like this serve to strengthen Bielsa’s conviction: that a system which works doesn’t need fixing.
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Two of those who signed new contracts last week, Dallas and Cooper, have become the closest of friends at Elland Road and, in time, effective cogs in the machine. Cooper’s whole life has been spent in the pipeline of professional football, a defender who felt the full force of Fernando Torres and Liverpool on his debut for Hull City, but Dallas’s career required more of a climb from the base camp of amateur football in Northern Ireland.
Dallas’s agent, David Hartley, was tipped off about him by an Irish contact before any clubs in England had taken a look a close him. Hartley went to Belfast to watch him playing for Crusaders and saw a winger who was “as pale as a sheet of paper, as skinny as a rake” but good enough to make the trip worthwhile. Dallas was part time, drawing less than £100 a week from Crusaders and earning a bigger wage in a joinery shop.
“He had something about him,” Hartley says. “He wasn’t exactly tearing the league up but I liked what I saw and the money Crusaders wanted from his was ridiculously nominal.” When Brentford signed him in 2012, the fee was a mere five figures. “About £15,000 in the end,” Hartley says. “We’d exhausted almost every avenue and at times we had to beg Mark Warburton to stick with it. But Brentford wanted to take the chance.”
Warburton was Brentford’s sporting director and Uwe Rosler was their manager, a two-man team who worked closely together. Rosler gave the deal for Dallas the thumbs up and would sign him for a second time as Leeds manager in 2015, by which stage Dallas’ valuation had risen to £1 million.
“There were a lot of things I liked about Stuart,” Rosler told The Athletic. “I’d been to see him at Crusaders and to meet his family. They were very humble but very ambitious, a nice balance of the two. I saw a goal threat in him, a great engine and different ways of using him too.
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“I wanted him at Leeds and I hassled (Massimo) Cellino to get him once we knew there was a chance Brentford would sell. The fee was a bit higher by then! I used him in a 4-3-3 at Leeds and I thought he could play on either side, down the right or cutting in off the left to shoot with his right foot. He’s good enough to play as an ‘eight’ (a central midfielder) too. That wouldn’t be a problem for him.
“What I noticed with him was that he always listened. He always took on board what we said to him and found instructions easy to execute. That’s the sign of a good player and it makes him easy to trust.” Bielsa would tell the same story.
Others around Dallas have picked up on the versatility that Rosler spotted. Cooper said last week the Northern Ireland international was so adaptable that “he would be decent in goal” and Bielsa has spent time crafting Dallas into a wing-back, improving him defensively but setting his side up in a way that allows him to spend much of each game on the halfway line or beyond. Barnsley left back Jordan Williams had Dallas on his toes constantly.
Luke Ayling was absent again yesterday, pushing through the last stages of his recovery from ankle surgery, but he would have watched from the bench even if he was fit. Ayling is Leeds’ first-choice right back, in Bielsa’s mind as much as anyone else’s, but Dallas has the shirt and is playing too well for Bielsa to think about pushing him aside, overlapping constantly and offering an outlet to Bielsa’s central midfield pair.
United’s win at Oakwell was a close-run result in a high-paced derby that Bielsa said Leeds “deserved to win but could have lost or drawn”. Kiko Casilla continued to redeem himself for the debacle of last season’s play-off defeat by turning away the stream of shots Barnsley threw at him from all angles. Leeds hit a post in the first half through Jack Harrison and played Hernandez into a position where the Spaniard usually scores in his sleep. But he leaned back and lashed the ball over the crossbar.
Barnsley had come to play and an open second half created palpable jeopardy until Bielsa replaced Patrick Bamford with Nketiah and the 20-year-old met Phillips’ devil of a free-kick with a side-footed finish on 84 minutes. Five minutes later Aapo Halme — the defender who Leeds allowed Barnsley to sign for £400,000 in the summer — conceded a penalty by clipping Nketiah inside Barnsley’s box and Klich tucked it away with utter nonchalance, passing gently to the left of goalkeeper Bradley Collins. Klich is one of many players who tick Bielsa’s boxes: confident, reliable and good enough to improve. A new contract should be agreed with him in the next few weeks.
Cooper signed up for five more years on Wednesday and Dallas signed up for four. They are long commitments to players who are unknown quantities in a higher league. Leeds went too far with a glut of big contract extensions in the autumn of 2017, misjudging some of the players they tied down, but they were in the hands of Thomas Christiansen back then and he buckled when the Championship got too hot. Bielsa has the measure of the league and, crucially, a knack of backing the right horses.
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He watched Cooper tussle with Romelu Lukaku during the international break and Scotland’s 4-0 drubbing at the hands of Belgium did not dissuade him from thinking Cooper can mix with strikers as dangerous as the Inter Milan marksman. As for Dallas, his outing for Northern Ireland against Germany gave Bielsa the utmost confidence about letting the winger loose in the Premier League. “If you watch that match, you’ll find an answer,” Bielsa said on Friday when asked if his player could step up. United’s head coach has their backs.
(Photo: James Williamson – AMA/Getty Images)