Did Leeds United hit their limit last season?

When Stuart Dallas turned 21, he was still playing in his native Northern Ireland. At 22, he was loaned down to a club in League Two. He was 23 before he played in the Championship, 29 when he made his Premier League debut. Nine days before his 30th birthday, he was playing away at the soon-to-be-crowned champions, a side with 27 wins in their previous 28 games. Leeds were down to 10 men before half-time. When the match entered injury time, they seemed to hanging on for the most creditable of draws.

And then Dallas surged clear, running from his own half to meet Gjanni Alioski’s through pass and slot his shot under Ederson. Manchester City 1 Stuart Dallas 2. He had beaten what seemed the best team on the planet. 

It was a moment to encapsulate an improbable rise: under Marcelo Bielsa, Dallas had gone further than anyone thought possible and done better than seemed plausible. Relative to expectations, perhaps he was the footballer of the year. No one else had overperformed to such an extent; few others summed up Bielsa’s universality as the player who had started off as a winger and could be left-back, right-back, wing-back on either flank or central midfielder. 

Bielsaball involves huge amounts of running but Dallas only missed nine minutes in a season when he scored eight goals. 

As Dallas returns to the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday, it is with him yet to open his account this season. It would be less noteworthy but for two aspects: his exceptional season last year and the broader trend among Bielsa’s magnificent seven.

There are reasons why Pep Guardiola likes to call the Argentinian the best manager in the world and they have little to do with Bielsa’s medal collection; the Leeds manager has been known to make self-deprecating references to his relative lack of silverware. Part of it reflects Bielsa’s ambitious, attacking football, the thrills a high-octane approach can generate and the bravery of trying to man-mark all over the pitch. But part of it is because of his coaching prowess. 

Dallas is one of seven pillars of a side that charged into the top half of last season’s Premier League who highlight Bielsa’s ability to improve players. He inherited five from a club who finished in the lower half of the Championship under Paul Heckingbottom: Kalvin Phillips, Luke Ayling, Liam Cooper, Mateusz Klich and Dallas. Two more played for Middlesbrough in that division that season: Patrick Bamford, who was bought, and Jack Harrison, who was borrowed from City for three successive years.

Come last season and Cooper, once branded ‘League One Liam’, captained a team to ninth in the world’s best league. Klich started the season with goals in consecutive games. Harrison was one of the division’s most productive midfielders, combining eight goals with a further eight assists. Bamford was only outscored by Harry Kane, Mohamed Salah and Bruno Fernandes. Ayling, to his surprise, was namechecked by Gareth Southgate as a possible England call-up. Phillips became one of Euro 2020’s outstanding midfielders and one of only 22 Englishmen to start the final of a major international tournament.

Now Dallas has no goals and no assists. Harrison has one assist, albeit with a lovely cross against Tottenham, and no goals. Klich has one of each, but his goal was a penalty. Bamford’s tally of two goals would surely be greater but for injuries but Ayling is another running machine whose body broke down. Bielsa seems to believe Cooper is in Leeds’ strongest side; a majority of fans might argue otherwise.

There can be a debate about precisely how good Bamford is, about how much of an outlier last season was and what his natural level is, though there is none about how much Leeds have missed him in autumn. Phillips is undeniably a high-class player; he would improve Manchester United’s midfield, even if the thought of it may annoy many in Leeds. He is an illustration of Bielsa’s transformative powers.

His peers were models of both incremental and exponential improvement, seeming to get better every year until the crescendo of last season. There are factors for their struggles this year: principally injuries, but also bereavement, in Dallas’ case,  and the difficulties of playing in a team that has lost its rhythm and verve at times.

But if they have hit a wall, perhaps it is unsurprising. There may be a limit to how far even outstanding coaching can take most players. Some may have reverted to a standard of performance that might have been expected of footballers who, for the majority of their careers, were Championship stalwarts. There was something wonderfully incongruous in seeing Harrison among the finest attacking midfielders in the Premier League and Dallas looking one of the best players in any position. It was surreal but perhaps now reality is biting for Leeds.

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