Much more alarming than the recent spate of defeats is that there’s nothing indicative of a long-term strategy here.

Leeds United are in a rut. Yesterday’s 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa was our fifth loss in six games. We’re now in the relegation zone. Only winless Wolverhampton Wanderers have scored fewer goals than our 11. Everything points to relegation and a swift return to the Championship.

All of which has precipitated the typical tidal wave of tropes that comes crashing over the horizon when a team finds itself in this kind of predicament. The manager needs to go. He’s out of his depth. He’s lost the plot. His tactics and team selections are taking the team down. And so on and so on.

The feeling amongst a growing body of malcontents is that if we retain Farke, we shall surely go down. In all probability they’re right, though I’d argue this squad would be no less likely to suffer relegation under a new manager. To my mind Wolverhampton are the only divisional rival who have a poorer squad. By rights we should get relegated. So what if we do? We go back to the Championship. We get another set of parachute payments. We find ourselves well-placed to make a swift return. It’d be a disappointment, but not necessarily a catastrophe.

Nobody wants to get relegated, of course. Least of all me. But the perception of relegation as something that a club must avoid at any cost lends itself to an all too often catastrophic short-termism. It leads to decisions that make superficial sense at the time but screw you further down the line. It was this sort of stupidity that meant Sunderland ended up paying the likes of Jack Rodwell £70,000 a week as they stumbled into the Stygian pit of League One. A prescription of changing the manager and sticking two-fingers up at PSR to embark on a January spending spree could well serve to make us worse in the long run.

No, we need to think long-term. And it’s here that the real problem lies. In April we at last got round to appointing a replacement for Victor Orta. According to a puff piece in The Athletic published in the summer, Nick Hammond put in a word for Adam Underwood and that was enough for the board to disregard his complete lack of experience as a sporting director and give him the job. At a Premier League club, no less. Archie Gray is the only youth player to have played significant minutes for the first team since the 49ers’ takeover and we sold him more than a year ago. In the last two seasons we made a number of expensive loan signings from the Premier League. Of them only Joe Rodon ended up staying at Elland Road on a permanent basis. This summer’s activity for the most part saw us recruit players in their late twenties. Few of them will have significant resale value and few seem a natural fit for Farke’s possession fetish. For all the talk of expanding the stadium’s capacity and establishing ourselves as a fixture of the top-flight, there has been nothing in this board’s activity resembling the adaptive, coherent and strategic thinking that has seen Brighton and Brentford achieve both of those things. That is far more alarming than the recent run of defeats and anything our manager supposedly is or isn’t doing.

You can cringe and whinge all you like about Farke’s persistence with Brenden Aaronson. But the heart of the matter is that this is a board that fails to understand where English football is at this moment and seems to have no real conception of our place in it. The sheer financial power of the Super League Six is such that they can afford to make multitudes of mistakes and still compete for silverware and European qualification. They are too rich to fail. We aren’t. If we want to compete at the highest level we need to be clever. Every penny needs to count. Every decision needs to factor in long-term implications. We need to devise a sustainable, long-term strategy and bloody well stick to it. Otherwise we’ll eventually find ourselves back where we were before Marcelo Bielsa turned water into wine: in our umpteenth season in the doldrums with a half-empty ground and a squad full of plodders.

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