Good Morning. It's Thursday 8th October, and here are the latest headlines from Elland Road...
Leeds lead the Premier League for shots from set-pieces
Leeds United’s unbeaten start under Daniel Farke has been built on more than organisation. Five games into 2026-27 they sit fifth, with nine points from two wins and three draws, seven goals scored and only three conceded. The sharper edge has come from dead balls. That is a continuation of the shift that kept them up last season. By November 2025-26 Leeds looked in trouble. Farke moved to a back three, tightened the structure and leaned harder on set-pieces. They finished 14th, never seriously threatened after the turn. The same habits have carried into this campaign, and the numbers suggest they are now among the league’s most set-piece-reliant sides.Opta figures shared around the squad put Leeds top of the Premier League for the share of shots that come from non-penalty dead-ball situations, at 46.7 per cent. They also lead for the share of expected goals from those situations, at 41 per cent. Three of their seven league goals have arrived from set-pieces. For a side without a specialist set-piece coach, that is a striking early return. Ethan Ampadu is the most obvious weapon. The captain’s long throw caused problems throughout last season, Leeds scored five times from long throws, second only to Brentford, and he has carried it into this campaign. Only Brentford’s Michael Kayode sent more long throws into the box than Ampadu’s 135 last term.
Teammates say the throw has got longer and harder. Against Crystal Palace before the break, two of Leeds’ better openings came from it. The timing is convenient. Leeds go to Arsenal on Saturday, and the champions are short in central defence. William Saliba has still not played this season because of a back injury and is not expected back until December. Ezri Konsa is a major doubt after leaving the England camp with a quad problem; Thomas Tuchel called it light trauma, but Arsenal were still assessing him after the international break.
A back line missing Saliba, and most probably Konsa, is a kinder target for Ampadu’s throws and for deliveries into the box than a fully fit Arsenal defence.Leeds are not without absentees of their own. Joe Rodon is out for several more weeks with a hamstring injury, so the set-piece threat has to compensate for a thinner defensive unit as well as create goals. Farke’s side have also been modest in open play: they are not dominating territory, and the Palace draw showed how flat they can look when the dead-ball route is shut down.
That is the trade-off. Set-pieces have given a promoted side a repeatable way to score without matching the top clubs for chance creation in open play. Three goals from seven is a useful share this early; it is not yet a season-long plan. Arsenal, even though they are missing key defensive figures, are the first real test of whether the weapon travels. If Ampadu’s throw and the wider dead-ball routine trouble a championship defence at the Emirates, the adaptation Farke made last November will look less like a survival tactic and more like a method.
Leeds saved, or stuck by sustainability regulations?
Manchester City’s near-total guilty verdict on the Premier League’s financial charges has reopened a familiar argument: whether the rules that were meant to stop clubs collapsing have also locked the league’s hierarchy in place. An independent commission found the club guilty of all charges bar one sub-charge relating to co-operation, covering the period from 2009/10 to 2017/18. The findings, published in redacted form at the end of September 2026, concluded that City had misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances, with schemes that artificially inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900 million. The club has appealed. Sanctions have not yet been decided; the range available to the league runs from fines to points deductions and, in extreme cases, expulsion.That unresolved punishment has fed straight into the wider debate about Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and the squad-cost framework that is replacing them. On The Overlap Fan Debate, Jamie Carragher used Leeds United’s near-collapse as the cautionary case. In late 2003 Leeds were carrying debts of roughly £78–81 million after the Peter Ridsdale-era spending spree, had posted record losses approaching £50 million, and came within weeks of administration. Creditors granted temporary breathing space; the plc later entered administration in March 2004, though the football club itself was sold and continued. Carragher put the question directly to a Leeds supporter: were they glad rules now exist to stop clubs reaching that position again?
The fan’s reply was the one many outside the established group make, that the current system mainly protects the clubs already at the top. Carragher then pressed the other side of the same point: Leicester’s 2015/16 title is the standard counter-example, but how realistic is a similar leap for a club such as Leeds under today’s constraints? Both observations hold. Post-2000s regulation, and the tighter PSR regime that followed, has sharply reduced the number of cases in which an owner can load a club with debt and walk away, leaving supporters with an insolvent institution. Portsmouth’s collapse, Leeds’ 2003–04 crisis and several lower-league failures are the reference points the rules were written against. Clubs are more likely to remain going concerns across generations.
The same constraints also limit how quickly a newly promoted or mid-table side can close the revenue gap. Wage and amortisation caps tied to existing turnover favour clubs whose commercial and broadcast income is already large. Leicester’s title came before the current PSR settlement had fully hardened and rested on an unusually efficient recruitment model plus a single outstanding season; it has not been repeated. Newcastle’s post-takeover trajectory and the scrutiny applied to Aston Villa and others show the tension in real time: owner investment is permitted only within defined loss and squad-cost limits, so the path from mid-table to sustained title contention is narrower than it was in the early 2000s.
Leeds’ present ownership illustrates the narrowed route rather than an exception to it. 49ers Enterprises have put substantial capital into the club and the infrastructure around Elland Road, but they still operate inside the same sustainability tests as everyone else. Spending can accelerate a return to the Premier League and a push for European places; it cannot, under the rules as written, replicate the unchecked outlay that nearly sank the club two decades ago, or the scale of disguised funding the commission found at City. The City case will test how far the league is willing to go when the breaches are historic, large and, in the commission’s view, deliberate. Whatever sanction emerges, the structural question Carragher posed remains: the rules have made another Leeds-style meltdown less likely, and another Leicester-style title less likely as well.
