Leeds United pull off transfer success as Championship promotion hopes given boost
After a challenging summer, the Whites’ supporters are feeling more unified as they pursue promotion.
A lot has changed since Leeds United’s Premier League relegation four months ago, with a transfer merry-go-round following the club’s 49ers Enterprises takeover and the appointment of Farke. Leeds United’s start under Daniel Farke, as well as a busy end to the transfer window, appears to have united the fanbase with supporters finally agreeing on where they think the club will finish this season.
An eventful summer came to a close with the transfer window’s closing, and attention is now squarely on what’s happening on the field. We have been asking Whites supporters where they think the team will finish this year because of this. It was the same query we posed in May after being demoted, and the parallels are intriguing.
Before the summer, opinions among fans were divided between those who believed the team would succeed in gaining promotion the first time around and others who thought it would regress to Championship oblivion.
In the days following relegation, there was a considerable discrepancy between the optimistic and pessimistic wings of the Leeds United crowd as 35% of supporters predicted automatic promotion and 29% predicted the club would end midtable.
Although fewer fans are anticipating to celebrate a top-two finish at the end of the season, the results reveal that supporters are generally more optimistic than they were in May. However, fans now seem to be much more certain about where the club will finish.
A quarter of the fanbase (25%) predicts the team will just miss the top six, while nearly half (46%) thinks the team will make the playoffs this year. This indicates that 84% of respondents, as opposed to only 68% a few months earlier, are anticipating a significant push for promotion.
At the same time, the proportion of supporters anticipating a midtable finish has more than cut in half, with only 12% now anticipating that the team would be completely eliminated from play-off contention.
