Premier League announcement addiction takes hold but Marcelo Bielsa's reality is what is needed - Daniel Chapman

After preparing his players, Marcelo Bielsa often tries to prepare his club’s fans.

“The ideal is to try to keep this moment as long as we can,” he said, after promotion was won. “After, naturally, this moment will go. So don’t replace this special moment with another feeling.”

Well, we held out for a week, but then another week went by without another trophy being lifted or anybody screaming from the top of a bus, and so, naturally, this moment has gone.

In the past Bielsa has also said that the emotions attached to success are fleeting, five minutes of euphoria replaced by “that enormous and huge emptiness.”

Now that emptiness is being filled just as quickly, because football abhors a vacuum, with an enormous and empty summer mantra. Transfer speculation. Kit speculation. Stadium speculation. Takeover speculation.

No sooner is the celebration poster pinned to the wall, than speculation’s sledgehammer comes to bash it all down, paper, plaster and cement. We loved this football club and its staff and players for all they gave us last season, but we’re using the past tense now. Announce replacing it all, except Marcelo Bielsa, and maybe Ben White.

The takeover speculation is the most interesting and the most severe. There have been rumours about Qatar Sports Investments for what feels like forever, despite all of it sounding terrible: Leeds becoming a ‘little brother’ to Paris Saint-Germain, QSI’s big project that, dominating domestically, keeps falling woefully short of its Champions League targets.

And this weekend Paraag Marathe of the San Francisco 49ers, whose investment arm already own a percentage of Leeds, spoke to the New York Times about increasing that stake to help Leeds build “organically and thoughtfully”, apparently the last thing many fans want while QSI are waiting in the wings.

It’s all so painfully familiar. Looking back over the last 16 years outside the Premier League, the worst part of them was how tawdry business dominated our time and thinking so much more than the admittedly equally tawdry football.

It took effort to remember we were supposed to be trying to enjoy supporting a football team, not obsessing over the balance sheets of a ramshackle small business in decline.

The past few weeks have brought relief to our collective desperation to leave Scott Wootton, Kevin Nicholls and Edgar Cani behind.

But it seems like nothing can break the grip that 16 years of takeover talk still holds on Leeds fans, as if the one thing we treasured all along was the joy of googling Preston Haskell IV to decide if he could afford Mbappe.

It’s partly the Premier League’s fault that this doesn’t subside.

The top flight encourages a new kind of very online fan for whom it wouldn’t matter if their chosen club never played a game of football, as long as a regular stream of announcements about kits, signings, stadium developments and investment gave them a steady supply of brags.

Last season Kalvin Phillips looked bemused and embarrassed by the amounts clubs seemed willing to pay to take him to the Premier League, but those are the numbers fans demand to boast about. A club can spend £5m on a player and be accused of lacking ambition. Spend £50m on the same player and it’s a statement of intent to throw in the face of other sides.

It’s all generated by the Premier League’s crisis of confidence, the way it has to keep convincing others that it’s the best league in the world, if only to convince itself.

The legend goes that, even to compete in the English top flight, a club has to spend untold millions on Mbappe and Neymar, a magical lock and key opening glory.

The reality is that Sheffield United were threatening the Champions League places this season not with Neymar but with Billy Sharp.

Wolves built their side in the Championship and will be playing this week for their place in the Europa League quarter-finals.

Leicester’s star creators, Harvey Barnes and James Maddison, did their growing up in the Championship.

They’ll be playing in Europe next season. If Phil Jones can be a Premier League star then Liam Cooper should give us no fear.

Here, again, we can listen to Bielsa, famous for his preference for “the nobility of the resources used” over expensive signings that only boost egos or fulfil false ideas of what constitutes ambition.

A successful football club is a delicately calibrated thing, and in Bielsa’s hands it’s a grenade with the pin ready to be pulled if the hierarchy doesn’t keep him happy.

An underrated part of United’s success has been the way, despite disagreements and failed transfers, the board have kept the trust of the hardest coach to please in world football.

After 16 years of playing unlucky roulette, if Marcelo Bielsa thinks Leeds United can meet his ambitions, who really wants to spin the wheel in search of reflected glamour?