Pat Bamford always wanted to be the main man. It’s what he kept talking about when he joined Leeds United from Middlesbrough in the summer of 2018. The number nine shirt. The big club. The pressure and responsibility of being The Guy who scores the goals.
Seven years later, Bamford knows all about what being The Guy wearing the number nine shirt for a big club entails, and it isn’t always nice. There’s the constant scrutiny and criticism. There’s the demand to be that player every time you step onto the pitch no matter how the rest of the team is playing or how much your body is aching. There’s even the chance that if you fluff a penalty then you and your wife and kids will receive death threats on social media and cunts will turn up outside your house and you’ll need to hire security so your family will feel a semblance of safety at home.
Yet throughout it all, Bamford kept coming back for more.
There’s a perception of Bamford that he’s a confidence player lacking the mental strength for that confidence to be anything more than fleeting. It’s nonsense. Bamford’s greatest strength is his self-belief, that confidence bordering on arrogance every centre-forward needs to keep putting themselves in positions to score no matter how many previous chances they’ve missed. Nobody believes in Pat Bamford more than Pat Bamford himself. How else can you explain his decision to turn down an international call up from the Republic of Ireland because he believed he could play for England even though, at the time, he’d scored more goals in League One than the Premier League? How else can you explain him proving himself right?
Even as he says goodbye to Leeds United, Bamford was ready to fight for the shirt — quite literally, judging by the size of the biceps he developed over his summer holidays. It’s why plenty of fans expected we hadn’t seen the last of Bamford even after he’d been told by Daniel Farke that he wasn’t part of the plans at Leeds United in 2025/26. Truthfully, it feels like the healthiest decision for both player and club. It would only have taken another miss for the social media abuse to start again. Instead, he can now go and put those muscles to use as The Guy at another club, finally feeling the universal warmth of a fanbase he’s been on a wild ride with, knowing he leaves Leeds United in a better place than when he joined.
While so much of the coverage around Bamford’s departure is focussing on his admission that the handling of his exit still feels “too raw”, there was something else that stood out about his farewell statement:
> “Finally, I’d like to thank you fans. I know at times it’s been frustrating, and you’ve probably pulled your hair out at points as well, but together, in these seven years, we’ve celebrated some of the best moments in the club’s recent history.”
He gets it! He always did! It might feel like a strange thing to question, but I’ve not always been convinced Bamford has the self-awareness to match his self-confidence. For all the bile Bamford was subjected to online, inside Elland Road he received almost unwavering support, the chanting of his name a staple on the terraces throughout the last seven years — only sometimes when he was celebrating by cupping his ears or covering them it felt like he was listening to the wrong noises. Turns out I was wrong.
It’s all part of what has made Bamford one of the most endearingly bewildering footballers to represent Leeds in our recent history. For all the tear-you-hair-out misses, he was also capable of goals as spectacular as his Tony Yeboah impression at Peterborough, all while [reinventing himself on numerous occasions](https://thesquareball.net/leeds-united/the-eternal-enigma/) to leave us constantly guessing which Pat Bamford was going to turn up next.
Hat-trick Bamford will always be my most treasured Bamford, his individual performance at Villa Park in 2020 part of a collective display that encapsulated the thrills of Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United at its very best, grinding down Jack Grealish and co until they were left chasing shadows — with Bamford the focal point of it all. His second that night was a hit from the edge of the box with pure pizzazz, but it’s his third that remains one of my favourite goals of all time, the culmination of a couple of minutes of Super Leeds keep-ball in which the Peacocks swiftly nicked it back whenever the opposition dared to try win possession, finished off by Bamford toying with time, space, and half the Villa team.
Would we have seen more of that Bamford were it not for such rotten luck with injuries over the last four years, or did we only see it in the first place due to Bielsa pushing those players’ bodies to the limits? We’ll never know. What we do know is that Leeds’ repeated failure to identify another player capable of fulfilling a similar role in the team wasn’t his fault, which is why whoever was the manager at any given time kept turning to Bamford to help the rest of his team whether he was physically ready or not.
Even as Leeds move on, it remains to be seen whether there is a striker at the club capable of replicating Bamford’s role in the team. That’s not his problem, though, and he leaves having lived up to his promise from seven years ago, signing off his farewell with a description nobody could argue with. “Your number nine, Patrick.” ⬢