While hating Leeds United and exulting in their every disappointment is the default setting for most football fans, one supporter has a theory that those wishing misery on Leeds are unwittingly cheering for their own obliteration in a nuclear fallout. Reddit user GRI23 has posted his theory on r/soccer, and he has kindly allowed us to reprint his thesis that relegation for Leeds United would accelerate the apocalypse.
So, now that you armed with the knowledge that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is an underwhelming goal return for Chris Wood, here it is...
Odd thing to say surely, seeing as Leeds United have so many rivalries and are generally one of the most hated teams in England.
But I decided to look at the relationship between the safety of the world and the form of Leeds United (because I have nothing better to do while 'studying' for A-Levels)
Doomsday Clock
The Doomsday clock was devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board. It began in 1947 and was originally an analogy for showing how close the world is to nuclear war. It began at 7 minutes to midnight and has fluctuated ever since, at 'midnight' a nuclear war begins. For more information take a look at this Wikipedia article and this website that logs the times and reasons for changing the times.
Leeds United
Leeds were a fairly insignificant club for their early history, bounding between the First and Second division until the 1961 appointment of Don Revie. During his 13 year stint he guided Leeds to two First Division Championships, an FA Cup, a League Cup, and two Inter-Cities Fairs Cups (the precursor to the Europa League). He left in 1974 to succeed Alf Ramsey as England manager. Replacing him was Brian Clough who was dismissed after a tumultuous 44 days in charge. Later that season Leeds were cheated out of lost a European Cup Final to Bayern Munich. They spent most of the 1980's in the Second Division before Howard Wilkinson got them promoted and won the last First Division title in 1992, with a certain egotistical Frenchman leading the line. The 90's and early 2000's were successful including a UEFA cup semi-final and a Champions League semi-final. However, it came all crashing down with their financial implosion. For the rest of the 2000's and 2010's they have been in the Championship aside from a three-year stint in League One (during which Swindon Town soundly beat Leeds 3-0 home and away).
State of the World
The 1950's were considered to be dangerous according to the Doomsday clock, due to the Korean War and the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom developing nuclear weapons. The 1960's were safer as were the 70's (during which oh so coincidentally Leeds had their best period of success). The 1980's were considered to be very dangerous as the Soviet Union was on the edge of implosion before tensions soothed in the 90's and early 2000's. Recently North Korea have been going full Newcastle and acting like they are big despite being from a shithole, but despite this everyone acts like they are dangerous because they have a new leader and so the Doomsday Clock has recently reached one of its lowest points.
So is there any link?
Maybe. Leeds being in the limelight does give everyone a common enemy to band around to hate so there is some credibility to the theory.
But regardless I ran the numbers and produced these graphs. These graphs show a definite link, but I decided to use the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient (a real mouthful though probably not the biggest for some readers). And using my recently acquired knowledge of Stats 1 & 2, I tried to interpret this. I came out with an r value of -0.5803, which implies a negative correlation. r values have a value of -1<r<1 with 1 being absolute positive correlation, -1 being negative, and 0 meaning no correlation.
A value of -0.5803 is so high that, according to my A-Level maths data book, this is above the critical value for a correlation test at the 0.5% significance level.
Therefore there is less than a 1 in 200 chance that the end of the world is not caused by Leeds doing poorly
There you have it. The original post is available here.
