Former Sheffield Wednesday boss Carlos Carvalhal is being linked with the vacant managerial role at Yorkshire rivals Leeds United following their relegation from the Premier League, according to the Yorkshire Post.
Carvalhal, who is currently the manager of La Liga side Celta Vigo, is being linked to the job at Elland Road following the departure of Sam Allardyce last week following his four-game stint of managing the club in which he was unable to keep them in the Premier League, being relegated to the Championship alongside Southampton and Leicester City following a 19th place finish.
Who is Carlos Carvalhal?
A defender in his playing days representing the likes of Braga and Chaves in his native Portugal, Carlos Carvalhal took his first steps towards getting into management at Portuguese second-division side Espinho, the club where he finished his playing career.
After spells of managing other clubs in Portugal like Braga and Sporting CP as well as in Turkey with the likes of Beşiktaş and İstanbul Başakşehir, Carvalhal would make the move to England to take over the head coach role at Sheffield Wednesday in 2015.
During his two-and-a-half-year spell at Hillsborough in which he led the Owls to a sixth-place finish in the 2015/16 season and a fourth-place finish in the 2016/17 season in the Championship, the 57-year-old would go on to take charge of 131 matches in total for Sheffield Wednesday, winning 56 of them before leaving the club by mutual consent in late December 2017 with the Yorkshire outfit sitting in the bottom half of the Championship table.
It wouldn’t take the Portuguese manager long to find a new job as he became the boss of Premier League strugglers Swansea City, four days after leaving his initial role at Sheffield Wednesday.
Brought in to try and keep the Swans in the top flight, Carvalhal was unable to help the club avoid the drop to the Championship as they finished 18th in the Premier League, failing to win any of their remaining nine Premier League matches before eventually leaving the club at the end of the season.
At present, the 57-year-old Portuguese currently finds himself managing Spanish side Celta Vigo in La Liga, keeping the club in the top flight of Spanish football on the final day of the season following a 2-1 victory over champions Barcelona.
A nightmare season for Leeds United
The 2022/23 Premier League season has been disastrous for Leeds United, in a campaign that has seen the club take the drop back to the Championship alongside Southampton and Leicester City, bringing an end to their three-year stint in the English top flight.
In a season which has seen Jesse Marsch, Javi Gracia and Sam Allardyce taken to the Elland Road dugout, Leeds was unable to retain their Premier League status following their dismal 19th-place finish.
Alongside that, Leeds ended the season with only seven wins and 31 points to their name, as well as having the league’s worst defence with the Yorkshire outfit conceding a total of 78 goals in the Premier League, five more than Southampton who will also join them in the Championship.
Writer’s View
For Leeds United to go and potentially appoint someone like Carlos Carvalhal, I think it would be an interesting appointment, to say the least.
If there is a positive side to this potential appointment, it is mainly down to the fact he has experience in England and specifically, the Championship following an all-round successful spell at Sheffield Wednesday in which he nearly took the club to the promised land of the Premier League.
There is always a risk when it comes to appointing a new manager but something Leeds needs to do right now is to start from scratch – rebuild the squad as well as inject some stability into the team, something that has been missing from Elland Road for some time now.
Could Carlos Carvalhal be the man to do that for the club to mount up a challenge in a bid to return to the Premier League at the earliest possible opportunity? Possibly.
