Very Specific Football Question No.23: Where is David O'Leary?

For a brief moment in Premier League time, Leeds United were the team that had it all: flair, pace, goals, attitude, ambition and the most lauded young players in the land. It was enough to make their rivals (and in the case of Leeds, that’s everyone) seethe with jealousy. Steering this hovercraft of hot talent was a fledgling manager taking his first surefooted steps on the path to greatness. A dulcet-toned Arsenal and Ireland legend with soft brown hair and a golden face, which had once exploded with joy after he slammed home that winning World Cup penalty against Romania. David O'Leary was the man with the Midas touch.

Leeds United’s fall in the following decade has been satisfyingly brutal for everyone their rivals. It leaves them languishing in the nether regions of the Championship, their passionate fans consoling themselves with the knowledge that one day - maybe next year, maybe next decade - they will be back where they belong. The same cannot be said for their former manager.

Last seen managing Al-Ahli in the Qatari league in 2011, the O'Leary trail has since gone cold. And even “last seen” is just a figure of speech. No one actually saw him managing Al-Ahli. For all we know, it’s just an entry he added to his own Wikipedia page before he gave up pretending to have a job. If this is the case, he hasn’t been editing it for the past four years.

O'Leary was sacked by Leeds in 2002 due to the club’s failure to convert lavish spending into trophies, but he remained attractive to chairmen and women alike. He was linked with various top-flight jobs during a year-long sabbatical, which he spent backpacking through Thailand and Cambodia wearing flip-flops, eventually agreeing to take the helm at Aston Villa. Despite a pleasant first season in the Midlands, he left by mutual consent in 2006 when Villa fans stopped enjoying his work. Once again, O'Leary started being linked with most of the world’s managerial vacancies, but this time no one good offered him a job. Eventually, even the newspapers making up the stories forgot about him, and he vanished.

O'Leary’s current whereabouts are the subject of very little conjecture. The average man in the street believes that he stays indoors most days watching Only Fools and Horses on Netflix, sporadically taking a break to pet his cat. Others assume he has settled for a quiet life on the Spanish coast, while some believe he spends his days wandering around his native Ireland dressed as a bush, just for his own amusement.

In fact, none of these are true. O'Leary wrote on his Wikipedia page that he was wrongfully dismissed by Al-Ahli, who claimed he had “abandoned his post”, like some kind of yellow-bellied security guard. O'Leary took his former employers to court and won compensation of £3.34m - a figure even more enormous than Seth Johnson’s Leeds salary.

In February 2014, a man resembling O'Leary appeared on a BT Sport studio panel for the Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United. However, the pundit’s lacklustre performance led to speculation that O'Leary had used some of his Qatari millions to construct a David O'Leary robot which he planned to send on public appearances to generate extra income. Although the allegations were never proven, O'Leary was not seen on the panel - or anywhere else - again.

O'Leary’s only remaining friend in football, the former Leeds midfielder Eirik Bakke, currently refreshes his former manager’s Wikipedia page on a hourly basis in the hope of another update.

Police have offered a £250 reward to anyone who can track down O'Leary’s managerial career.

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