One year on from Massimo Cellino’s Leeds United takeover and for the first time in a while, there is an opportunity to draw breath at Elland Road. It may not last long but for Neil Redfearn and his young side it is certainly well deserved – chaos exchanged for calm at a club that has provided more than a fair share of drama in recent times.

Such are the circumstances that Redfearn has been able to spend some of the international break tuning Leeds’ pre-season plans. They cannot possibly be any more slapdash than last year’s, when the players made their own packed lunches in northern Italy and won one game 16-0 against opponents more accustomed to waiting on tables.

In many ways it is remarkable Leeds have achieved mid-table security in the Championship with seven games remaining. Pre-season set a precedent for a turbulent few months, with Dave Hockaday sacked and replaced by Darko Milanic, the Slovene who lasted 30 days in the job. In January the team slipped to 21st and remained dangerously close to the bottom three for a number of weeks as the Football League banned Cellino as owner – after failing to pay import duty on a yacht was deemed a dishonest offence – and relegation loomed.

Those worrying days were littered with distractions but on a quiet afternoon at Leeds’ training ground the only disturbance comes from a lorry delivering crates of water. The club’s apprentices are tasked with lugging bottles up the stairs at Thorp Arch and as Redfearn casts his eye over them, he says: “You think the lads now are good, you should see these play.”

It comes as little surprise that Redfearn speaks with such passion about Leeds’ young players. The head coach has been at the club for six years, mostly with the academy, a period that is now bearing fruit for the first team. This season the midfield pair of Alex Mowatt and Lewis Cook – both called up for England youth duty last week – have emerged as burgeoning talents, while the wide players Charlie Taylor and Sam Byram have also progressed.

Redfearn has seen them all develop from prospects to regular starters. The 49-year-old from Dewsbury, who used to watch Leeds from the west stand as a seven-year-old, wrote United’s academy philosophy and coaching programme for the elite-player performance plan. He had been caretaker manager three times before Cellino entrusted him with the job in November, and his side have dragged themselves from the depths while the Italian has been exiled in Miami.

“These kids are massive assets at a time when the club doesn’t have many assets,” Redfearn says. “It doesn’t own the stadium, it doesn’t own the training ground. This is the bit they’ve got to protect, big style, because this is they way the club is going to get out of the shit.

“This club has sold its assets, sold its soul, when Leeds United has always been about youth. The Revie era, that great time, was about young, homegrown players. What you can’t do is sell your soul; you’ve got to protect that with your life.

“They’ve shown such strength of character and togetherness, not to mention ability, to get themselves out of this situation. Playing for Leeds United, there is a pressure and expectation anyway. They’re heavy shirts and it can wear you down if you don’t have that strength of character, but the kids have shown just that. These lads are the tip of the iceberg. It’s a really good time for this football club if there can just be some patience, some foresight and planning for the future.”

Patience, though, is a commodity rarely afforded to managers who work under Cellino, the owner who went through 36 head coaches in 22 years at Cagliari. He is expected to make a comeback to England in the coming weeks, returning to a club that has steadied of late, whether because of his absence or not.

The Italian’s future at Leeds is far from certain. There remain tax allegations against him regarding a boat and a car in Sardinia – similar to the case which resulted in a Football League ban until the end of the season – and an investigation into alleged misuse of public funds relating to Cagliari’s Quartu Sant’Elena stadium. He denies wrongdoing.

The last few months have provided welcome relief from such topics. Cellino has divided opinion within supporters of a club relegated from the Premier League in 2004, having invested in Leeds significantly but having also made some perplexing decisions.

Undoubtedly, though, the galvanising effect of the side’s renaissance has been fuelled by the emerging youngsters, with Redfearn drawing parallels between his crop and the famous Leeds side which twice won the league under Revie.

“If you look back to probably the greatest Leeds side ever under Don Revie, when he started and the club were in the Second Division without much money, they brought in Madeley and Reaney and Bremner, they had this group of experienced pros with them, but he basically took a big chance,” Redfearn says.

“In some respects we were in such a position where we had to change things. I knew that as the caretaker when I came in and I remember the first game, Bolton at home, when I put in Cook and Mowatt and everybody went: ‘What’s happening? You can’t do anything with kids.’ But you can.

“There is a whole load of people who have put years and years of work into this academy and all of a sudden you’re starting to see the fruits of it in the first team. For the sake of English football, you can’t look past the academies.

“I think the Premier League is the best league in the world, but I think it’s a monster. I think it’s run away with everything; the Football League has got no teeth, the FA has got no teeth. Our international sides are now losing their identity, wrongly. There’s got to be some way where our FA gets our identity back and it’s got to be through the youth.”

Redfearn is on a rolling 12-month contract. Other clubs have shown interest in the former Barnsley midfielder but he has no intention of leaving his project at Leeds. He was told by Cellino to keep the club in the Championship, yet plans for next year remain on hold because communication between the two is limited during the owner’s ban.

It remains to be seen how much stomach Cellino has for the fight when he returns. He has accepted his enforced hiatus, although is understood to be frustrated at the League ban and feeling like an outsider who will never be accepted into English football.

“I first met him properly was when I was invited down to Elland Road just before pre-season started,” Redfearn says. “He looked stressed and I just said to him: ‘Do you need some help?’ He smiled and just went: ‘Yeh.’ Rather than me going to judge, it was me going to help. I think that was needed at that time – it needed the people of Leeds to rally round.

“He thinks the kids are great, that things are young and vibrant. When I told him about Charlie Taylor the first thing he did was put him on a three-year contract, without actually seeing Charlie play. He backed me on that.

“The bit he loves is the football bit. When he speaks to me it’s always with passion about the football. He picks your brains and finds out about you, learns about you as a person; he likes to know about the person he is dealing with. He likes to know that he can trust you. He’s a vastly experienced football person.

“It’s written in my contract that I have got sole right to picking the starting XI and who plays in the side. Obviously I’ll talk football with him and I’ll talk players but he never tells me who to pick. I think he realises that he’s potentially got his hands on something really big.”

Leeds are at home to Blackburn Rovers on Saturday. United sit 17 points above Wigan, who are 22nd, and 15 points behind sixth-placed Ipswich Town but a strong finish could provide them with momentum to start next season on the front foot, something they missed last season.

The future, according to Redfearn, looks bright, providing his youngsters are allowed to flourish. “It’s vitally important that they stay, because they are top players. I don’t think we realise how good they are. Sometimes you don’t realise what you’ve got until it’s not there any more.

“My remit was to keep Leeds United in the Championship, so he [Cellino] must have realised we were in trouble. He must have done. He realised it was a mess. We’ve done that and some. I haven’t done myself any harm. But this has been six years in the making, not knowing that being head coach would be the end goal. The last thing I want to do is walk away now.”