Leeds’s season is 90 minutes old but they could not have made a more convincing start than in their 3-1 win at Bristol City. The caveat is that blazing starts are nothing new under Marcelo Bielsa and he acknowledged that this is ground zero in terms of achieving the Premier League return he stuck around to realise. The wry smile and sheepish chuckle that greeted a question asking if his team’s suffocating performance in platinum and pink surpassed his expectations said as much. “I know perfectly well that this is a long season and all of the things that happen at the start of the season do not determine the finish. We suffered a lot in this situation last season,” he said.

But the early evidence, as it was last season when Leeds won five of their opening six matches, is compelling. Even if Bielsa does tickle his squad by adding another new face before the transfer deadline on Thursday, other than the defender Ben White, who was peerless on debut on Sunday, and Hélder Costa, a summer addition from Wolverhampton, he is working with the same core of players, including a raft of youngsters from the club’s academy, with the 17-year-old Mateusz Bogusz the latest to make a big impression.

“Everybody has highlighted that Pontus Jansson left but Ben came in and he looked like he had been there for years,” the striker Patrick Bamford said of the Brighton loanee. White coped with a couple of cannoned balls into his feet, took the sting out of attacks and prevented any sticky situations from festering.

Despite key departures – Kemar Roofe has just followed Jansson and Bailey Peacock-Farrell out of the door – the spine of the team remains pristine; so strong, so stubborn. Bielsa has an inner circle of dependables that define them: Liam Cooper, Mateusz Klich, Kalvin Phillips and Pablo Hernández, who somehow did not get into the Championship team of the year last season.

Because of how Leeds blew Bristol City away, Bielsa could afford to keep some of his powder dry at Ashton Gate, with Jack Clarke, the teenage forward back on loan at the club after joining Tottenham for £10m this summer, not called on and Ezgjan Alioski and Costa merely saying hello off the bench. Leeds hardly looked bereft of options with Gaetano Berardi and Luke Ayling still to return from suspension and injury respectively.

Jansson has left for Brentford and Roofe joined Anderlecht on Tuesday but keeping hold of Phillips, a player tracked by Aston Villa this summer, was paramount because he provides Leeds’s zest. He is comfortable dropping into defence in Bielsa’s famed 3-3-1-3 and has made the anchorman role his own under the Argentinian in Leeds’s familiar 4-1-4-1 formation. It has not been plain sailing – Phillips was hooked twice before half-time last season – but, as his manager has suggested, when Phillips plays well, so do Leeds.

Phillips is a midfield bouncer, first on the scene at the very scent of danger, but he also makes Leeds tick. He shakes off challenges, turns over possession, eats up ground and drives Leeds forward. For fans, Phillips is the local boy done good, having grown up in Armley, around the corner from Elland Road.

The uproar around spying led to scrutiny of Bielsa’s integrity but he is a magnanimous character. Be it detailing his plans for the season on a piece of paper after bumping into fans in Wetherby, handing out sweets to young supporters at home games, naming his team before matches or ordering Jansson to allow Villa to score in the spirit of the game, Bielsa has proved to be a generous personality.

Even the way Bielsa offered the world a peek inside his brain via that Powerpoint presentation in January was as daringly transparent as it was extraordinary. On Sunday Bielsa attempted to cool simmering tensions by approaching Lee Johnson at half-time to clear the air over a touchline disagreement between his physio and the City head coach. They sorted out their differences at the interval but Johnson was unhappy. “If you had a tactician watching the way they conduct their technical area, you’d see why,” he said. “They like to work that and listen, fair play to them, most clubs do the same.”

Bielsa and Leeds are approaching uncharted territory – he is the first manager to start successive seasons at the club since Simon Grayson eight years ago – but something about this marriage feels sacred. For a team to put down as resounding a marker as they did on the back of another brutal summer of triple and quadruple sessions sets the tone for another tantalising campaign.

The challenge is to be more durable and how bottomless this small Leeds squad will prove over a gruelling season remains to be seen but they have already offered answers to several questions in one fell swoop. Bielsa’s methods are no mystery, his thinking is no longer shrouded in secrecy but early evidence suggests Leeds will take some stopping.

Talking points

• With all the chaos at Bolton and Bury, it is easy to forget the grief Coventry are going through. For the second time in six years the club are playing home games away from the city, this time 22 miles outside Coventry at St Andrew’s. Mark Robins’s side beat Southend in their League One opener in front of a crowd of more than 6,500. “It’s like moving house,” Robins said. “Whilst the environment’s a little bit different, you get used to it pretty quickly.”

• Over the years countless managers have described players returning from loan as like a new signing and Steve Cooper may be able to adopt that adage regarding Borja Bastón. A £15.5m signing from Atlético Madrid three years ago, Baston scored his first Swansea goal since October 2016 in victory over Hull last Saturday. Swansea could do with offloading the high-earners Bastón, Jefferson Montero and Andre Ayew but Bastón’s early-season form is encouraging. Meanwhile the Bournemouth striker Sam Surridge, who shone in spells at Oldham and Yeovil, has joined on loan.

• Whether it is an under‑nine, a first-year scholar or Ben Woodburn, the No 10 on loan from Liverpool, Oxford United have given all 171 of their players a squad number this season. Each number will be printed in the club’s match-day programme. “Those lads wearing the big numbers have something to aspire to: keep making those numbers smaller and smaller until you are wearing a number between 1 and 11,” said the manager, Karl Robinson.