The Leeds midfielder Kalvin Phillips is leaning against a table with his family. His gran pipes up. “Bielsa,” she says with a beaming smile. “Oooooh, I think he’s lovely … He walks around Wetherby sometimes. I heard he goes into Costa. I’d love to bump into him and say I’m Kalvin’s gran.”

After watching the first two episodes of Amazon Prime’s Leeds documentary, Take Us Home, you get the sense you would also get more time with Marcelo Bielsa if you wandered around the cafes of Wetherby – Phillips’s gran is in it more than the Argentinian and nice as she is, At Home with Kalvin Phillips’s Gran is a different show.

I’ve made enough cheap TV to know this is beautifully and expensively made. If you love football and you love montages then there is enough super slo-mo shots of exasperated and joyous fans, owners punching the air or punching the seat in front and match footage from cool, unexpected angles to keep you interested.

The cast of talking heads, from Heidi surrounded by Leeds memorabilia to Anthony and Dale sat in the pub are a perfect representation of their fans. You feel the love for the club and the hope and expectation.

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The narrator for this journey is Russell Crowe, who has supported Leeds since watching the great 1970s side on Match of the Day as a boy in Australia. This might suit an international audience but there is something very strange about Crowe explaining the nature of England’s second tier in his deepest possible voice. “The championship is a gruelling 46-game season and is considered one of the toughest football competitions in the world.” It’s almost impossible not to imagine Gladiator whenever he speaks, whether it’s explaining the intricacies of the play-offs or pointing out that Luke Ayling has a knee injury.

The series has been funded by the Leeds owner Andrea Radrizzani’s Eleven Studios and to begin with it feels like some curious propaganda exercise for the Italian. He explains how “one day I am going back to the dust”, saying he doesn’t want to take his money with him – good news for fans. He is praised by a business partner, his wife, his director of football, his chief executive. By the time the leader of Leeds city council explains what a good owner he is, you start to wonder why everyone is trying to convince you of the virtues of a man you had previously spent very little time considering.

A classic football documentary needs less boardroom and more dressing room. I want Peter Reid swearing more times than is physically possible without drawing breath after coming in 2-0 down at home to Wimbledon. I want John Sitton referring to his players as Bertie Big Bollocks and sacking players at half‑time. I want players avoiding eye contact with Barry Fry or Neil Warnock while they take years off their lives screaming at anything that resembles a footballer.

Football is not like that anymore but I would like to be sure and it appears here that the dressing room is off-limits. Apart from the odd voice-over, Bielsa is off-limits and he is the reason Leeds are fascinating right now. He famously doesn’t give interviews. And you have to wait until episode six to see his first sit down interview for two decades. It would be well worth teasing this through the whole series.

Play Video 1:51 Take Us Home: Leeds United docu-series on Bielsa's first season, narrated by Russell Crowe – trailer

We do hear from his old kit man at Newell’s Old Boys in Argentina explaining how he is not motivated by money. There is beautiful archive footage of him being carried along by his players after a title win in 1990. Ander Herrera, who played under him at Bilbao calls him “one of the best in the world”, obsessed with never cheating. Adam Forshaw says under Bielsa he has become a “sponge” so he can take everything in.

Much is made of how the players have had to adapt to his methods, making them work eight- to 10-hour days, but I want to know about Bielsa the man. I know he is obsessive. I know all he thinks about is football. We all watched the press conference after spy-gate.

I want to see him in his house thinking about football all day. I want someone to check he is thinking about football all day. I want Louis Theroux there, asking him questions that are in no way related to football and then letting them hang in the air.

It takes a while to get to the first match. Crowe gives their opening game of the season against Stoke such a buildup, you expect they are about to play Barcelona, or perhaps go into battle with the Visigoths of the North. Leeds go two up but then Benik Afobe pulls one back from the penalty spot. Perhaps it’s my mind but the music gets even more Gladiator. Other Leeds sides would have crumbled under such pressure but “this is a new Leeds”. They win 3-1.

Later, after a late Pontus Jansson equaliser at home to Brentford, Crowe announces this is when Leeds “show off a trait that is a signature of their glory years. A never-say-die fighting spirit”.

At the end of episode one, Crowe’s voice goes even deeper: “There is a long twisting road ahead and what is about to unfold will be one of the most dramatic seasons in the club’s history.”

Will it? This is a club who have won the league three times, reached the final of the European Cup and the Cup Winners’ Cup, who have been managed by Revie and Clough. They have had Bremner and Charles, Cantona and Hunter.

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TV has to emote and excite and poetic license is part of that – Crowe cannot say “This will all be an anticlimax and actually not too dissimilar to West Brom’s season just with a more interesting manager and a less interesting mascot” but there is a fine line between drama and hyperbole.

In episode two we are allowed into a board meeting but it feels very much like they film a bit of it for us and then get on with the real conversation. The director of football, Victor Orta, explains he talks to the manager for an hour a day to find out what he “likes in respect of the skills of the player” they may try to sign, which seems very much like a conversation the manager and director of football should be having.

But none of this will matter to Leeds fans. Even after two episodes you are left feeling that Radrizzani is as nice as everyone says and that his team and most of all Bielsa have inspired the club and to a degree inspired the city. Everyone comes across well – the fans, the players, the employees, Kalvin Philipps’ family.

The set up is really good but almost too good to make this compelling TV, which isn’t really the fault of the producers. Any sporting documentary is only as good as the story they follow and you do not know what that is going to be when you begin. Last year Leeds were interesting but they were not Sunderland getting relegated to League One and they do not have the stars of Man City in the two most recent comparable versions of this genre.

Football is about hope. It’s that simple. Ultimately, success or failure is less important. What matters is there is a reason to believe and you get that in spades from this documentary and that is way more important for the club and the city than whether their fly-on‑the‑wall TV show is slightly sanitised.

As the presenter of the Leeds podcast Phat Chants Micky P Kerr explains of the manager. “I love the guy. I’m obsessed with him. I think about him every day. I can honestly say there’s not been a single day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about Marcelo Bielsa. He’s brought hope and it’s the hope that kills you.”