Where can Daniel Farke take Leeds?

We never wanted to be Norwich, that was the point. We were Leeds. Leeds might be good or Leeds might be bad. Being Leeds was better.

Even when Norwich were in the Premier League and we weren’t, and they’d stolen all our good players and given us Steve Morison and Adam Drury, the pathetic ones were the Canaries. Such a horrible mundane little bird when compared to a majestic peacock. It was like some protracted revenge for our theft of Andrew Hughes as they took Bradley Johnson, Jonny Howson, Robert Snodgrass and Sam Byram and went up to the Premier League, taunting us as if they were better at being Leeds United than Leeds United could be. Their only route to success was being Leeds, and even when it worked, and we were bitter and angry about it, we didn’t envy them in the sense of wanting to be them. Being Norwich, to me, would have meant taking control of the club, releasing Luciano Becchio from purgatory in Yarmouth, and closing what was left of it down. 

2023 comes at you fast. Doing a Norwich is now so essential to our club’s wellbeing that the players’ summer diet plans could have been taken from one of Delia Smith’s cookbooks. I’m going to try not to dwell on recent history because we all know it, but it is important to connect it to the longer history of our last three promotions to the top flight. 1964, up from Division Two straight to the summit of the First Division, we stayed at the top for more than ten years. 1990, up from Division Two straight to the summit of the First Division, we were top five for all but three of the next twelve seasons. 2020, up from the Championship straight to the top half of the Premier League, we…

We could have established ourselves for another decade among the elite, but the board got pissed without realising the wine they were drinking would still be water if it wasn’t for Marcelo Bielsa. They Sacked Bielsa and now we are here, back in the Championship, hoping to yo-yo back to the top flight the way we haven’t since the 1920s and 30s, but Norwich have. That is the plan, now. Bounce back up. Be Norwich. I suppose in a footballing landscape where being Brentford or Brighton has become aspirational Leeds United just have to swallow our bigger-than-your-club ego and get on with this.

Enter, eventually, Daniel Farke. It’s understatement to call him an improvement on Sam Allardyce but not over the top to call him, at first, underwhelming. It’s the associations, you see. Norwich City’s best recent manager. Well. Great. And in fashionable terms of coaching trees, he’s a branch from the genus of Stuart Webber. Webber is the Leeds-supporting, mountain-climbing, women’s football-hating sporting director who got David Wagner to Huddersfield and got them into the Premier League, then went to Norwich, and got the guy who had replaced Wagner at Borussia Dortmund II, Farke, to get them into the Premier League, twice, then replaced him with David Wagner (via Dean Smith). There’s nothing wrong with these achievements. But our own promotion in 2020 was supposed to clear away all the cobwebs of lagging behind Terriers and Canaries for so long. We had our pride back. But I guess we’d already lost it again by the time Allardyce showed up.

Besides, it’s not the first time an old Norwich boss has become manager of Leeds United. Norwich were newly reformed after the First World War when Major Frank Buckley took charge of affairs at The Nest, an odd little ground at the bottom of a disused quarry where fans perched atop a concrete precipice just yards from the touchline. Crowds for Buckley’s team were becoming a health and safety nightmare but he and several directors and players walked out when the board decided not to report an illegal approach for one of their team. Buckley worked for three years as a travelling sweets salesman before returning to football at Blackpool, then Wolves, then after the Second World War Leeds. His time at Wolves had marked him as a visionary: ruthless in the transfer market, willing to experiment with training techniques, famous for the injections of ‘monkey serum’ that opposing players complained made his team unstoppable zombies. Leeds were relying on him to get them out of Division Two, but while his methods were still idiosyncratic — he had the players ballroom dancing on the pitch, while neighbours complained about him bellowing obscenities at them over the new public address system — his style was becoming anachronistic. Dressed in Edwardian plus fours and carrying a couple of fox terriers around with him, the Major eventually decided the board’s lack of ambition was holding the club back and left to manage Walsall in the Third Division. 

It’s just about possible, across seventy years, to make some comparisons with Daniel Farke. 1990s style is back but his haircut and parka combo never went away. There’s a cringe factor, too. “Imagine one of my young players and the most beautiful girl in their town asks them for a date to go to the cinema,” he said in 2020, wandering on for a while until he got to: “But if this young guy was already with, let’s say Keira Knightley, he might say that is nice but a new haircut is expensive, the cinema is busy and I am bit too lazy to buy flowers. I will probably stay on the sofa and watch a game of football. You are not excited any more.” He was talking about how his players had to be as excited to play Brentford as they were to play Liverpool. “Maybe this is a bad example,” he said. Remember, too, that in tandem with Stuart Webber, Farke’s Norwich tried to psych out visiting teams by having Carrow Road’s away dressing room painted ‘deep pink’ for its ‘testosterone lowering’ properties.

We should expect Farke to have a presence at Elland Road, then, risking all the perils of managerial personality that so ruffled up Jesse Marsch. I can do the headlines right now: ‘From Mother Teresa to Keira Knightley, have Leeds hired another headcase? Gabby Agbonlahor says…’ But Farke is 46 and perhaps what we’re encountering here are the first steps towards a more successful second act. Norwich was a learning curve. Krasnodar — that job ended before it began due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last season at Borussia Mönchengladbach? They finished 10th, bottom half by three points, a season with some eye-catching wins that, according to Kicker, ‘went step by step down to the gray mediocrity’ that may be as much Mönchengladbach’s fault as Farke’s. It was their second successive season finishing 10th, their second single-season coach in a row. Farke left by mutual consent.

Which brings Farke back to the Championship he’s won twice and to Leeds, and brings this blog post to the football. Elland Road’s summer of inactivity has reduced fans to pleading for just the appearance that things are happening, never mind actual events, but still, there will be a football team soon and it will play matches, and what will that be like? Hopefully it will be like this, in Farke’s own words, although he was claiming this was what he was about to do in Mönchengladbach where it never quite took:

“The better you are in possession, and the better your possession, then the more likely you are to have a solid defence, because when you have 70-80% possession, then providing you’re not scoring your own goals, then you shouldn’t concede. That’s a fact. Then you also have more energy, power and concentration to focus on defending off the ball.
…
“We also want to work on being a bit more dominant on the ball and having good structure in possession or being prepared for the moments when you have to defend.”

If this is Farkeball, I’m a fan. And I’m already wondering why, as an attack-minded possession-orientated manager with a focus on being prepared to defend counter-attacks, Farke couldn’t have been brought straight to Leeds after Bielsa so we could have had all anyone then was asking for — the same, but with a bit more defending — instead of letting Jesse Marsch dismantle it all. 

Reading about Farke’s preferences, watching bits of old Norwich games, I’m immediately optimistic about next season’s Leeds United team because I think our players might be passing to each other, and not sideways (he is sternly against sideways passing). As it stands, with Adam Forshaw out of contract and assuming Tyler Adams and Marc Roca leave, our club has no senior midfielders, giving Farke an opportunity to call what I’ll charitably call an oversight into an opportunity. A couple of newly bought midfielders who can pass to their teammates would be very welcome. And, knowing how reliant Farke’s Norwich were on Emi Buendia — much of their second Premier League relegation gets put down to his sale to Aston Villa and some bungled reinvestment — perhaps we’ll go get a new true creative, too. Farke’s first Championship champions scored 93 goals with a goal difference of +36. His second scored 75 with +39. I’ll take either. Thanks in advance, Daniel.

The new owners’ belief seems to be that Championship lightning can strike a third time for Farke. The stories go that 49ers Enterprises have been using the time spent not announcing Farke to run a vigorous and detailed analysis of a wide range of managerial candidates. They’ve ended up with the guy who has won our division twice and scored loads of goals doing it, so I guess at least their spreadsheets are matching up to my eye test. All their talk of science doesn’t quite tally with either the result, or their other key requirement: an obvious safe pair of hands from centre field. They wanted a manager with a name and a track record, not a Thomas Christiansen (I still love him) style punt into Hail Mary territory. Farke fits that bill so neatly that the biggest question mark about him seems to be his poor record with Norwich in the Premier League, as if all we need to worry about is whether he can keep us up next season. It’s probably worth waiting to see if Farke can rediscover the Champo Midas within him, first.

Farke may exit eventually as a hero on horseback, but one saddled up celebration is more than most coaches get in their careers, and he had that at Lippstadt, so what’s left? Quite a lot, given he’s still only 46. We’ll have to wait and see what effect last year at Mönchengladbach has, but dare I mention it, when Marcelo Bielsa arrived at Elland Road it was after three chaotic months and an undignified sacking at Lille that had pushed him to the edges of employability and into the clutches of Leeds. Farke’s two significant jobs are six years building a club from almost nothing in Lippstadt, and four-and-a-half years at Norwich in a country where the average tenure before a manager is sacked, according to the League Managers’ Association, is eleven months. Farke first trained to be a sporting director and, while Stuart Webber did that work at Norwich, the work needed to build a new squad in the next few months at Leeds may suit Farke in a way that creates a longer term foundation for his own success. Or he’ll just get sacked like every other manager, who knows. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)