Is Leeds manager Daniel Farke actually a bit underrated? — The Athletic 9/3/24

By Phil Hay

It was either bravado or total confidence, and Leeds United were invited to find out which.

Everyone else in the process to find the club’s manager last summer had adopted the conventional route of presenting to the panel. One of the presentations ran to almost 100 visual slides, swamping Leeds’ board with details about tactics, ethos, squad building, the rest. Clubs have come to expect nothing less.

Daniel Farke broke from protocol by choosing not to hit those interviewing him with heavy PowerPoint punches. I’ve won the Championship twice, the man who made Norwich City EFL title winners in 2019 and 2021 told them. I know what I’m doing. I get this division and it hasn’t changed much, so what else is there to think about? Take it or leave it.

Granted, the conversation was not that terse or blunt, and Farke was not over-promising either. Leeds had been recently relegated. They were urgently spinning plates and it was not the time for a prospective coach to overplay his hand. But Farke wanted Leeds to understand that if he was their pick from a shortlist of names, they would get what they were after: a team with the gumption to crack the Championship. People involved in the process say it was almost the equivalent of him interviewing them.

Leeds had so much to do, so much to resolve, that in that moment they would not have set the benchmark for Farke as high as the one he is hitting. Nine games out from the end of the regular season, his squad are close enough to leaders Leicester City, two points back having played one match more, to believe his third second-tier title in six years is far more than a Hail Mary.

Sheffield Wednesday away last night was an 11th league win in 12 matches in 2024, and different forms of data say the same thing: two points dropped from those available 36, three goals conceded in that period, Farke voted Championship manager of the month for the third time in four, the photos of him with the award less ecstatic each time.

How to burst such suffocating reliability? Because if Leicester, running Farke’s side as ragged as they did a fortnight ago, before losing 3-1, cannot cross the line against them over 90 minutes, who in this division will?

Andy Hinchcliffe, the former Sheffield Wednesday full-back and now Sky Sports EFL pundit, predicted last month that Leeds would end the season unbeaten at Elland Road.

Tips of that nature are risky because in the Championship every club gets burned eventually; too many fixtures, too relentless a schedule, human nature making missteps unavoidable. But what can be said about Farke’s team is that there is no fact-based argument against them potentially winning each game they go into.

They score when they need to, dipping into their reserves of class, like they did twice at Hillsborough on Friday. They barely concede or barely look like conceding, and that second yardstick is often a better gauge of organisation. Players can interchange, as they did in a 3-2 defeat at top-flight Chelsea in the FA Cup 10 days ago, without it looking like someone has removed the batteries. It is encouraging enough Farke having the core players he has. But then a 20-year-old Mateo Joseph steps out of the shade and blooms like he did that evening at Stamford Bridge.

And what of Farke himself in all this?

The best way to frame his impact is to say that in years and years of covering this club, of seeing coaches sink in the wet sand of irrational expectation, unhinged ownership, inadequate resources or whatever else was sent to drown them, it is difficult to think of one who has made the Leeds job look so smooth.

It took time for him to get to this position, via bumps in August and either side of Christmas, but for weeks now he has been fairly free to stand on the touchline, hands in pockets, chin tucked into the neck of his black coat as the players do what he asks them to do. It is methodical and religious, a whole dressing room on the same page, and relegation candidates Wednesday’s definite upturn of form recently was negated last night by the fact that Leeds’ form is better, and Leeds are better.

It did not look that way for 45 lifeless minutes, the football as foggy as the weather, but Leeds only need moments.

One came in added time before half-time as Junior Firpo redeemed a slightly stinky performance with a whipped cross which Patrick Bamford devoured at close range. A second arrived in the 58th minute when Bamford manipulated a high ball, Georginio Rutter played a pass around the corner and Willy Gnonto stuck it away. Two-nil and game, set and match, because Leeds do not fold from 2-0 up.

Plainly, none of what is happening at Elland Road is wildly against the odds, even if last summer was more fraught than history is likely to record. Leeds found a way to give Farke the tools he needed, beyond the levels of the average Championship side, and he would have questions to answer if the play-offs were currently getting away from him.

But there is a difference between being given the tools and managing them properly. There is a difference between being given the tools and motivating them properly, coaxing players who are out of form back into it and keeping the show on the road. The perception at Leeds, going back years, is that they never do the second half of a season as well as the first. Since the turn of the year, they lead the form table by seven points.

Good sides don’t do what they do merely because they are full of talent; exhibit A being Mauricio Pochettino and Chelsea as United found them in that cup tie.

There were brief periods before January when Farke was subject to a little grumbling about him refusing to let his players off the leash completely but latterly they have bulldozed on in a way which begs the question of why he would. His moaning is minimal and the messages he gives his squad about sticking to the programme, about going through the process, are consistent with what he says in public. A dressing room needs that clarity — a coach looking like he says what he means.

There is, in short, a lot of credit due to the club’s performance as their remaining regular-season fixtures run into single figures, and perhaps a touch more than Farke has received. For all that there is in his favour, and clearly there is plenty, it is far easier for a coach to suffer the meat grinder at Elland Road than it is to earn fillet steak. He got his third manager of the month award on Friday and while the Championship’s sponsors are having a hard time persuading him to smile for the camera, no Leeds boss working in this division has won it so often in one campaign.

Data provider Opta noted recently that when Leeds last recorded nine league wins in succession, in 1931, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein was being released in cinemas.

It stood as a neat metaphor for the monster Farke has created.