Daniel Farke’s return with Leeds a reminder of where Norwich want and need to go — The Athletic 20/10/23

By Phil Hay and Michael Bailey

At Carrow Road this weekend, reunions everywhere.

There is Daniel Farke and his coaching team, coming back to the club he once managed with aplomb. There are footballers still at Norwich City who played for him and at least one he wanted Leeds United to buy in August. Sam Byram is in white, Adam Forshaw is in yellow and green and tucked away in Norwich’s dugout is first-team coach Andrew Hughes, a warhorse of Leeds’ promotion from League One in 2010.

This is how the merry-go-round works: people in football dotting from place to place, staying put for so long and then tipping up elsewhere, but Farke will be the story when Norwich host Leeds tomorrow (Saturday), returning to the city where it all started for him in English football.

Farke has not been seen at Carrow Road since he was removed from his job as manager there in the winter of 2021, told to clear out after four years, two Championship titles, a Premier League relegation and 208 games. And if the crowd at Norwich are not pining for him specifically, they are pining for some of what he gave them: swagger, progress and big steps forward, the taste of something good.

Because the position today is rather different.

Two weeks ago, at the end of a 1-1 draw at Coventry City that took them into this international break, there was unrest in the away end as the club’s players approached it. Norwich had led until the 88th minute but failed to protect a 1-0 advantage. Their Championship form showed two wins from seven games after starting the season with three wins out of four. Pockets of supporters berated the squad and also berated fellow fans who were starting to applaud the players. Reports of scuffles on the way out of the stadium spoke of simmering disharmony.

Norwich, coached by another German now in David Wagner, are seventh in the table and three points off third place, but, some would say, lodged in the holding pattern they fell into in the aftermath of Farke’s sacking.

Leeds can relate because they have been through the emotionally delicate process themselves; of reaching the end of the line with a revered coach and floundering in knowing exactly what to do next.

February will mark two years since their sacking of Marcelo Bielsa, but only now does it feel as if they are coming through the other side of that romance. Farke has done more than any of Bielsa’s other three successors to quicken up that process.

One of these clubs might have found an answer. Wagner, a manager who has magicked a way out of this division to the Premier League before with Huddersfield Town in 2017, is trying hard to convince the fanbase at Carrow Road that he is theirs, with scrutiny rising.

Farke’s reputation is like Bielsa’s insofar as the fractious periods he had at Norwich, the periods which brought about his demise, did not detract from the appreciation of what he did at his best. Norwich were Championship champions twice under him but were relegated limply from the Premier League in each subsequent season, albeit the second time it happened long after he had been dismissed.

The best of the numbers were excellent: promotions claimed at a canter, both by double-figure margins. The worst of the numbers were not pretty: sent straight down with just 21 points (only five wins) in 2019-20 and winless in 10 league games at the start of 2021-22 when the end came. In hindsight, it might have been a 2-1 defeat to Leeds at Carrow Road that October — a result Bielsa also badly needed — which did for Farke. City claimed their first win of the season away to Brentford the following weekend but still sacked him within an hour of the final whistle.

Farke’s relegations, or those he at least partially oversaw at Norwich, came up in conversation when he was interviewed for the Leeds job in June.

He told them that, in his opinion, he had the credentials to be a long-term Premier League manager. As he saw it, neither promotion with Norwich had given him a fair crack of the whip. Between his budget and the club’s recruitment, led by sporting director Stuart Webber, he felt his squad had twice gone into the top flight with only the smallest chance of surviving; requiring “a miracle”, as he put it at the time.

Farke had no stock in England when Norwich picked him up from Germany, where he was working as Wagner’s successor at Borussia Dortmund’s B team, in 2017 — a left-field choice which worked superbly. Speaking on Friday, he would not be drawn on the timing or the manner of his exit almost two years ago.

“I never speak about this topic,” he said. “My principle is always to judge a situation. It’s not important what people think when you come in through the door. It’s more important what people think when you go out.

“I think I was their first non-British manager, they trusted me, and I’ll be forever grateful. I always have the good memories in mind.”

Asked if there was anything he’d change with hindsight, Farke said: “When you watch back each and every week, you have things you would do in a different way. I have to be there with hundreds of decisions every week, not always big decisions, and there are situations where you think, ‘I should have done this in a different way’.

“As a manager, once you think, ‘Right, now is the moment I know everything about football, I’m world-class’, you should retire because you become a dinosaur. You always have to make sure you’re ahead of the wave; or (at least) that is my approach.

“Norwich was a big challenge. The situation I went into, it was more or less a group which was too old, too expensive, mid-table, unbelievable financial pressure. I had other options at that time, in Germany, but I decided, ‘No. I want to work in the motherland of football’. Because if you’re capable of solving that situation, you don’t have to fear anything.”

The Webber-Farke axis was a very productive one when it worked — and Webber, to his credit, stood by Farke after that first loss of Premier League status, a miserable post-lockdown run of nine straight defeats, with only one goal scored, to end the season in stadiums empty because of pandemic-restrictions as Norwich finished last, 13 points adrift of second-bottom Watford.

Norwich were untouchable in both of the promotion years, but the closing months of Farke’s time in charge put pressure on their relationship.

Webber is a Leeds fan who, on occasion, has been known to pop up in the away end when they are on their travels. He is also technically available for somebody to employ after Norwich announced in June that he would leave the club once he had served his notice. But despite that, and despite Leeds’ intention to name Farke as their manager, Webber was missing from the shortlist when the board at Elland Road went looking for a new technical director in the wake of relegation from the Premier League last season. Getting the band back together was an idea they avoided.

That vacancy arose after the departure of Victor Orta. Like Webber at Norwich, Orta had been in his post since 2017. Leeds considered several alternatives to the Spaniard, including Brentford’s Lee Dykes. When it came to a decision, they plumped for Gretar Steinsson, recently gone from Tottenham Hotspur, and employed Nick Hammond as an additional transfer consultant. Webber did not feature in the final interview process and is still with Norwich now, although Ben Knapper is due to arrive from Arsenal as their new sporting director next month, clearing the way for him to move on.

It was Webber who told Farke his time at Norwich was up as they sat together in the away dressing room at Brentford. Norwich, correctly, feared they were going down again, and duly did, regardless. Results under Farke had put him in harm’s way, but aside from a playing philosophy the crowd liked, what Norwich lost by sacking him, and have not yet been able to fully replace yet, was the now 46-year-old’s knack for selling a vision.

Farke, as Leeds have discovered over the past few months, was adept at speaking in a way which united people behind him. As a public voice, his PR for Norwich tended to be sharp and convincing, helped by a decent sense of humour and a willingness to be brutally honest. In his absence, communication has been tougher and divisions between Norwich and their support appear to have grown. Those reactions in Coventry a fortnight ago were an open expression of disillusionment.

Farke worked Norwich’s players hard, an intense trainer who has applied the same mindset at Leeds, and while his successor, Dean Smith, eased off on that front, Norwich’s recruitment of Wagner in January was a switch back to a regime that preferred to crack the whip; almost as if City were looking for some of what Farke had given them.

Farke and Wagner have similar CVs: both coached Dortmund’s reserves immediately before coming to England, both have won promotion from the Championship, and both find themselves in that division again now after time spent working back on the continent. Norwich banked 10 early points this season but have regressed on the results front from the end of August onwards, not helped by injuries to strikers Josh Sargent and Ashley Barnes.

For all that, they host Leeds with only two places and two points separating the clubs. Neither is a mile from where they want to be positionally after 11 matches — which you can call a quarter of the regular season if you squint – but the moods around them do not suggest they and their respective fan bases are in the same place spiritually.

Leeds feel like they are developing under Farke, as though the impetus is with them. The fit looks like a decent one. Wagner is swimming slightly against the tide and would not be helped by losing this of all fixtures, against a returning figurehead.

What reception Farke will receive when he walks out of the tunnel tomorrow, who can say? Carrow Road, in the circumstances, will not want to be too generous. But when they look down at Farke, they might see a certain irony: that a manager whose era they are still trying to move on from is aiding Leeds in doing just that.