Inside the fall and rise of Leeds United: How Daniel Farke turned it around and led the club to the brink of promotion back to the big time

Daniel Farke broke into a half-grimace, half-grin, when he was told on Friday that a huge image of his face had been emblazoned on Trinity Leeds, a shopping centre in the city.

‘I would have been distracted by this when I was younger,’ the German said. ‘In my job, there are two options: build a statue and put pictures on a shopping centre or throw tomatoes. I say, “Do not be driven by these emotions. Stay as you are”.’

The 47-year-old’s response encapsulated the binary condition of the modern manager, who is loved or loathed as results dictate. On this monumental weekend in which Leeds try to step back into the Premier League, the truth is that he will be judged by many on the events of Sunday afternoon alone.

Fail to take Leeds back, and some will want him gone.

That’s harsh, because Farke has turned the team and the dressing room around to put the club in a position which seemed almost impossible in the early months of the season.

Sources within the camp point to his one-to-one work with players, his eye for how they can develop and a capacity to ease anxieties as keys to the club’s surge to the play-off positions after a start which was painfully slow. There were no wins in their first three league games and one in their opening five.

Those desperate early weeks, in which a return to the top flight seemed so far off, were something Farke could hardly be held accountable for.

It was an inauspicious start because of last summer’s exodus of players — partly a consequence of Leeds’ former director of football Victor Orta giving players clauses in their contracts allowing them to leave on loan in the event of relegation. 

Leeds lost Robin Koch, Diego Llorente, Brenden Aaronson, Rasmus Kristensen, Marc Roca, Maximilian Wober, Jack Harrison, Tyler Adams, Rodrigo and Luis Sinisterra. Of the 10 players to start 20 Premier League matches last season, seven were gone.

A change in the club’s ownership to 49ers Enterprises — and their recruitment of Farke — came just a few weeks before the season, leaving little time to plan. Farke made a few good early additions. Ethan Ampadu has been one of the signings of the season.

And as a manager intimately acquainted with promotion to the Premier League, having taken Norwich City up twice in three years, he knew how the second tier, removed from the goldfish bowl of the top flight, can give young players a chance to breathe and develop.

Sources say he saw particular potential in forward Georginio Rutter. He arrived for a club record £35million in the January of their relegation season — struggling with the expectation and earning a single start in the Premier League. It turned out the Frenchman just needed time and space to fulfil that promise. Farke saw it. Rutter’s name echoes around Elland Road on a weekly basis, now.

‘That’s been such a gift,’ says one source close to the club. ‘If Leeds had not been relegated, Rutter’s future would have looked uncertain but he now looks a future Premier League player, whether the club are promoted or not.’

The same goes for left-sided inside forward Crysencio Summerville. He has had fewer confidence issues to contend with and simply blossomed.

For Archie Gray and Wilfried Gnonto, this Championship season has been a continuing education. The pressure Farke faces this weekend is compounded by the fact that some, or all, of those players could prove attractive to Premier League clubs if Leeds don’t reach the top flight now.

The Leeds recovery, which accelerated with an extraordinary undefeated run between January 1 and April 1 when they dropped only four points, has not just been about individuals.

The collectivism Farke has created is the reason why some are drawing comparisons with Howard Wilkinson, who took over a struggling Leeds side — 21st in the second tier — and made them First Division champions inside four years, in 1992.

A gem of a book about Wilkinson’s success at Leeds, The Man with the Plan, by Dave Tomlinson, lays out in detail why the dour Yorkshireman succeeded at Elland Road in those extraordinary early 1990s.

The core principle was a collectivism which is just as applicable now as it was back then. It’s striking how often, in a conversation with Wilkinson this week, he reaches for military metaphors.

‘Sergeant Wilko’, as they called him in Leeds, a play on the old TV character Sergeant Bilko, has always sworn by players you’d have with you in the trenches. ‘If you have six men in a platoon you look for specific qualities,’ says Wilkinson, now 80. ‘It’s not about learning how to fire that gun. It’s how to fire it when missiles are coming in front of you.’

Farke will be without Patrick Bamford on Sunday after the striker failed to recover from a knee injury and there will be a desperate sense of jeopardy at Wembley. Expect it to be cagey. Ten of the last 11 Championship play-off finals have seen two or fewer goals inside 90 minutes. This clash between the division’s third and fourth-placed sides is unlikely to be different.

Leeds went into their play-off semi-final against Norwich on a worrying run of form. Having been top in mid-March, they tailed off badly, losing four of their last six league games and shipping four goals against QPR and three to Middlesbrough.

How to stop the rot ahead of the semi-final away leg was Farke’s biggest predicament of the season. He opted to maintain entirely the same routine, with a full week at their Thorp Arch training base rather than taking his team, who did look weary, on some team-bonding exercise.

‘No psychological games. We just work hard,’ he said. The players organised their own group meal at a Leeds restaurant, independently of him.

Farke had been criticised for a lack of boldness in his substitutions. For the semi-final games, he returned to the 4-2-3-1 formation which had served him so well after the turn of the year.

Positioning 18-year-old Gray at No 10 behind Rutter was designed to shore things up in the middle and they ground out a 0-0 draw at Carrow Road. It then helped that Norwich were terribly poor in the second leg.

Southampton have had no reason to change systems. When the clubs met at Elland Road three weeks ago, Saints left with a 2-1 win, to go with the 3-1 win they secured in the reverse fixture at St Mary’s last September.

Those games showed that Leeds can be vulnerable to Russell Martin’s side, who have been more than capable of springing the high press they invite by playing out from the back and throwing players forward.

Right back Kyle Walker-Peters caused Leeds’ Junior Firpo trouble in that game at Elland Road. Southampton striker Adam Armstrong, who scored three times across the two games, has been another problem for Leeds.

Yet there is predictability about Southampton’s commitment to possession-heavy football. And by contrast with Farke, this is entirely new terrain for Martin, who has never finished higher than 10th in a managerial career which took him from MK Dons to Swansea, before St Mary’s.

The achievements of the three managers to have taken Leeds to the top flight — Wilkinson, Don Revie and Marcelo Bielsa — were quoted to Farke as he took his press conference ahead of the journey south.

‘I know there are many legends here,’ he said. ‘I am not near them, but in a few years hopefully I can go a small way to playing my part in this club’s history.

‘I want to create a legacy and I came here because I was full of belief that this club belonged in the Premier League.’

The Man with the Plan, by Dave Tomlinson. Hardback RRP £25. pitchpublishing.co.uk