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 decorated at Trinity Leeds, a shopping center in the city.

“I would have been distracted by this when I was younger,” said the German. ‘In my work there are two options: build a statue and put pictures on a shopping center or throw tomatoes. I say, “Don’t let these emotions guide you. Stay as you are”.’

The 47-year-old’s response summed up the binary state of the modern manager, who is loved or loathed depending on results. On this monumental weekend as Leeds attempt to take a step back in the Premier League, the truth is that he will be judged by many based on Sunday afternoon’s events alone.

If you don’t get Leeds back, some will want him gone.

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

Sources within the camp point to his one-on-one work with players, his eye for how they can develop and his ability to allay fears as keys to the club’s rise into the play-off positions after a painfully slow Start. There were no wins in their first three league games and one in their first five.

Those desperate first weeks, when a return to the top seemed so far away, were something Farke could hardly be blamed for.

It was an inauspicious start due to the exodus of players last summer – partly a result of former Leeds football director Victor Orta giving players clauses in their contracts allowing them to be loaned out 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 ten players who started twenty Premier League matches last season, seven were missing.

A change in ownership of the club to 49ers Enterprises – and their hiring of Farke – occurred just a few weeks before the season, leaving little time for planning. Farke has made some good early additions. Ethan Ampadu was one of the signings of the season.

And as a manager well aware of promotion to the Premier League, having conquered Norwich City 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 special potential in striker Georginio Rutter. He arrived for a club record £35m in January of their relegation campaign, struggling against expectations and earning a single start in the Premier League. It turned out that the Frenchman simply needed time and space to fulfill that promise. Farke saw it. Rutter’s name now echoes around Elland Road every week.

“That was such a gift,” said a source close to the club. ‘Had Leeds not been relegated, Rutter’s future would have looked uncertain, but he now looks like 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 trust issues and has simply blossomed.

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

Leeds’ recovery, which accelerated with an extraordinary unbeaten run between January 1 and April 1 when they dropped just four points, was not just about individuals.

The collectivism Farke has created is why some draw comparisons with Howard Wilkinson, who took over a struggling Leeds side – 21st in the second tier – in 1992 and turned them into First Division champions in four years.

A gem of a book on Wilkinson’s success at Leeds, The Man with the Plan, by Dave Tomlinson, explains in detail why the stern Yorkshireman found success at Elland Road in those extraordinary early 1990s.

The core principle was a collectivism that is as applicable now as it was then. It is striking how often he turns to military metaphors in a conversation with Wilkinson this week.

‘Sergeant Wilko’, as they called him in Leeds, a play on the old TV character Sergeant Bilko, has always sworn by players you would have with you in the trenches. “When 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 about how to fire it when missiles are coming your way.”

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 danger at Wembley. Expect it to be restrained. In ten of the last eleven championship play-off finals, two or fewer goals were scored within 90 minutes. This clash between third and fourth places in the division is unlikely to be any different.

Leeds went into the play-off semi-final against Norwich in worrying form. After going top in mid-March, they fared poorly, losing four of their last six league games and sending four goals to QPR and three to Middlesbrough.

How to stop the rot ahead of the semi-final away match was Farke’s biggest predicament of the season. He opted to stick to the same routine entirely, with a full week at their training base at Thorp Arch, rather than take his team, who looked tired, on a team-bonding exercise.

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

Farke had been criticized for a lack of courage in his substitutions. For the semi-finals he returned to the 4-2-3-1 formation that had served him so well after the turn of the year.

Positioning the 18-year-old Gray at number 10 behind Rutter was intended to strengthen matters in the middle and they scored 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 their system. When the clubs met at Elland Road three weeks ago, Saints left with a 2-1 win, following on from the 3-1 win they achieved 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 generating the high press they provoke by playing from the back and throwing players forward.

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

Yet there is predictability about Southampton’s commitment to possession-heavy football. And unlike Farke, this is entirely new territory for Martin, who has never finished higher than 10th in a managerial career that took him from MK Dons to Swansea, ahead of St Mary’s.

The performances of the three managers who took Leeds to the top – Wilkinson, Don Revie and Marcelo Bielsa – were quoted to Farke as he held his press conference ahead of the trip south.

“I know there are a lot of legends here,” he said. ‘I’m not around them, but hopefully in a few years I can make a small contribution to the history of this club.

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

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