Sunday’s opponents Brentford are one of the best-run clubs in the country. They haven’t sacked a manager in more than ten years. We’d be wise to think on that before telling Daniel Farke to piss off.
Last week was quite the week, wasn’t it? It started with The Guardian claiming that Daniel Farke’s job was contingent on obtaining good results from a pair of ominous-looking home fixtures. It ended with Ao Tanaka bundling home a late equaliser to salvage a point against last season’s champions Liverpool. This mere days after he and his teammates hosted Club World Cup and Conference League winners Chelsea and pulled their pants down. I suspect I’m not alone in having struggled to sleep last Wednesday and Saturday night. I felt like I’d channelled Mark E. Smith and popped a load of amphetamines. There are few stimulants more potent than a magical night under the Elland Road lights.
Farke had come under harsh scrutiny following a run of six defeats in seven. It was the usual tidal wave of cliched guff. The Court of Moronic Opinion heard charges of tactical ineptitude and inflexibility and suchlike. Even after he refuted them in spurring on his players to claw back a two-goal deficit against moneybags Moss Side Head Choppers before losing to a late wonder goal from Phil Foden, there were still suppurating minces ringing up BBC Leeds to crucify him.
Taking four more points than anyone expected from the Chelsea and Liverpool games seems to have gone some way to quelling the sound and the fury, but I can’t help but feel that a defeat at Brentford on Sunday would inflame it once more. On Saturday, my family and I made our usual post-match stop at Wetherby Whaler. (Other fish and chip providers are available.) As we waited my old man got talking to another fan about the game. I had to bite my tongue as this gentleman started moaning about how Farke should have made changes at half-time and how we might not have been two-nil down if he had. My brother then informed me on the way home that one of these godawful online ‘content creators’ had declared it ‘two points dropped’. In a game we had not led at any point. I ask you.
There’s a startling lack of goodwill toward Farke. You could well understand it with, say, Jesse Marsch. Andrea Radrizzani had dressed him in borrowed robes, to loan from Shakespeare, having sacked Marcelo Bielsa against the express wishes of circa ninety percent of Leeds fans. Marsch therefore was never going to be anything other than the horrible new stepdad. But in this case I find it genuinely astonishing.
Farke walked into a fucking morass. Do people not remember what it was like? It’s worth stressing. Like the break-up of the Beatles, during the fall of the Roman Empire, while Jordan was getting divorced from that bloke. Players fleeing the relegated ship for Frankfurt and Rome and Betis. Players threatening legal action and going on strike to force moves. Radrizzani trying to use Elland Road as collateral as he sought to purchase another club. The protracted 49ers takeover that meant Ethan Ampadu was the only summer signing to join the club during pre-season.
Leeds lost one of their opening games of 2023-24 at John Eustace’s West Midlands City (+1 internets if you caught the reference) with a bench that featured two goalkeepers and a bunch of spotty kids. But Farke steadied the ship and under him they amassed a points tally that in most seasons would have secured a top-two finish. Only a narrow defeat to Southampton in the play-off final denied him promotion in his first campaign. He then lost Georginio Rutter, Crysencio Summerville and Archie Gray in the summer before guiding us to one of the best seasons in our history, setting new club records for points, wins, clean sheets and goal difference on the way. So brilliant were his side that they won the title despite Burnley breaking the Championship record for the fewest goals conceded. When Chelsea did the same in the top-flight in 2004-05, they finished 12 points clear of Arsenal at the summit.
And despite all that, hordes of fans wanted him punted at the first sign of trouble. I have a few theories as to what’s driven it. One is that these people simply can’t have been around when the likes of Blackpool and Barnsley were ramming us up the shitter, or when a sodding postman knocked us out of the FA Cup, or when our idea of a marquee signing was paying a million quid for Luke fucking Murphy or taking some twat on loan. Surely nobody who remembers those bad old sad old days could lose their mind at a few narrow defeats in the fucking Premier League. Prima facie it doesn’t seem a terribly unreasonable proposition. As much as our fans like to mock ‘smaller’ clubs like Cruddersfield or Rovrum for low attendances, Elland Road was half-empty for practically my entire childhood. For years after first getting my season ticket aged 11, I often used to be able to put my little feet up on the seat in front of me. By the time someone was regularly sitting there, I’d had my first shag, which unfortunately was only marginally less disappointing than the average Leeds performance in the GFBates era.
I digress. The reasons for the anti-Farke sentiment - listening to too much TalkSHITE, having a hate boner for Brenden Aaronson, possessing all the emotional maturity of that spoilt Tory girl from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory - aren’t important. The point is that, for a whole host of reasons, sacking him would be fucking mental. That the players are clearly still sweating embryos for him is one, but chief among them is the wealth of evidence that sacking your manager mid-season to improve results doesn’t seem to do that in actuality. I’ve maundered enough already and really can’t be arsed to explain, so I won’t, but there are several academic studies on it. Bridgewater (2010) being one of them.
We travel to Brentford on Sunday. Pound-for-pound they’re the best-run club in this country bar Brighton. The last time they sacked a manager was in September 2015, when they binned off Marinus Dijkhuizen to replace him with Dean Smith, and I gather that had at least as much to do with him falling out with the owner and missing home as it did results. Since then they’ve won promotion to the Premier League and are now in their fifth consecutive season at this level, despite consistently being near the bottom of the division for expenditure on player salaries. Incidentally it was this repeated overachievement that led to notorious tight-arse Daniel Levy poaching Thomas Frank, who succeeded Smith at Griffin Park in late 2018 and enjoyed a hugely successful spell after starting his reign with just one win from his first ten games.
I mentioned Brighton. You’d have to go back to 2014 for the last time they sacked a manager mid-season, when they swapped Sami Hyppia for Chris Hughton. They did later sack Hughton, whose career since strongly points to it having been the right call, but that was at the end of the 18-19 season and was part of a paradigm shift to a more expansive style of play and a greater emphasis on youth development. It’s a vision they’ve stuck with ever since. All of Hughton’s successors have conformed to a pattern: Graham Potter, Roberto De Zerbi, Fabian Hurzeler. All young coaches who favour a progressive style of play and aren’t averse to giving the kids a chance.
If the two best-run clubs in the country think fucking off your manager in the middle of a season is a bad idea, and that surely must be their view as they are loath to do it, I’m inclined to agree with them. They set an example we’d do well to follow. The way to establish yourselves as a fixture in this league, as they have, is to have a long-term strategy and damn well stick to it, not listening to a few gobshites on Elon’s Nazi-riddled cesspit of a website telling you to ‘show some ambition’. If we do lose to them on Sunday, we’d do well to remind ourselves that Brentford didn’t get to being in a position our board would kill for us to be in by hammering away at the panic button every time their results slipped.