The Leeds chair, Paraag Marathe, is flying in from San Francisco for talks with Daniel Farke over the manager’s future. The American will attend Monday night’s Championship game against Bristol City at Elland Road, with Leeds needing to win to move back to the top above Burnley on goal difference with one game remaining, before meeting Farke this week.
Members of the 49ers Enterprises consortium that owns Leeds have privately expressed doubts about whether Farke is the right man to manage the club in the Premier League despite the German leading them to promotion this season and earning 90 points in the previous campaign. Farke was relegated from the Premier League in the 2019-20 season with Norwich, who sacked him early in the 2021-22 campaign after he had led them back to the top flight at the first attempt.
Marathe, who leads a consortium of about 100 investors making up 49ers Enterprises and will have the final say, needs to be convinced by Farke and wants to hear how he would approach a season in the Premier League. The owners have ambitious plans to turn Leeds into a top-10 club, and to expand Elland Road’s capacity to 56,500, and want to make a quick decision.
Leeds’s managerial plans are complicated by financial restrictions that have left them with little profitability and sustainability headroom and a limited budget to make changes. The club have posted combined losses of £94.5m over the past two seasons and their permitted loss, after two seasons in the Championship, for the next three-year reporting cycle will be £61m.
Farke has two years on his contract and would be due a year’s salary in compensation if dismissed, leaving Leeds to focus on alternatives who are out of work or available for limited compensation. Initial soundings have been made towards the former Rangers manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst, the former Bayer Leverkusen, PSV and Benfica coach Roger Schmidt and Davide Ancelotti, son of the Real Madrid coach, Carlo Ancelotti, and his assistant at the Bernabéu. The first two are out of work and Ancelotti is expected to leave Real with his father in the summer.
Another potential problem for Leeds is the owners’ determination to take charge of player recruitment through a data-led approach, which many managers may not accept.
Leeds backed Farke by retaining him after they lost to Southampton in the playoff final last season, but Marathe failed to offer any personal support after securing promotion at the second time of asking last Monday. Marathe is due to stay in Leeds all week and attend their final game of the season at Plymouth on Saturday.
On appointing Farke, in July 2023, Marathe said the former Borussia Mönchengladbach coach had been recruited with a view to managing the club in the Premier League. “I don’t think he had a fair stack of cards when he was in the Premier League,” he said. “We’re going to give him the deck of cards. I think he could be a very successful coach across Europe. This isn’t just: ‘Hey get us through the Championship.’”
