Why it might not be ridiculous to sack a manager who won promotion

After what felt like weeks of speculation, Leeds United confirmed this week that Daniel Farke will be their manager in the Premier League next season.

Instinctively, it feels ridiculous that it was ever a question. Leeds won the Championship with 100 points, beating a Burnley side with an almost impenetrable defence to the title. The season had its ups and downs, and there remained a whiff of suspicion after Farke failed to get them promoted last season, but surely he has earned his chance to take Leeds into the top flight, right?

Well, yes. On the other hand, he earned his chance at Norwich City — twice — and look how that went. Twice.

This is Farke’s third promotion from the Championship. In those three promotion seasons, he has collected 291 points and finished top each time.

Conversely, he has managed 49 games in the Premier League and won six. When Norwich, already well on course for relegation, sacked him in November 2021, that was the fourth-worst record of any manager to have taken charge of more than 20 Premier League games. It included a run, spread over those two seasons, of 15 consecutive defeats.

Even though Farke has done brilliantly for Leeds in the Championship, there’s little evidence to suggest he will do brilliantly for Leeds in the Premier League.

This isn’t meant to pick on Farke specifically. You could say the same about Scott Parker, who has made Burnley the third club he has taken from the Championship to the Premier League, so clearly has something about him. But his record with Fulham and Bournemouth in the top flight reads: played 52, won nine, drawn 13, lost 30, 40 points gained. Averaged over a 38-game season, that’s 29 points: not enough to survive in any of the Premier League’s 33 completed seasons.

And then there’s Phil Parkinson, whose three successive promotions with Wrexham should, in theory, qualify him for god-like status. But they’ll be in the Championship next season, and that’s where things start to get sticky. He has managed three clubs in the second tier: it would be harsh to blame him too much for Bolton Wanderers’ relegation, given it was amid a financial apocalypse that nearly saw them go out of business, but being sacked before Christmas by Hull City and relegating Charlton Athletic are less easy to explain away.

Getting a team promoted and making them competitive in a higher league are two very different jobs. So why was the idea of Leeds moving on from Farke — or Burnley from Parker, Wrexham from Parkinson or any promoted club in similar circumstances — so ridiculous?

There’s very little precedent for it in England. In the history of the Premier League, there have only been five occasions when the manager who led a team to promotion was not in charge at the start of the following season. Three times the manager in question was snapped up by a bigger club and, in 2017, Steve Bruce resigned from Hull.

The only time a team has even come close to ‘upgrading’ a promotion-winning manager in the summer was when Watford replaced Slavisa Jokanovic with Quique Sanchez Flores in 2016, and even then there were some contractual issues that were at least a factor in the decision.

‘Upgrades’ of an ostensibly successful manager have happened in different circumstances. Southampton were doing reasonably well under Nigel Adkins partway through the 2013-14 season, but took the opportunity to replace him with Mauricio Pochettino. After successfully avoiding relegation for their first two seasons, Brighton & Hove Albion decided that Chris Hughton had taken things as far as he could, so replaced him with Graham Potter. Bournemouth thanked Gary O’Neil for keeping them up in 2023, but sent him on his way and brought in Andoni Iraola.

Parkinson has overseen a third promotion in a row (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

It also happens with players all the time, and nobody blinks an eye. It’s widely accepted that Player X from Promotion Winning Team Y might well be good enough for the Championship, but not for the Premier League. Every season, clubs that go up say, ‘Thanks for the promotion, guys, but we’ll be buying some better players now’ to significant portions of their squad.

Similar things happen elsewhere. Recently, too: in Germany, Koln are second in the 2.Bundesliga and heading for promotion, but lost confidence in head coach Gerhard Struber, as well as sporting director Christian Keller, and have replaced both for the last couple of games of the season.

It happens in other sports too: in basketball, the Golden State Warriors reached the playoffs in 2013-14 but thought they could do better than coach Mark Jackson, replacing him with Steve Kerr, and that’s gone pretty well since. After Tyson Fury’s first fight against Deontay Wilder, which was officially a draw but pretty much everyone thought Fury won on points, he replaced trainer Ben Davison with SugarHill Steward for the rematch.

In all of those examples, a coach has done one job very well, but the decision-makers involved recognised that doesn’t necessarily mean they will do the next one equally well.

It’s not that much of a surprise it doesn’t happen, because it would take some significant backbone to make such a bold call. If you stick with a manager after promotion and you’re bottom of the table with one win from 10 in October of the following season, well… you had to give the guy who got you there a chance, right? But if you change managers after promotion and you’re bottom of the table with one win from 10 in October, then you look like an idiot, and the reputation of the guy you binned grows as they count their payoff.

Parker has a good track record of promotion, but his Premier League record is poor (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

On a human level, it would be a fairly despicable way to treat someone. If Farke, or Parker, or Parkinson were dismissed after the seasons they’ve all had it would look pretty shabby. It might not even be the right or sensible thing to do from a football perspective, either: there’s plenty to be said for loyalty and continuity, the circumstances of their previous records are different to the ones these three managers currently find themselves in so might not be deemed relevant, and any replacement would be a gamble.

But much as anything, it feels like there’s more onus than ever on promoted teams to try something a bit different. The last six clubs to rise from the Championship have gone straight back down, averaging half a point per game between them. It’s not just that they’ve all gone down, it’s that none of them were really ever close to staying up.

Five of those six kept the manager that got them promoted and Leicester would have done had Chelsea not come calling for Enzo Maresca.

There are all sorts of factors at play here, from broader questions about the chasm of class between England’s top two tiers, to elements particular to every club. But one thing it emphasises is that conventional thinking hasn’t worked, and that maybe keeping a manager with a poor record in a higher division, just because they have a good one in a lower division, isn’t necessarily the right call.

(Top photos: Daniel Farke and Phil Parkinson, right; credit: Getty Images)

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