The Daily: Wednesday 14th June 2023
From Leeds to Uruguay, via Norwich, Leicester and Glasgow.
Will Stuart Webber and Daniel Farke be the keys to a quick return for Leeds?
Leeds United’s admiration of Stuart Webber has hardly been a secret. Practically since the moment they fired Victor Orta from a cannon into the sun—before relegation was even confirmed, no less—their admiration for the man who continued the long-standing Norwich tradition of bouncing between the top two divisions (and pushed it to even greater extremes) has been pretty much common knowledge.
The obvious connecting thought from that is whether this will persuade Daniel Farke, with whom Webber is very well-acquainted from his spells at both Huddersfield and Norwich, to get the get the old gang back together and seek to breathe a little life back into cheeks at Elland Road after whatever last season was meant to be.
But there are complications. For every West Bromwich Albion or Wigan Athletic, there have been numerous examples over the years of freshly-relegated teams who’ve hit the Championship ground running and bounced immediately back. At the end of last season Burnley looked like a mess, but a very smart managerial appointment and the intelligent restructuring of the squad after the inevitable post-relegation mass walkout allowed them to hit the ground running, and as early as the autumn their quick return to the Premier League already felt like a gimme. Expectations at Leeds are likely to be high.
And while Webber has had success in getting teams into the Premier League at both Huddersfield Town and Norwich City, Norwich were relegated from the Premier League in 2022 and categorically didn’t have a season like Burnley last time around. They had one like Norwich City, which ended in them finishing in 13th place in the Championship, and even though the problems at Carrow Road have been broader than any one individual, that’s not a particularly strong look for the man who was sporting director there at the time.
And then there’s his comments on women’s football, which did him no favours, displaying a lack of judgement for someone in such a senior position, even if you do happen to agree with his—to my eyes dubious, but that’s a conversation for another occasion—assertions, you don’t have to say it out loud. And even if asked directly about it in an interview, you can always fudge something. Though then again, Leeds do have previous with staff members in senior positions saying silly things in public.
Nothing’s guaranteed, of course. At the time of writing, neither Webber nor Farke have yet been offered Leeds jobs—at least, not publicly—and there may still be a case for arguing for other other candidates. But while Brendan Rodgers may be a… higher-profile (‘better’ doesn’t quite feel right, there) appointment, he would likely be very expensive.
Rodgers was on the same as Mikel Arteta last season, and appointing him wouldn’t answer the sporting director question, either, unless Webber was to work with him. Other names suggested include Carlos Corberan, who it feels may have managed every club in the Championship in the last two or three years, and, for those with a keen sense of humour, Steven Gerrard. Take a moment to enjoy the mental image. It would be… ferocious.
But at the moment, it seems most likely to be Webber and Farke who will be charged with the responsibility of trying to ensure a quick return to the Premier League. If the team’s performances throughout much of the 2022/23 season are anything to go by, whoever ends up doing it is going to have their work cut out this summer.
A Rodgers return to Celtic?
While we’re on the subject—albeit extremely loosely—of Brendan Rodgers, Sky Sports is now reporting that Brendypops has entered talks with Celtic over a possible return to the SPFL next season. As mentioned above, he’s not inexpensive, but those are England wages. Perhaps it might even make sense for him to return to Celtic, where expectations are simultaneously higher and lower.
Social media seems very much of the opinion that he may be using this as leverage for better offers from south of the border, but this all feels a little too much like 4d chess to have much to it. It’s worth bearing in mind that Brendan Rodgers is an out of work football manager whose last position, although it had obvious highs, ended on a very definite low. He might not have been the manager who relegated Leicester City in a literal sense but, well, he was there for most of the season.
Furthermore, it should also be counterpointed that to pin Leicester’s relegation on the manager alone would be wide of the mark. From the top down, Leicester have been beset by a toxic combination of bad luck, bad planning, and bad implementation over the last few years. The death of chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a helicopter crash in 2018 hit the club hard. With the owners’ business interests largely tied up in the tourism industry, the pandemic had an impact upon the club, too.
But it wasn’t all matters beyond Leicester’s control. On the planning side of things, the team started last season under a cloud after a summer during which transfer speculation had largely centred on which players would be leaving the club and to go where. Too many senior players were going out of contract at the same time. The departure of goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel after eleven years is believed to have hit the playing squad particularly hard.
It would be unfair and unreasonable to even imply that these players didn’t give their all this season or anything like that, but there was an air uncertainty hanging over the future direction of the team. That much desired return to the Champions League had never materialised, and it all ended up feeling like a fin de siecle for a story that began the best part of a decade ago.
Brendan Rodgers is a talented manager. He proved that at Leicester, in taking them to 5th place in the Premier League and winning the FA Cup. And those who talk of the SPFL as a ‘farmers league’ are ignoring something extremely important. At Celtic, the pressure is on to win as close to every single game as possible. The standard of much of the opposition may well be lower than is to be found in the English Premier League but, well, I’ll put it this way; Celtic ended the 2022/23 season on 99 points from a 38 match season. They won 32 of those 38 matches, finishing seven points clear of Rangers and 42 points clear of third-placed Aberdeen, scoring 114 goals and conceding 34.
To maintain that sort of consistency over the course of a season is difficult, and as if that isn’t enough, last season Ange Postecoglou got the team playing enervating enough football to earn himself a crack at the Tottenham job. He’s been spoken of as their best manager since Jock Stein, and that’s high praise. It would also be a high standard for Rodgers to have to meet. But he can hardly be said to lack the self-confidence to give it a go.
Uruguay win the U20 World Cup
The volume of Leeds supporters still holding out hopes that Marcelo Bielsa would somehow return to Elland Road started to die down with the announcement that their former manager had accepted the job of coaching the Uruguay national team. And Bielsa will be stepping into a team boosted recently lifted by success at an Under 20 level, after winning the U20 World Cup in Argentina.
The host nation might have been forgiven hoping that they could take some steps towards getting back to former glories in this competition. They were the winners of this this tournament five times out of seven between 1995 and 2007, but on this occasion Argentina couldn’t deliver. They won all three group games, but in the second round were shocked by a 2-0 defeat to Nigeria in San Juan which sent them crashing out of the competition.
For those of an English persuasion, England also won their group—beating Uruguay in the process—but also lost at the first knockout stage, by 2-1 to Italy in a match decided by a penalty kick three minutes from time. Italy went on to reach the final, before losing 1-0 to Uruguay, with the winning goal scored four minutes from time by Luciano Rodriguez of Liverpool Montevideo.
Can we infer the future success of a national team from its younger teams? Not often. Since Argentina’s last win in 2007 the U20 World Cup has been played seven times and had seven different winners. Ghana, Brazil, France, Serbia, England, Ukraine and Uruguay have all won it since 2009, with England’s 2017 winners featuring such luminaries as Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Dominic Solanke and Lewis Cook.
It may not guarantee glittering prizes, but every member of the England U20 squad is still making a living in the top 92, and the vast majority remain in the Premier League or Championship. In case you were wondering, the France team which won the 2013 tournament contained familiar names such as Paul Pogba, Florian Thauvin and Alphonse Areola, but otherwise the overlap between that squad and the squad which won the 2018 World Cup is pretty minimal.
But for all that, the thousands of Uruguay supporters who’d made the short trip across the River Plate to support their team certainly seemed delighted enough with it all, and it will certainly give the men’s senior team’s new manager plenty to think about, ahead of the start of their CONMEBOL World Cup qualifiers for 2026 in September. Bielsa kicks off, by the way, with a home match against Nicaragua tomorrow night.