Leeds are back in the elite - now Farke's task is keeping them up

German combines emotional intelligence and advanced numeracy. He will need both to stay afloat in the top flight

- Louise Taylor

When Leeds United sold £140m of playing talent last summer, Daniel Farke deviated from accepted managerial convention and declined to throw his toys out of the pram. Farke is a little too unconventional, a little too resistant to groupthink, to always do the expected and his club's owner, the San Francisco-based 49ers Enterprises, is poised to reap the benefits.

The German's unusual amalgam of high emotional intelligence and advanced numeracy have helped to provide the framework for the freshly secured promotion to the Premier League that Leeds so narrowly missed out on last May. As the stars of that campaign - Crysencio Summerville, Archie Gray and Georginio Rutter - departed and Elland Road regulars despaired, Farke held his nerve. With English football's spending rules complied with, the manager reconstructed a slimmed-down squad in a manner befitting his former roles as an economics student and the sporting director of the German club Lippstadt.

In, among others, came Ao Tanaka for £3.5m from Fortuna Dusseldorf, Jayden Bogle for £5m from Sheffield United and the Tottenham loanee Manor Solomon. While Japan's Tanaka proved one of the second tier's best anchoring midfielders, Bogle shone as an increasingly outstanding attacking right-back and Israel's Solomon impressed on the left wing.

Farke had never really wanted to be a coach. As a third-tier player in Germany he studied economics and became more interested in contracts, taxes and balance sheets than tactics. His dream was to remain in football as a sporting director and it came true at Lippstadt, where he oversaw the construction of a new stadium.