If a photo of Leeds United manager Daniel Farke was slid in front of me with zero context, I would assume he was a drummer in a successful, mid-career heavy metal band. That long hair and beard scream “I am intimately familiar with double-bass-drum setups and paradiddles”. This is, alas, not the case, but if any Premier League team does feel a bit heavy metal right now, it’s Leeds.
Farke took over in 2023, when they were a Championship side, and hauled them into the Prem in 2025, where they finished in a very respectable 14th place after their first season back in the big time. As per antics like jogging on to the pitch to have words with the referee during a game against Man City, Farke very much leads from the front. A win against Nottingham Forest in Yorkshire club’s first match of the new season has picked up the momentum of the team’s strong performance at the back end of the last campaign.
The heavy-metal manager of a heavy-metal team needs a heavy-metal watch – and that’s exactly what Farke has got. His Rolex Sea-Dweller takes “heavy metal” pretty literally, in that it’s a pretty damn heavy piece of metal. The better-known Rolex Submariner is a proper dive watch, no question, but the Sea-Dweller is its older brother; it can survive depths down to 1,220 metres below sea level, while the Submariner is only certified to 300m. Because of that, the Sea-Dweller is bigger and thicker, coming in at 40mm for some variants but more frequently 43 or 44mm, and – unlike the Submariner – has a helium escape valve for properly gnarly deep-sea diving in hyperbaric tanks.
Given Farke’s look, it really is exactly what you’d expect him to wear, and it sets him apart from the usual watch-wearing habits of football managers, who tend to go for fancy Patek Philippes and Richard Milles, or affordable daily drivers as per Liverpool’s Andoni Iraola – or, if they’re Team Rolex, it’s usually a Daytona, like Newcastle’s Matthias Jaissle. Interestingly, some guy called José Mourinho, now overseeing some Spanish team called Real Madrid, is currently wearing the Rolex Deepsea, an even bigger, gnarlier dive watch than the Sea-Dweller. Luckily for Leeds, and Farke, he won’t be menacing the Premier League any time soon.
But Daniel Farke has his hands more than full with the domestic giants he’ll be coming up against in the coming months. Luckily, he has the watch for the job, and some relentless, heavy-metal tactics to match. That Sea-Dweller can go deep, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be sinking back down into the Championship any time soon.