Steve Clarke, who was sacked by West Brom recently.
By Josh Butler
As the football season approaches the festive period, chairmen up and down the country are assessing the performance of their side and trying to work out who to buy in the coming weeks to improve their side- perhaps to propel their team to the top of the league- maybe to make a 2nd half tilt at the playoffs. Some are even trying to drag themselves clear of a relegation dogfight.
However one thing clubs are doing which is becoming increasingly common year on year and seems to be the ultimate short term fix… giving the manager the sack.
As I write this at 10:40 on December 17th and with the aid of the LMA website, the trio of departures over the weekend (Steve Clarke from West Brom, Andre Villas-Boas from Tottenham and Gianfranco Zola’s resignation form Watford) has seen the number of managerial departures rise to an astonishing 23 and of those, 19 were sackings. This breaks down as follows:
Premier League- 5, Championship- 7, League One-8, League Two- 3
This only covers the Football League- the top 92 clubs in the country. Whilst non-league clubs tend to show a little more faith with managers and don’t have the funds to pay managers off halfway through a lengthy contract, there have been casualties at clubs such as Southport (Conference) and Stockport (Conference North) to name but two.
Surprisingly, the trend has actually been consistent for over a decade, as the records below will show, but why is being a football manager more of a deathtrap than before?
Actually, not really on the rise
The problem I feel, is the monstrous amounts of money at the top end of the game now means that the incentives to get to, or to stay in the Premier League are huge. This season the bottom team will get £60m just through TV rights and prize money. The Championship playoff final is now the most valuable game in club football on the planet- rated at between £100 and £120 million- a frightening sum of money and when you consider each year a group of non league clubs (recently Hinckley United and almost Kettering Town) go under and lose a century of history for the sake of £100,000, it really does put things into perspective.
The lure of these riches are too much for most chairmen to contain themselves with and for those (most of them) who have built financial models which require the club to go up or stay up just to break even, the slightest dip in results and the slightest hint that the club is not going to hit that target, they’ll whisk the manager out of the door and get a new man in, who will, invariably do well initially before coming up against reinvigorated sides who also changed managers, lose a few, and they’re out too.
As a firm believer in consistency throughout all sports (I refer to the success of Red Bull Racing and Sebastian Vettel in F1- now the longest driver/team partnership at 5 full seasons, with 4 titles 2010-13 and a 2nd in 2009) you only need to look at the staggering success Manchester United enjoyed under Sir Alex Ferguson and compare to where they are since he retired and key personnel also left. Look where Arsenal are now under Arsene Wenger- the longest serving manager by a full TEN years (Paul Tisdale at Exeter in 2nd at 7 years). Look at Exeter and how they’ve punched above their weight in recent years- Yeovil, what an amazing story of success they’ve had under Gary Johnson- a manager sacked by Latvia for failing to beat football’s perennial whipping boys San Marino. Such stories don’t happen by accident- nor do they happen overnight.
Just a look at the list of longest serving managers reveals only 3 managers having served 4 years or more, a further 5 having been at the helm for over 3 years and a staggering 21 at under 100 days with FIFTY having not been in the job a year (54%)
Yet for chairmen up and down the land, these glaringly obvious beacons of how to get it right are invisible- they get lost in short term gain and their clubs end up going nowhere. You can’t tell me Yeovil are a bigger club than Wolves but by doing it right, they’re a better club.
So has football management become the impossible job? In a nutshell, unless you’re at a club batting above their average or you have a very settled structure in place, then yes it has. You can guarantee nowadays 3 or 4 quick defeats and the media will pile on the pressure, the fans will take the bait and turn against their manager and team, that’ll give the weak, short-sighted chairmen the perfect excuse they need to make the call.
As I conclude this rant/opinion, I leave you with a simple image.
- I say no more
Thanks for reading,
Josh
Under The Floodlights 