Tuesday 4th January 2011 saw the Football League managerial merry-go-round slip into overdrive, as three managers lost their jobs in the same day. Guest poster Chris Lines looked on as Phil Parkinson (Charlton), Chris Hutchings (Walsall) and Paul Simpson (Stockport) were dismissed within a few hours of each other, to complete a rather squalid hat-trick for Football League chairmen. Two days later and Roy Keane’s gone from Ipswich too, denied the opportunity to lead the team out for their first semi-final since 1981.
We were already in double figures for sackings this season, not even including the Premier League. All told, there have now been 23 managerial changes in the Football League so far this season. So at the current rate of progress, more than half of all clubs will change their manager this season. Brilliant.
Clearly, this cannot be a good state of affairs for anybody. Managers, fearing that a couple of losses could result in the chop, will inevitably play safe – in their tactics, their team selections and their transfer dealings. This is the very opposite of what we want as fans. We want to see managers be bold, take risks, sign a brilliant maverick, go for the three points instead of sitting back for just one.
The sack-em-and-try-again culture benefits few. It hits clubs’ coffers, with hefty compensation often due to departees. It doesn’t create a sense in football that your club is a trustworthy, dependable, safe pair of hands that bigger teams might like to send their young starlets on loan to. And it means that fans don’t form the sort of bond with their manager that they used to – these days the manager often cuts an isolated figure when results are going against his team. Fans are quick to get on his back if they feel like a little pressure and booing might mean a newer, sexier replacement. And, obviously, it doesn’t benefit players. With regular changes of manager, they’ve no sooner gotten used to one way of playing than they have to abandon it and adapt to a new man’s vision.
Of course, not all dismissals are unfair or unwarranted. That would be a ludicrous claim. As far as I can see, most sackings fit into one of four distinct categories. I’ll look at each one in turn, using examples from the 2010/11 season so far.
The ‘Deserved To Go’ Club
Gordon Strachan, Middlesbrough. Strachan had done reasonably well elsewhere, but concerns were first raised when he started signing up half of the SPL – not a league enjoying halcyon days at the moment – and threw them all into the first team. Few of his signings bore fruit, and he increasingly seemed to have lost the fans and the players in his final weeks in the job. Not necessarily a terrible manager, but certainly the wrong fit at Boro and a deserved dismissal.
Chris Hutchings, Walsall. The general view among the footballing community on Tuesday seemed to be that Hutchings “had it coming”. It’s perhaps hard to argue against sacking the manager when you’re eight points adrift of safety halfway through the season, especially when they managed a credible 10th place last term. Should there be any doubt as to where the fans stood, the first three responses to the news on the upthesaddlers.com forum were: “Thank effin’ Christ!”, “Too late, I fear” and an understated, contemplative “YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!”.
The Somewhat Hasty
Paul Trollope, Bristol Rovers. A surprising number of fans and members of the local media were glad to see the back of Trollope. They are better placed than me to offer judgement, but on the face of it this was a manager who has been quite widely heralded for bringing the Gasheads up from League Two and whose reputation in the game was pretty promising. Not many of his ilk around, and perhaps Rovers have been a little rash? Time will tell, although chucking away a two-goal home lead to troubled Plymouth Argyle this week suggests that immediate improvements have not been made. If they’d stuck with Trollope, one imagines there would have been four teams worse than Rovers come May.
Paul Simpson, Stockport County. Similar to the Bristol Rovers situation, a lot of Stockport fans seem to agree with the decision of Stockport County’s owners (the 2015 Group) to get rid of Simpson. Style of play and an over-conservative nature in home games seem to have been their main gripes. Reasonable enough complaints, and ones I’m sure we’ve had of our own teams at times in the past. But Stockport are not long out of the woods from 14 months in administration – there was always going to be an almighty mess to sort out. And given the catastrophic consequences that dropping out of the Football League could have, you can perhaps (despite what I said earlier about fans craving positive football) have a shred of sympathy for Simpson for wanting to cautiously eek out enough points to keep them up. They were also four points clear of the drop zone when he was sacked. It’s a little cruel on a man who was also sacked last season by Shrewsbury – Shrewsbury! – for failing to make the playoffs. I have some sympathy for the fans if the football was bad, but surely staying in the league was paramount for this season?
The Wrong Man In The First Place
George Burley, Crystal Palace. Sometimes a team makes an appointment that makes you a little uneasy as to whether they’ve chosen the right man for the job. In both of his previous jobs – at Southampton and Scotland – Burley had cut a weary, somewhat lonely figure. Whether his grossly unfair dismissal from Hearts had left him jaded about the state of British football is debatable. Certainly, if you believe the rumours that a lot of Southampton fans will tell you, it left him vulnerable to becoming “tired and emotional”, as Private Eye like to call it. Throw in that Palace’s best players – Victor Moses and Jose Fonte – had been sold before Burley took over, and things were never likely to go swimmingly for him this season. Though if you start playing 79-year-old Edgar Davids at left-back, you’re not exactly helping yourself.
Brian Laws, Burnley. Other times a team makes an appointment so ridiculous that you spend the rest of the day in a sort of football-induced daze. You try to read the other football headlines but all you can see is “Laws gets Premier League job”. So you’re in a top-flight relegation battle, your brilliant young manager has just made the step up to a bigger club – your next move is crucial. To whom will you entrust responsibility for keeping you in the richest league in the world? How about a man who, despite spearheading two successful promotions with Scunthorpe, had (and still has) a career win percentage of just 36%? How about a man who’d recently been dismissed from a club languishing in the division below? “Brian Laws for me, please,” said Burnley chairman Barry Kilby as he (presumably) popped another mephodrone pill in his mouth while absent-mindedly placing his cat in a wheelie bin. Nobody in football understood Burnley’s appointment of Brian Laws. And now he has – with crushing inevitability – failed to turn the Clarets into a Championship-destroying monster. Who’d have thought it?
The Downright Stinking Harsh
Phil Parkinson, Charlton Athletic. Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve been provoked to write this piece is that Parkinson can consider himself pretty darned unlucky to be out of a job. I saw Charlton in a pre-season friendly at AFC Wimbledon on 10th July 2010 and they were not just bad, but diabolical. Okay, there were trialists aplenty on the field, but Charlton looked a million miles from being ready for the new season. But Parkinson has worked with what was available to him, made some decent signings on a tight budget, and has turned them into a side challenging strongly for promotion. This really smacks of new board wanting their own man. But why disrupt this season? Why not see if Parkinson can take you up to the Championship first? And now Charlton are being very heavily linked with Dennis Wise…
Simon Davey, Hereford United. Regardless of what you may think about Davey’s controversial arrival at Hereford after leaving Darlington for personal reasons, Hereford couldn’t get rid of him quick enough when Davey won only one of his first 10 games in charge and the Bulls propped up the early season table. But this was a man who’d kept Barnsley in the Championship for three consecutive seasons – he surely deserved more of a chance? You’ll notice that Hereford – having replaced Davey with their physio, as you do – remain joint-bottom of League Two in his absence.
So given the four categories I’ve set out above, put aside any allegiances and biases and think about which category would you put this season’s six other Football League dismissals into. There’s Kevin Blackwell (Sheffield United, dismissed two games into the season), Darren Ferguson (Preston North End, fired with the club bottom of the table), Paulo Sousa (Leicester City, sacked in late September after a poor start), Craig Short (Notts County, dismissed despite appearing to consolidate County in League One after promotion), Mark Stimson (Barnet, given his marching orders after a bad run of results), and, sacked just in time to earn a mention in this piece – these managers are dropping almost faster than I can type – Roy Keane (Ipswich Town, fired after 20 months of underachieving league form, but with a Carling Cup semi-final coming up). I’d argue that these six fit into a variety of the categories, but with one omission – the Downright Stinking Harsh. Well, would you put any of those six into that bracket?
So I think what I’m getting at is this. Yes, there have been way too many Football League sackings this season, a trend that is bad for the game in lots of ways. But most of these sackings are either slightly hasty or involve managers who should not have been given their jobs in the first place. Not many of them are astonishing or ridiculous. That sort of nuttiness is largely the preserve of the Premier League.
Football club chairmen have seldom excelled at selecting the right candidate. For every David Dein plucking an Arsene Wenger from obscurity, there are scores of Kevin McCabes and Richard Murrays thinking, “I know, I’ll give the job to good old Bryan Robson, that’ll be good for the overseas profile of the club”, or “Hey, this Les Reed chappy strikes me as a diligent sort that’s unlikely to give me any lip”.
Yes, fans are distressingly impatient nowadays and should calm down a bit, but the real problem is with the men who make the appointments in the first place. Often their choices are little short of harebrained. And even when they do pick a good ‘un, they’ll often sack him for losing three games on the spin anyway. And then it’s the next poor sod’s turn. If football club boards took a more rigorous approach to appointing managers they’d be hell of a lot more popular with their own fans. Five minutes on the phone to Tor-Kristian Karlsen – @karlsentk on Twitter, a regular and eloquent ranter on this subject – would be a good start.
Meanwhile, Johnny Promising rots in the youth team, his talent remaining undiscovered by a succession of half-baked managers. Bored and dissatisfied, he starts to notice fruit machines, Jägermeister and girls.
LMA Chief Executive Richard Bevan speaks to TFT
TFT: Managers in the Football League are currently experiencing average tenures of approximately half the length they enjoyed 30 years ago. Why do you think chairmen are so much quicker to pull the trigger in today’s game?
Richard Bevan, LMA: The majority of the dismissals, last season in particular, were in the Championship and League Two. This may be attributed to the pressure of being near the Premier League or falling out of the Football League. Perhaps one of the main reasons is the clubs’ desire for instant success. The reality is that for a club and manager to be successful an appropriate amount of time is required to succeed. While it is difficult to place an appropriate generic amount of time for tenure or time to deliver success, as every club has their own set of unique circumstances, it is certainly in the clubs’ best interests to look to the medium- to long-term with their managerial appointments. We obviously promote the fact that continuity creates stability and that will lead to success.
Does the January transfer window heighten the chances of a manager losing their job?
Seven managerial movements in December and already six at the start of this month suggest this may be a factor. However, one of the main factors for dismissals is the unrealistic expectation of clubs on their managers. Current stats certainly prove the continued volatility of the job. Today, managers have an increasingly small window of opportunity to have an impact on their club. History has shown managers need time to stamp their own imprint on a squad and a club.
A couple of this week’s sackings seem rather harsh – Phil Parkinson (Charlton) and Paul Simpson (Stockport). Given the resources available to them, it’s hard to see what more these individuals could have done. Parkinson in particular seemed to have a modest Charlton squad well placed for promotion. How do the LMA respond when a manager has lost a job they were carrying out to a good standard?
The sacking of Phil Parkinson was very surprising given Charlton currently sit fifth in League One, only three points from the automatic promotion places. Phil was awarded the Manager Of The Month award as recently as November, testament to the outstanding work he has done with his squad so far this season, following a summer that saw the departure of over 30 players from his playing staff. Paul Simpson’s dismissal was equally as disappointing as he was given less than six months in charge. Stockport are certainly a club in transition as having previously been in administration for 14 months and on the brink of extinction, a new manager certainly needed a significant amount of time to change their fortunes. Without doubt, both clubs are losing young, talented managers.
Over the past 12-18 months the LMA have been heavily promoting standard contracts with members and the clubs. Within time, the LMA hope that the standard contract will help improve the stability and longevity of managerial positions. What is key from the LMA viewpoint is to make sure clubs honour the manager and coaches contracts and ensure managers are treated respectfully during the termination – a very difficult period for many people.
We also encourage clubs to examine their business model and their manager recruitment strategy. A transfer window for managers has been suggested to help deal with this matter but this needs careful consideration and could have the opposite desired effect. The real focus should be on good governance and providing a stable framework for managers to work in.
Chris Lines is the author of the excellent Narrow The Angle blog.
Great article. The manager is often the scapegoat when a team is performing badly, I think it’s shortsighted by fans and boards to think this is always the case. I think one of the major factors for the continuing increase in managerial sackings is to do with unrealistic fans expectations and the boo boys that are more prevalent than ever at football matches. One defeat at home and the crowd start booing at the final whistle, it’s madness. Not every team can win the league or the cup, there will always be a club with restricted budgets, or one with transitional teams etc… instant success is not something that happens in football these days, football fans and boards need to embrace this fact and back their manager and team. That said Keano & Strachan deserved the boot, both teams are much better than their position and the above managers.
I agree with Graham, managers get it first, as if that will change anything. Fans are fickle and chairmen seem to pander to them very quickly.
Being a Leicester fan, seeing Nigel Pearson here for two whole seasons was great as we had some well needed stability and began to grow back to the team we were before relegation. The new owners wanted a more sexier name, hence Sousa, but he never really suited us and I’m not sure of anyone who was ever comfortable with him here.
It’s hard to get the balance of getting rid before the rot (if there is one) or sticking out so the manager can find his feet. I think, where Sousa is concerned, installing Sven at the right time was a master stroke. Many clubs have got it wrong this season though, and the number is increasing…!
An inspired post and spot on your assessments although I’d agree Simpson has had a host of issues to deal with a County. As my fellow Two Unfortunates blogger Scarf wrote last week, it’s the lack of class shown by the club’s board that really sticks in the throat.