Week 28: When Results In A Results Industry Still Manage To Get You Fired
What advice would you give someone wanting to become a football manager these days?
Other than don’t buy…rent.
In the not too distant past, managers were fired if they didn’t do their jobs. Now they get the boot even if they do.
The two obvious (and certainly not the last) casualties of the last week are Huddersfield’s Danny Cowley and Watford’s Nigel Pearson.
Cowley, along with his brother, was tempted to leave Lincoln City – where he’d achieved untold success in just over three years – for the ‘step up’ to Huddersfield. It seemed quite a wrench to leave as the Cowley brothers were adored by the Lincoln fans and wider community but they took the chance. The Yorkshire team were in trouble one place off the bottom of the Championship, having been relegated from the Premier League a few months earlier, with no wins in six games.
Cowley guided them to eighteenth and safety. But not safe enough, apparently. Certainly not for him.
“We have made this decision in the belief that, in the long term, it is in the best interests of the club as we move forward,” said chairman Phil Hodgkinson, citing different visions of how the club should proceed. So was the Cowley appointment not in the club’s best interests?
The new man, and fourth boss in four years, is Leeds United assistant, Carlos Corberan, whose only experience in the top job was in Cyprus but has spent three years with Marcelo Bielsa as well as coaching the club’s under-23 side.
Bielsa is a hot ticket right now. Renowned for a style that requires incredible fitness levels, his teams have been accused of burning out, but an enforced three-month hiatus was ideal for a team to recharge for the final leg of their journey. Leeds barely looked back after lockdown, instead of falling away as they did in 2018/19. The Terriers hope that some of the magic has rubbed off on his assistant.
They do like fashionable choices. After all, they copied the ‘Klopp’ model with David Wagner (who got them an unlikely promotion and even more unlikely survival) and then Jan Siewert, with less positive results. Appointing a young British manager in Cowley was a step out of that pattern but it lasted less than a year.
“After two difficult seasons, we have put a lot of thought and work into what we want to be,” said head of football operations Leigh Bromby. As opposed to what? Not putting a lot of thought and work into it? Many at the time saw the capture of the Cowley brothers as a major coup and they’ll no doubt find gainful employment quickly. Any EFL club with a managerial vacancy (or not – when did that ever stop them?) would do well to look at them.
But there was also suggestion that the footballing visions of Cowley and the owners didn’t align, but if not, why not? Shouldn’t that have been a key part of the recruitment criteria? I’m not picking on Huddersfield; a lack of alignment is often trotted out when clubs change their manager but surely it should never get to that, if it is true.
But if Huddersfield erred in that selection process, as it seems they are implying, then so maybe too did Danny Cowley. He was also a hot ticket, could do very little wrong at Lincoln and didn’t need to leave for anything other than ambition and possibly more money.
But ambition and money mean little if you’re unemployed within twelve months. And football being the fickle beast that it is, you never know if you’ll get another gig quickly, it at all.
Keeping Up With The Joneses
Danny Cowley was a great fit at Lincoln but the stars rarely line up so nicely that you get the chance to go back. It happened with Nathan Jones though, who also left a club doing well in Luton for one in the Championship but that still the Premier League advertising boards in a shed behind the stand. It didn’t work out for him either but Stoke didn’t wait for him to finish the job of keeping them up, replacing him with Michael O’Neil but he did get the chance to keep the Hatters up instead. A remarkable post-lockdown run saw them finish on 51 points after Graeme Jones left at the start of coronavirus shut down with them in a perilous position.
Which brings us to Watford, who have got shot of managers at a rapid rate in recent years but still managed to prosper. Until this season.
Nigel Pearson can be marmite for football fans but the players seem to respond to him. He’s also no stranger to short managerial stints (Southampton, Hull City and Derby) so was probably not too surprised when Watford’s owners pulled the trigger with two games to go but most observers were.
When Pearson – mastermind of Leicester’s great escape the season-before-you-know-what-happened – took over, the Hornets were six points adrift and didn’t look as if they knew how to score a goal, let alone win a game. His record of seven wins, including three straight away, gave them a chance and two wins at home to Norwich and Newcastle made them favourites to stay up. Remember too that it was Watford who not only inflicted Liverpool’s first 2019/20 Premier League defeat but did it in some style. His record over the whole season would have seen them comfortably in mid-table.
Yet, after a toothless first-half capitulation to West Ham, he was gone. With two tough games to play, it’s difficult to see what the strategic thinking was. If he’d got seven wins including a 3-0 win over the Champions, then surely letting him get to the end of the campaign was the most sensible move; especially as they didn’t have a saviour ready to parachute in. A hammering by Manchester City means that they need to beat Arsenal to stand any chance of staying up. Not easy but that’s what Villa thought a few days ago too.
If Watford stick to type, they’ll bring in someone else (probably from overseas – Claude Puel has been mentioned already) and even if they do survive on Sunday, they’ll probably be looking for another manager to get them out of trouble – someone like Nigel Pearson, perhaps – in six to eight months’ time.
LMA boss, Richard Bevan called it ‘disappointing’ and said clubs need to let managers ‘build a team culture and recruit successfully’. But it’ll fall on deaf ears. If the owners can’t do this, how can we expect them to let the managers do it?
And where does it end. If partial success is no longer enough it could get messy. If seven wins or meeting your objectives doesn’t cut the mustard, is anyone safe?
Do Chelsea get rid of Frank Lampard if they miss out on the Champions League at the weekend, for example?
Should Leicester sack Brendan Rogers if they finish out of the top four? And before anyone says they’d never sack such a popular manager after such a great season…
West Brom almost threw promotion away several times in the last fortnight but would that have seen Slaven Bilic boing-boinging off to the jobcentre instead of being a hero?
Nottingham Forest did somehow manage to miss out on the play-offs despite only needing a point for what seemed like weeks. For a club that’s had 673 managers since 2003, Sabri Lamouchi might be wise to begin polishing up his CV.
It goes on. Other than Jurgen Klopp, you can build a case against almost anyone.
Take Brighton. Last season, Chris Hughton was sacked because they had only just survived in the Premier League and didn’t score enough goals. Graham Potter arrived and they have only just survived in the Premier League and don’t score enough goals.
Like Watford did, Villa could have pulled the trigger after their post-lockdown results but kept the faith and have been rewarded with seven points and probable survival. Given fans wanted him out before we’d even heard the word ‘Covid’ it will be interesting to see the reaction if they get the points they need at the weekend. As he’s a fan, it clearly buys him a touch more loyalty than others.
The same questions will surface if Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United suffer second-season-syndrome as many promoted teams do. The old victim-of-their-own-success-dismissal that makes you wonder if they’d just be better being mediocre.
Bevan also said that football management seemed to be a ‘permanent state of psychological crisis’ and while many will have no sympathy with one that loses their job because of the high salaries and pay-offs, it’s also a fact that many managers are out of work and some never get a top job again. As the UK unemployment rate rockets and clubs begin cutting their cloth accordingly, has there ever been a worse time to get a P45?
Nigel Pearson, after high profile roles at Leicester and Watford will probably be OK. Danny Cowley voluntarily gave up a secure role – for his own ends – but he should be snapped up yet you never know. A few years ago he was a schoolteacher and part-time boss at Braintree. Nothing is guaranteed.
I don’t know if clubs will ever listen to Richard Bevan. Maybe there just isn’t a fix and one year will soon be seen as a long time for a football manager to be at a single club.
I hope not. But I keep hearing about football resetting because of this pandemic yet when it comes to hiring and firing managers, you sense it hasn’t and won’t change one bit.
It’s worth noting that amidst the mayhem, Wycombe Wanderers were promoted to the Championship for the first time in their history. Gareth Ainsworth, their manager, just happens to be the longest-serving boss in the league.
After him? That might be Klopp.
Coincidence? I just hope neither of them chose to rent.
words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist