“You’re only as good as your last performance…”
Forget the past. If you’re currently losing games, then you’re a bad manager. You’ve been found out. You’re a fraud.
What utter horseshit that is.
Nevertheless, these sentiments are routinely adopted when analysing manager performance. Why is it that a manager’s past goes out of the window? Why, despite huge bodies of evidence beyond recent results, are individual circumstances ignored? And why is it that the situation is seemingly and uniquely A Very British Scandal?
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen Portuguese and German bosses pick up two of the biggest managerial vacancies in England. Depending on who you listen to, an interview process to explore whether promising home-grown managers could impress enough to warrant consideration for the national team job either did or did not happen. None of the likely candidates to sit such an interview seem to think it did exist. Maybe ChatGPT ran the interview process?
The decision-making involved has led to some soul-searching around the state of English football. How is it that England can produce such quality on the pitch but such dross in the dugout? But that’s an assumption. And maybe the assumption is wrong.
Premier League clubs are loath to appoint a rookie manager unless he is an A-lister from his playing days, so the EFL has become the hotbed of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed data nerds with middling-to-poor playing careers but a ton of post-retirement experience at an academy near you.
Early signs are often spectacular. Liam Manning and Rob Edwards, for example, were running before they even got near the ground. Russell Martin showed an incredible aptitude to get his sides playing free-flowing attacking football. Even Michael Carrick, whose playing career clearly sets him apart from most, had a dalliance with delivering one of the most spectacular promotions that the Championship had seen, within months of his arrival at The Riverside.
Fast forward a few seasons and three of the above have been fighting to save their jobs, while the stagnation of Boro under Carrick – despite some pretty promising numbers buried beneath the results – means he is no longer being mentioned as a realistic contender for Premier League jobs.
The perception from many, maybe most, is that these managers have been found out, or at the very least that they’ve found their level. Why should someone who is mid-table at Bristol City be considered for a Premier League vacancy? Shouldn’t Michael Carrick get Middlesbrough promoted to prove his credentials as a top-tier boss?
The outrage when Vincent Kompany – born in Belgium but sculpted in English football – was appointed as Bayern Munich manager fresh off a relegation with Burnley summed this up. Why would a European giant hire a guy who has just failed at Turf Moor of all places? It was as if Bayern had bought Jay Rodriguez to replace Harry Kane.
The German giants were happy to look at Kompany’s success in winning the Championship title, not to mention his decent showing at Anderlecht, as more pertinent evidence of his suitability for the Bayern hot seat, rather than focus on a relegation campaign where the tools for the job are barely comparable.
But you’re only as good as your last game (or, in Kompany’s case, your last 38 games), so therefore he’s shit. That’s how it goes, right?
Well, if we look at Jurgen Klopp, it doesn’t have to be this way. His tenure at Mainz started with success after success, taking them from the bowels of the 2.Bundesliga into European competition. It couldn’t continue, though, and Mainz were relegated under his stewardship and then failed to bounce back the season after.
If this had happened in English football then I am confident that, no matter what came before, this would have been the death knell for Klopp’s top-flight career. Look at what happened to Chris Wilder* following a one-season slip after a decade of over-performance lifted him from non-league to the top half of the Premier League. Yet Dortmund were only too happy to appoint Klopp as their new manager, and the rest is history.
*before anyone alleges that I think Chris Wilder could have been the English Jurgen Klopp if he had just been given the chance… well, we’ll never know.
English football, on the other hand, seems to have a zero-tolerance policy towards perceived under-achievement when it comes to analysing the ability of coaches.
An unblemished record is the only benchmark for success, which may explain why the top opportunities currently seem to be going to coaches such as Erik Ten Hag, Arne Slot and Ruben Amorim, who, after promising starts to their careers, took up the job of being a massive fish in a pretty small pond. It’s quite easy to dodge any trouble in those ponds, and it’s a luxury that isn’t afforded to our own managers.
The EFL is not a level playing field and, for most, it is hard to succeed. This is especially true in the Championship, where there is such a huge resource gap between those recently relegated into the league and the rest of the division. It was pleasing when Southampton recruited Martin from Swansea despite little tangible success – a rare bit of innovative managerial recruitment that looked beyond the mere league table – and he delivered promotion in his first season at the club.
It now looks likely that Martin is soon to be sacked. This would be an understandable decision which would yield a stylistic shift and improve Saints’ chances of survival, but it would also be a permanent blot on Martin’s CV, in an industry where few seem willing to at least explore whether such a blot is relevant at all.
We can say the same about Kieran McKenna, whose job is surely safe at Portman Road, but was his name even whispered in the wake of Ten Hag’s sacking? Manchester United were one of three clubs who supposedly courted the Northern Irishman over the summer, along with Chelsea and Brighton, but there will now be fans of all three watching Match of the Day each weekend and laughing about their lucky escape.
Enzo Maresca bucks the trend, having been hired by one of the richest clubs in world football fresh off winning the Championship title, but his is not an EFL success story. The EFL was Leicester’s nightmarish purgatory – a punishment for flying right into the sun – and to deliver a return to the top flight, they hired an Italian who had learnt his trade at Manchester City. Chelsea weren’t investing in EFL form; it was just another asset grab from the City Football Group, to go with Cole Palmer and Jadon Sancho.
We’re waiting for our Pep rather than looking for our Klopp. Our Slot. Our Tuchel.
If we continue to have such an unforgiving approach to managerial achievements, then the only way we will get homegrown managers with the perceived calibre to compete for those top jobs is if Frank Lampard or Wayne Rooney also happen to be a generational visionary. We’re waiting for our Pep rather than looking for our Klopp. Our Slot. Our Tuchel.
Brighton owner Tony Bloom, who is reported to be an admirer of Russell Martin, appears to be one of the few who can ignore the noise. It’s interesting that the appointment of the recently-written-off-but-formerly-quite-good Neil Critchley at Hearts has been credited to Bloom’s analytics firm, Jamestown Analytics, ahead of his rumoured investment in the Scottish club.
It was Bloom who plucked Graham Potter from mid-table Swansea, in the virtually unprecedented move of a Premier League club recruiting a manager from the EFL. The reaction was predictable, with many incredulous that Chris Hughton could be discarded for a guy who finished 10th with newly relegated Swansea.
The appointment was a huge success. Potter oversaw a period in which Brighton transitioned from a team perceived as needing Hughton’s pragmatic style to survive to a team who stamped their authority on top-flight games, with relegation barely figuring as a scare. Horses for courses – and, as he often does, Bloom both bought and backed the right ones.
Otherwise, though, the sad fact is that the EFL is where good players become great, but promising coaches have their reputations destroyed by a hostile environment in which one failure is one too many.
The notion that no homegrown coach can successfully manage an elite side is born from perception rather than fact, in an environment where aptitude is assessed in far too binary a fashion: you’re good until you’re bad.
When you consider the strength of our pyramid compared to those in other countries, it seems unlikely that all homegrown coaches are too limited to work at the top level. It’s a pathway issue. And until we adopt a more nurturing attitude towards those on the way up, then their descent will always follow soon after.
Thank god someone said it. I’m exhausted by how quickly perspectives on managers from fanbases can turn on their head within 4 games
An excellent article George. Thank you. Kieran Maguire said on his recent pod that the stats show that changing manager has little or no effect.
Which brings me to my club, Stoke City. Relegation and seven Championship finishes either side of 16th and we now have our 6th manager since the drop. Only one has had a full season in the post.
Our owner, John Coates, has a good record of ‘innovative’ appointments but with the exception of Alex Neil, none had appropriate experience of the situation the club was in at the time of their appointment. That means they need a minimum of 18 months and two summer transfer windows to digest such a massive chunk of learning.
Every time we see the same sequence in our managers of ‘articulate enthusiasm > concern at the fitness of our players > shock at the reality of managing in the Championship > the look of a good man defeated’. This usually takes 8-12 months at Stoke and then they and their entourage leave only for the next ‘contender’ to step up and the cycle begins again.
If we can’t get it right at a financially stable club owned by such a genuine family of fans, what hope is there elsewhere?