YOU’RE GETTING SACKED IN THE MORNING

“Almost every football manager is only five bad results from the sack,” Andy Roxburgh, the former Scotland coach told me when he was UEFA’s technical director. The exact figure may vary - Pep Guardiola can survive six defeats in a row, having led Manchester City to four consecutive league titles and the UEFA Champions League – but the principle holds true.

In 2022/23, a record 41 managers worked in the Premier League. Chelsea, Leeds and Southampton appointed three coaches and – spoiler alert! – the latter two were relegated. As this season kicked off, the media cast Steve Cooper (Leicester), Julian Lopetegui (West Ham), Russell Martin (Southampton), Gary O’Neill (Wolves) and Erik Ten Hag (Manchester United) as ‘dead managers walking’. Cooper and Ten Hag have already gone, with the Foxes reviving somewhat under Ruud van Nistelrooy, who had previously impressed as caretaker boss at Old Trafford before Ruben Amorim’s arrival. O’Neill’s fate hangs in the balance after losing 2-1 to West Ham in a fixture dubbed ‘el sackico’.

The scrutiny of coaches by the media - and the unruly hordes of self-appointed tacticians on social media – is increasingly relentless but it’s always existed. As Roxburgh put it: “Gerard Houllier used to say that the most important 30 seconds in a manager’s week were how they handled the TV interview after a defeat.” Journalists, supporters, directors and players all watch this peculiar trial by ordeal with the same question in mind: has the boss lost it?

A manager who favours attack, in Roxburgh’s view, usually gets longer to turn things around than a defensively-minded coach, because fans will, for a while, support them for trying to play good football. There is also a commercial imperative behind this preference. With clubs like Bayern repositioning themselves as entertainment brands, any coach whose tactical preference is to ‘park the bus’ needs to win some proper silverware to survive.

The manager’s lot has become more volatile because of what Roxburgh called “fan in the box” syndrome, in which new owners, spending new money, expect immediate results. Football is, as Terry Venables liked to say, a simple game, but deceptively so. In an era of opaque financial regulation, when the season may soon last longer in the courtroom than on the pitch, buying success – never as simple as wealthy owners once assumed – is tougher and riskier than ever.

Football is also steeped in received wisdom, much of which is completely wrong. How often, for example, do commentators declare that titles are decided in big games? Yet in 2023/24, Manchester City topped the Premier League because they won nine more points against teams outside the top six than runners-up Arsenal. If the title had been decided purely on head-to-head results between the top six, the Gunners would have romped home with 22 points to City’s 15. The real significance of big matches, often hyped up as defining events on Sky Sport and the like, may be their impact on new owners who have inflated expectations.

If you apply the most exacting benchmark, 19 out of 20 Premier League clubs will fail every season because they won't be crowned champions. Even if you lower the bar a bit, 13 or 14 will not qualify for Europe. (This might not sound drastic but Manchester United will forfeit £10m from their Adidas shirt deal if they don’t reach next season’s UEFA Champions League.) The ultimate failure – relegation from the top flight – could cost £100m, which may convince even the most resolute owner to sack the manager.

In Italian football, Palermo owner Mauricio Zamparini remains the undisputed king of the ‘mangia-allenatore’ (literally ‘manager-eaters’), running through nine coaches in Serie A in 2015/16. Seven were sacked (two of them were brought back and sacked again), one served as caretaker while another stood down because he lacked the requisite coaching qualifications. Because of – or despite – Zamparini’s quixotic ruthlessness, Palermo avoided the drop by one point.

Even if you take a more considered approach to changing managers, does this tactic actually work? Data analyst Adam Smith found that 45 (58%) of 78 Premier League clubs which sacked coaches when in the relegation zone still went down. Research by BBC Sport’s Paul Haywood suggests that top flight clubs have roughly a 50/50 chance of winning more points per game in a season after appointing a new coach. 

Firing managers in mid-stream has worked brilliantly for three EPL clubs. Back in 2008/09, succeeding Juande Ramos, Harry Redknapp took Spurs from 20th, bottom of the table, to 8th. In 2017/18, Everton climbed from 13th to 8th after Sam Allardyce replaced Ronald Koeman. Big Sam’s efforts were rewarded with the sack in May 2018, a decision influenced by the fact that, to Roxburgh’s point, the Toffees’ fans couldn’t stick his dour brand of football. In October 2022, Aston Villa were 16th when Unai Emery took over from Steven Gerrard and finished seventh, qualifying for the UEFA Europa Conference League.

Why aren't such miracles more frequent? The obvious explanation, as José Mourinho once observed, is that “A coach is not Harry Potter” and cannot magic away the deep structural issues that hinder many clubs. The less obvious one is that fans and journalists seriously overestimate the amount of time managers have to change the way their team plays during the season . You can make positional changes, correct some tactical errors and remotivate individuals but as Roxburgh said: “If you want to completely change your team’s style of play, you need to work with the squad over an extended period of time, and that’s only really possible in pre-season training.”

When a coach’s relationship with the players breaks down irretrievably, their departure becomes inevitable. The difficulty for owners is that such crises can come from nowhere. In May 2016, Claudio Ranieri was being serenaded by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli at the King Power stadium after guiding Leicester City to the most improbable league title in football history. Seven months later, after five defeats in a row (again, to Roxburgh’s point) and a dressing room mutiny (in the immediate aftermath of his dismissal not one player posted regrets or regards on social media) the Italian was out, without a word of explanation from City’s owners.

Such rifts have a multitude of causes – no names, no packdrill, but I know of one Premier League manager who ‘lost the dressing room’ when his players discovered him having sex in it with a cleaner – but, given the hothouse intensity of their working lives, they are virtually inevitable. When Rinus Michels, the legendary coach who led Ajax to successive European Cups in 1971 and 1972, left for Barcelona, some players danced on the tables in delight.

Part of the problem, as former Arsenal and England striker Alan Smith told me, is that a manager's strictures are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Towards the end of George Graham’s eight-years at Arsenal – the Scot was ousted in February 1995 – Smith said: “If things weren’t going well, the players could predict – word for word – the bollocking we’d get at half-time.”

Relationships between manager and owner are often equally volatile. The story of coaches at a new club usually follows a similar narrative arc: feted like superheroes when they arrive, they depart as scapegoats (from the Biblical term ‘escapegoats’ to describe goats who were released into the wilderness with a scarlet ribbon tied to their head to embody – and take away with them – the sins of the community). Football coaches may be rewarded more remuneratively than goats in ancient Palestine but, ultimately, they serve the same purpose.