No less than 31 managers in the Premiership and Football League have been sacked or left ‘by mutual consent’ this season. My colleague Sue Bridgewater has measured the average tenure of managers and it has declined from 3.12 years in 1992-93 to 1.36 years in 2009-10.
No less than 31 managers in the Premiership and Football League have been sacked or left ‘by mutual consent’ this season. My colleague Sue Bridgewater has measured the average tenure of managers and it has declined from 3.12 years in 1992-93 to 1.36 years in 2009-10. Yet all the evidence shows that getting rid of a manager generally makes very little difference to a team’s fortunes, particularly when one considers the financial costs involved, and can actually be harmful.
Football is a game of narrow margins and there are so many factors affecting results that a ‘bad run’ can be an almost random event. So why are managers being sacked more frequently?
Expectations have always been high and often unrealistic in football. There are probably at least forty clubs whose fans think their rightful place is in the Premier League. As the riches associated with Premier League membership have increased, so has the desperation to get there and stay there: or at least claim four years of parachute payments. The gap has also widened between the Championship and League 1 with the former becoming more like a de facto Premiership 2.
Ambitious owners quickly become discontented if their money does not bring the desired progress, while fans can quickly become disenchanted with a manager. The impetus is to ‘do something’ and the dreaded vote of confidence is often followed in short order by dismissal. Short-termism is rife, but it is questionable whether it does either individual clubs or the game as a whole any good.