Like a sergeant with his stripes, no manager or coach is complete these days without the initials of his name decorating the front of his tracksuit top, his puffer jacket, his winter sideline coat.
At the Vitality Stadium last Tuesday night, Bournemouth FC gaffer Gary O’Neil was missing a couple of print characters from the front of his jacket. In block capitals and white lettering were GO where it should have been GO’N. The BBC match commentator Chris Wise didn’t miss his opportunity for a quip, even if he didn’t quite land the gag.
The Cherries were 0-1 down to Brighton, courtesy of Evan Ferguson’s delightful first-half finish. Now it was late in the second half and the home side were still chasing an equaliser. The BBC director cut to a shot of the agitated manager on the touchline. “You might note on Gary O’Neil’s jacket,” remarked Wise, “it’s missing the N. It’s got ‘GO’ on it, and in the current managerial climate, having [‘GO’] on your tracksuit probably isn’t such a good idea.” No sooner had he said it than Brighton scored their second and Bournemouth were inching a step closer to the relegation trapdoor. Was GO’N going, going, gone?
The “current managerial climate” is tropical and feverish; sackings have been spreading like a contagion from club to club. Only two days before Bournemouth v Brighton, two more managers had been defenestrated. Brendan Rodgers parted company with Leicester City on Sunday afternoon, becoming the 11th manager to get the heave-ho, a new record for a single Premier League season. Later that day the revolving door at Chelsea whirred up to Mach speed again and suddenly Graham Potter found himself thrown out on the pavement, like a punter who’d been causing ructions at the bar.
And if it was a bar, he could have dusted himself down and walked straight back in and bought the joint. Because according to the Daily Star, Potter was paid off by Chelsea to the tune of £13m for his troubles. He was on a five-year contract worth £50m, signed when he took over last September. And the man he replaced at Stamford Bridge, Thomas Tuchel, was also bounced out by the American owners with a mattress worth £13m to cushion his fall.
But Potter and Tuchel were only in the ha’penny place compared to one of their predecessors: Antonio Conte was paid a reported £26.6m when then Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich threw him overboard in 2018. If Abramovich didn’t spare the lash, he didn’t spare the cash either when he was dumping his gaffers. In September 2007, he shocked the football world when he decided that his golden boy, the all-conquering Jose Mourinho, was dispensable too. Mourinho departed with a kick up the backside worth a reported £18m. If Jose fancied himself as a crooner, and you wouldn’t rule it out, he could’ve sang ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ with a glint in his eye that night.
David Moyes is hanging on to his job at West Ham by his fingertips, but he won't go hungry if the axe eventually falls. Photo: Steven Paston/PA
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David Moyes is hanging on to his job at West Ham by his fingertips, but he won't go hungry if the axe eventually falls. Photo: Steven Paston/PA
Six years later, he and Abramovich kissed and made up; Mourinho was back at the Bridge; by December 2015, the second marriage was dust. This time, the bride walked away with an estimated £10m in compo. And when Manchester United sacked him in December 2018, he saddled up and left town with a reported £19.6m in his satchels.
Managers, like players, are known from time to time to issue the proverbial come-and-get-me plea when they’ve their eye on a bigger club elsewhere. With the grotesque redundancy packages being thrown their way these days, some of them aren’t far short of issuing a come-and-get-rid-of-me plea to their employers. They can jump off the carousel nearly any time they like because they know there’s a lucrative landing in store for them. And they know too that there’s a fair chance the carousel will stop and let them climb back up again for another spin on the merry-go-round. As in the world of corporate management, failure at one place doesn’t seem to exclude them for very long from the golden circle. In this particular game of snakes and ladders, there seems to be more ladders than snakes.
In January 2021, Frank Lampard was sacked by Chelsea and Tuchel was installed in what was traditionally known as the hot seat but may now have to be re-named the ejector seat. In January 2022, Lampard was hired by Everton. In January 2023, he was sacked with the club second from bottom in the Premier League. Last Thursday he was back as interim boss at Stamford Bridge, replacing Potter, who had replaced Tuchel, who had replaced Lampard.
We don’t know for certain, but this kind of culture is hardly held up as a model of good governance in Harvard Business School. But presumably most business schools proceed along the basis that income and expenditure, profit and loss, due diligence and stable management, are universal priorities in all enterprises great and small. The flow of money in and out is as fundamental a law as gravity itself. But in the Premier League, gravity has been suspended indefinitely. The financial imperatives do not always apply. What goes up does not necessarily come down. Money is unchained from reality. It just floats around in the ozone, like the paper currency in one of those TV game shows where the contestants grab at it frantically as it swirls around in a pressurised chamber.
Chelsea was transferred from the Russian to the Americans last summer. If Abramovich was the poster boy for anarchic capitalism after the fall of communism, Todd Boehly and his consortium were supposed to be the exemplars of conservative blue-chip American capitalism. But their spending has been deranged too — £600m on players in the last two transfer windows combined. Plus two managers seen off the premises in double-quick time also.
Rodgers and Potter have joined the 2022/’23 P45 club, which was inaugurated as early as last August after Scott Parker was axed by Bournemouth and replaced by O’Neil. Parker was joined in quick succession by Tuchel, Bruno Lage (Wolverhampton Wanderers), Steven Gerrard (Aston Villa), Ralph Hasenhuttl (Southampton), Lampard, Jesse Marsch (Leeds), Nathan Jones (Southampton), Patrick Vieira (Crystal Palace), and Conte (Tottenham Hotspur). The speed and volume of turnover is such that you’d nearly forget some of them were managing in the Premier League at all this season.
Time, money and results wait for no man in this dizzying circus of musical chairs. Back in the more sedate 1960s, when Harold Wilson was smoking his pipe and great players were being paid peanuts, the average lifespan of a manager in the old First Division was five years. By the new millennium it was down to two-and-a-half years, give or take. In this decade it has come down to 13 months, in or around.
The latest candidates for the chop are said to be David Moyes at West Ham and Steve Cooper at Nottingham Forest. They know the game they’re in; they know that they won’t be going hungry if push comes to shove. But still, you’d like to think that if it does happen, DM and SC will at least be allowed to keep their coats.