If you were a billionaire, would you buy Everton Football Club? No? Me neither.
The bookends to last Sunday’s thoroughly deserved Palace win over Everton could not be ignored. Two TV interviews with Rafa Benitez gave us a snapshot insight into a man under mighty pressure to hold on to his job.
In the pre-match chat with Sky, Rafa was cheery and chirpy, apparently a smiling man with few cares in the world.
Post-match, he was very much “feel sorry for me”, looking and sounding like he was preparing for a one-way trip through the Goodison revolving door. “We controlled the game” was his ludicrous claim, repeated over and over. The rest of the message he chose to pass on to his TV audience was that his Everton team only lost to Palace because of three goals all caused by individual mistakes!
As I write, media speculation puts managerial novice Wayne Rooney at the head of the queue to replace Benitez!
Obviously, it would be morally wrong to actually make this recommendation but, if Everton’s new stadium design incorporated a redundancy chute in the corner of the owner’s office, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Since David Moyes left Everton to become Old Trafford’s Chosen One in 2013, no fewer than nine different managers have occupied Everton’s slippery hot seat. A right box of licorice allsorts that includes Martinez, Ferguson, Koeman, Ancelotti and, of course, Allardyce.
And that set me thinking about football club owners and the managers that owners choose and later inevitably sack. More particularly, I was focused on the extraordinarily high failure rate of those who do the hiring and firing, the astonishingly low success rate of those who take the job, the role of the media and, above all, what about us fans?!
The Impossible Job?
What an odd job it is to be a Premier League manager! In the whole world of work, where else would you find a manager who:
- Generally gets paid way less than the personnel employed to execute his instructions?
- As results will prove, is not the best available and not even the best suited for the task at hand?
- Can be plucked from the obscurity, depression and heartbreak of two years’ unemployment and still be the subject of immediate high praise from fans for the pick the employer has made?
- Will soon be the victim of the “boss kill rate” currently running at 70% a year? In 12 months since December 2020, fourteen Premier League managers received their P45, including two at Spurs and two at Watford. Who next? Everton? Leicester? Leeds? Watford again?
The Fans
From the day they walk in the door, managers divide fan opinions. But every one of us knows that feeling deep inside – I just want this fella gone. The process that follows is fast, frequent and familiar – the incumbent manager hanging on for dear life, then put out of his misery by a sudden relocation to football’s unique recycling bin, and culminating in the new man being “unveiled” – like some beautiful bride!
This procedure tends to make fans very possessive. Give me back my club. Indeed, before kick-off at Chelsea only last Thursday, Everton fans displayed a banner reading “Benitez get out of our club”.
Remember the “Wenger Out” plane banner? More recently, the online outpourings of grief, joy and other human body products by Manchester United fans before and after Ole’s termination offered yet more proof that fans believe their club belongs to them and not the owners – and it almost goes without saying that people with one eye only see one club. Just in that moment, anyone would think that no other club had ever sacked its manager.
And then there’s Newcastle. After a decade of holding up little pieces of owner-loathing paper saying “Ashley Out”, they started their chants of “Bruce Out”. Which begs a question: did Scunthorpe fans use this chant style prior to the removal of manager Neil Cox?
The Media
Every week, someone will proclaim that some manager somewhere is on his way out the door. Plus, every six months or so, writers ask us to consider “which club won the transfer window?” Oddly, managers are exempt from windows, so we never see that kind of headline written about them. And yet ….. who did win this year’s managerial merry go round? Palace! Obviously.
The fairground music is never far away, as even the best managers are only ever four or five bad results from the push, and the media needs little encouragement before cranking the merry go round into action. Pages and screens are packed with pure speculation, and suddenly the years roll away as the familiar names are proclaimed as ready to step in. Will it be Lampard? Koeman? Nuno? Keano? Pirlo? Zidane? Pardew? Hodgson? Allardyce? A long list of men waiting for the phone to vibrate with news of a place on the short list.
My mate Dennis the Menace likes to have a bet with fellow fans on the cliches that writers will pour forth in their articles. You can place your money on the first five to appear in the next article that pops up online. Dennis’ current hot cliché list to bet on includes no silverware, fan resentment, on another day we’d have won, vote of confidence, the poisoned chalice, last roll of the dice, self destructed, point of principle, mutual consent, blame the owners, blame the players, blame the fans, musical chairs, player power, budget limitations, not first choice, stand-in manager, caretaker, interim manager, a step in the right direction, a full and thorough recruitment process, old boy network, managerial team, honeymoon period, new manager bounce, it’s a circus and, of course Sam Allardyce…..
Which brings us to the question – what on earth makes men want this job so badly that they will endure minute by minute pressure, tidal waves of prickly personal abuse and – at the end of it all – inevitable termination?
Ego? Self over-belief? Power? Money? Fame? An insatiable desire to be the best?
Who knows, but maybe the most famous head on the stick is of course the quintessential contract salesman Jose Mourinho, whose cycle of failure appears to be speeding up with every new job he takes. Just six months into his Roma reign, another home defeat last week saw him in familiar press conference posture, refusing to answer any questions before informing the press that his job is impossible and blame for the 3-0 loss lies with the players. In the previous four days, according to the reports, Mourinho had also blamed results on a referee, injuries, the media, fate and his own players once more. Obviously, it’s not Jose’s fault. Not ever.
And so we end this review at home, where Palace’s third choice for Roy’s successor last summer came only after swerving oh-no Nuno and still-at-home Lucien Favre. We won! Because we have the soft spoken strong man Patrick Vieira – and we all say “Phew!” Well, many of us do. Errr, some of us do. And that’s a definite maybe.
