Have recent managerial dismissals in Football been fair?

Michael Appleton

In the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of debate about unfair managerial dismissals, and with good reason.

Brian McDermott, despite steering Reading from underachievement near the bottom of the Championship to winning the title and putting up a strong fight against relegation with a team of unfashionable players, was sacked. Only eight days later, Blackburn sacked a manager in the first 10 weeks after he’d been appointed for the second time this season.

It’s pretty evident that at some high profile clubs, the people in charge don’t have a solid understanding of what’s reasonable to expect or how long a new boss needs to drill the players in his own methods.

Three weeks ago Richard Bevan, Chief Executive of LMA was interviewed by Radio 4’s Today programme, where he said:

“I’m not sure where the arrogance of football comes from that we don’t have to behave as any other industry. It’s embarrassing for the game that all of those sackings are unfair dismissals. The volatility is undermining the profession.”

While I’ve not been able to find the original audio recording of the interview, Bevan seems to have made a pretty clear and extreme claim – that all of the managerial sackings were undeserved. The ‘the people in charge are all idiots’ angle is one that will find support among fans in the Abramovich age. And from a media perspective, it doesn’t risk irritating former and future managers, who are more likely to be needed for a sound-bite than chairmen, meaning it’s this angle that many news outlets have taken. The Daily Express, for instance, takes up Bevan’s tone and slant on the raw data, reporting that “Out of the 33 changes, less than half (14) were resignations rather than sackings.” (Southend’s Paul Sturrock and Sunderland’s Martin O’Neill became the 34th and 35th after that was written.)

In other words, close to half of managerial changes were the result of managers deciding to leave their club behind.

Of course, the actions of Nottingham Forest and Blackburn (and to a lesser extent Southampton and Reading) are short-sighted and disloyal, but they aren’t the entire picture. Look at cases such as Carl Fletcher at Plymouth and Paul Dickov at Oldham, where almost all fans will tell you the board stuck by a first-time manager, not cut out for the role, for far too long.

Whenever an idea becomes a media talking point, managers up and down the country are asked their opinion, on the off-chance they say something attention-grabbing. Paul Ince used his turn to call for a managerial transfer window, but perhaps wasn’t wise in his choice of supportive reasoning:

“You look at Michael Appleton – he’s a young English manager coming into the game. To lose your job after 67 days is ridiculous. We’re not getting any time. We’ve got St George’s Park and this great training facility, which are all about bringing young English coaches through, but where’s the protection for them if they’re getting sacked after 67 days?”

It’s an easy retort to make, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for a man being sacked after 67 days when he’d walked from Blackpool after 64. Having said that, Appleton does have a decent excuse for abandoning Blackpool so quickly – the underinvestment in training facilities has become notorious, cited by some as a key reason for Ian Holloway’s departure. Odds are you’ve seen the state of their pitch, which makes you wonder just how bad the training ground might be. But Blackburn could try a similar defence, saying they expected Appleton to be a better manager than he was. If you take a job, you’ve got to make yourself aware of the conditions you’ll be working under. Instead, Appleton seemingly went to Blackpool with rose-tinted glasses and walked right back out at the first opportunity.

Bloomfield Road back when it didn’t resemble a farmer’s field. Courtesy of Terry Robinson

Two days after Bevan, MK Dons manager Karl Robinson spoke out against the sacking of his fellow League One manager, Gary Smith, by Stevenage FC. Given that Smith was a former MLS winning boss, who’d overseen a 4-0 victory over Sheffield United four days before being sacked, from certain angles Robinson appears to have a point. But Smith’s methods met with criticism from fans, both in his early days at the club and over recent months. He’s been accused by some of changing players for no good reason and being more loyal to his own signings than the evidence of their performances demanded. On top of all that, of Smith’s last 23 league games in a row, Stevenage won only five and drew two.

Of course, every right-thinking fan wants managers to be judged on long-term standards, not short-term events. But when short-term has become medium-term, and the team are in the kind of form that would see them competing for a record worst points haul, it’s not too unreasonable to give the manager his marching orders.

And even that doesn’t take into account the managers who hold onto their jobs for longer than they deserved, either because of board loyalty or a reputation that isn’t mirrored by their recent achievements. An almost clinical example is Martin O’Neill at Sunderland. After spending £24 million on Steven Fletcher and Adam Johnson last summer, his team have looked pretty average in most areas, while players like Stephan Sessègnon and Seb Larsson, who’ve been creative and dangerous previously, have looked bland and predictable.

Such was the power of his reputation, that there was little talk of O’Neill being removed when in October, Newcastle’s Demba Ba became Sunderland’s outright second top scorer. Even looking back to his time at Aston Villa, you can argue that O’Neill did no more than should be expected, given the presence of one of the country’s best youth systems and the vast sums invested in the team by Randy Lerner.

While I wouldn’t want to call for anyone to lose their job, this season and last Mark Hughes at QPR, Lee Clark at Birmingham and Steve Kean at Blackburn have benefited from owners have been far more loyal than the fans wanted, holding onto the reins when the consensus was that they were performing absolutely terribly.

I do realise that as a union leader, Bevan will argue from a biased perspective. And Ince and Robinson are going to be excessively loyal to people they expect to negotiate with in the future, who they may well know on a personal level. But if the LMA want their managers to be given more loyalty through a rough patch, they should encourage the likes of Mark Robins, Dean Saunders and Michael Appleton to turn down lucrative moves when their employers are in a critical position. And in cases like Appleton’s, make sure the manager is aware of what he’s getting into before he decides to move to a new club.

The sad truth is, as much as there are owners like Abramovich and the Venkys who are infamous for their consistent lack of loyalty and itchy trigger fingers, there is a flip side. Managers like Appleton, Saunders, Steve Bruce and Iain Dowie have all either moved on quickly or abandoned a club who’ve been notably supportive to them, sticking by them through a period of underachievement.

The problem of managerial stability doesn’t have a simple one-sided solution.