raimondo90
12 years ago
I believe in giving managers times. You can't expect someone to take over what someone else was building and deploy brand new strategy and style and expect it to succeed. It complicates the players and team. Some players take time to adapt to new coaches. RDM might be a rare miracle but don't expect a repeat. Managers need to bs able to build their own team with the tactics and players they see fit.
Lets take a look at your example:
Before interim jones there was Manager Charlie. Charlie here believes in building slowly from the back playing in a 4-2-3-1 formation and bought players to suit such play. They hit a rough patch lose 5 games and BAM he's sacked. Jones comes in and find all Charlie built is wrong. He believes in pure speed lots of crosses and high defensive line using 4-3-3. Now we can see how they are gonna run into trouble. The players had adapted to the former strategy and maybe even grew fond of Charlie. Jones comes in and disrupts everything. You can't possibly think that the very first game under new manager to be a spectacular win. It will take maybe a month for the team to adjust and be successful.
I hope that can demonstrate why managers need time.
In England, the majority of pundits and commentators seem to think that the way to be successful in football is to find a good manager, back him in the transfer market and be patient, allowing him to slowly build for long-term success. Over and over, we’re told how football managers need time and that the really successful teams are the ones who stick with their manager for decades.
But maybe that's the totally wrong approach. Maybe you should give someone six months to do the job and if you think they're crap after six months, get rid of them. I mean, in the nine years since Abramovich has taken over, Chelsea have employed nine different managers, which should be a recipe for complete failure, but actually they've done pretty well. They've won the Champions League once, the Premier League three times, the FA Cup four times and the League Cup twice. That's not a bad return.
Let’s imagine that when Abramovich took over Chelsea, he appointed a manager called Interim Jones (it’s not a realistic name, but never mind - maybe in a few years Interim will become a very popular boys name). And Interim Jones, over the course of 9 years at Chelsea, won the Champions League, the Premier League three times, the FA Cup four times and the League Cup twice, we would probably hail Interim Jones as one of the great managers of the present day. We would talk of him in the same breath as Sir Alex and Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho. But Interim Jones doesn’t exist – he’s just a lovely name to give to Mr Abramovich’s business strategy.
Of course, you could argue that money talks, and it's not the managers who made the biggest difference to Chelsea at all, but Abramovich's billions. It’s a pretty persuasive theory; give any football team billions of pounds to spend on the world’s best players and they are always likely to win something. Manchester City seem to be doing ok.
Italian and Spanish clubs have been hiring and firing managers for decades now. Ten years ago I remember reading that if an Italian club lost 4 games in a row, the manager would normally be kicked out. To my English eyes, it seemed like madness, but maybe they were onto something. In the last 20 years Spanish and Italian clubs have performed as well as – if not better than – English clubs in Europe. The fact that many of them had a new manager every eight months doesn’t seem to have harmed them too much.
Opponents of this theory will point to the number of trophies Manchester United have won by sticking with Sir Alex Ferguson for 26 years; but maybe, in the same way that there's more than one good way to manage a football club, there's also more than one good way to own a football club. Maybe the Manchester Utd way (sticking by your manager) and the Abramovich way (sack them as soon as you think they are crap) are just two different strategies. In the time since Sir Alex has been Manchester United's manager the club have won the Premier League 12 times, the FA Cup five times and the Champions League twice. In the same period, Real Madrid have employed 23 different managers and have won La Liga 11 times, the Copa Del Rey once and the Champions League three times. They are quite similar records.
Maybe one managerial strategy isn't inherently better than the other. In the same way that Barcelona’s tiki-taki strategy isn’t morally better than Manchester United’s strategy of pace and counter-attack, maybe getting a new manager every season isn’t any worse than sticking by your manager through thick and thin.