The Sack Race #2: 🗣️‘Fan media lives on hate-watching. Rage. Sack the manager ... owners feel it’
SPL architect Roger Mitchell and Falkirk manager John McGlynn give expert opinions on why the hot seat has become positively scalding 🔥
By Stephen McGowan
The first-ever chief executive of the Scottish Professional League — precursor of the SPFL — Roger Mitchell’s LinkedIn page now refers to him as a ‘change agent’.
A corporate consultant with interests in music, technology and sport, Mitchell also hosts and runs the sports business podcast Are You Not Entertained?
Writing recently on the social media X account of the award-winning podcast, he addressed the revolving door propelling modern football managers into a stadium and back out before they’ve had the chance to sew their initials on their training kit.
“The volatility in European football is simply not sustainable,” said Mitchell. “United, Chelsea, Spurs, City, Liverpool, Palace, Forest, West Ham, Wolves have all had their managers leave or be totally shredded in five months. When is someone going to say, ‘Stop’?”
A chartered accountant from Glasgow, Mitchell now runs the Albachiara consultancy from Como in Italy. During a conversation by direct message, he expanded on his theme. Identifying short-termism as the scourge of the modern manager, he fears that most are now regarded as here today, gone tomorrow commodities.
“The difference in money for certain performance milestones is now too big,” says the SPL’s CEO from 1998 until 2002. “Get relegated, don’t get into the Champions League. Any early signs of missing out, create total panic. And those monies are existential, not jam on top.
“Then you have American and financial owners with no experience of team-building and patience. They don’t feel the game. They panic and listen to the wrong advisers. They’re babes in the wood.”
He suspects that fans in the boardroom pose a further threat to the current-day coach. While supporters’ groups seek fan representation at the upper levels of their club, the plus points might be cancelled out by the negatives. Calm and reason might be supplanted by emotion and knee-jerk reaction. When directors spend their days camped on supporter message boards there’s a danger that they’ll follow the sheep rather than lead them.
“Fans with instant meme culture have created a culture of hero to zero, day by day,” adds Mitchell. “Fan media lives on hate-watching. Rage. Sack the manager. That’s the new vibe and owners feel this.”
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One executive from a sizeable Scottish club identifies the boredom of fans as a growing threat to the job security of managers.
The days of the television repair man have come and gone. When TVs malfunction these days, they’re cast into the nearest recycling centre and a new flatscreen model is purchased from Currys. Mobile phones are upgraded on an annual basis. In a world where everything is disposable and replaceable there seems to be no reason why a football manager should be any different. The head coach has much the same shelf life as a family hatchback from the local branch of Arnold Clark. Steady, reliable runners might be given three to four years before supporters grow restless and agitate for something shiny and new on the driveway.
Sacked after eight years at Pittodrie, Derek McInnes was a successful Aberdeen manager, one of just two since 1995 to win a major trophy. A victim of the modern desire for change for change’s sake, his record exceeded anything achieved by the five Dons managers brought in since. His only mistake was to hang around a little too long.
“My kids have a hard time watching anything for 30 seconds much less five minutes or an hour,” acknowledges St Johnstone owner Adam Webb.
“They are really challenged to stick with something, whereas I grew up in a time when we read books for hours or watched two movies in a row. There is a general change in society whereby things need to change often and quickly.
“But for the quality and wellbeing of a football club, for the success and history of the club, I hope it will dawn on clubs that it’s not the right practice in football.”
The reasons for owners pulling the trigger vary from club to club. It might be team selections, a dismal style of play or a failure to win big games. It might stem from a fundamental difference in outlook between manager and board.
As Russell Martin discovered, it might even be membership of the Green Party or a vegan diet. Or the appearance of a white tactics board in the hands of a Celtic manager wearing green training shoes. Sooner or later, even the skilled operators induce boredom and irritation in their own supporters.
Mitchell identifies the wealth of young footballers as a further threat to the shelf life of the progressive manager. While some — like Wilfried Nancy at Celtic — unsettle players by virtue of being the wrong men making the wrong changes in the wrong culture at the wrong time, player-power can strike anywhere at any point. At the elite level the modern player is wealthy enough to regard authority with withering contempt.
“Today’s players and their agents are not controllable,” adds Mitchell. “See Mbappe and Alonso. And they know it.
“They get managers sacked and a coach has no real control over a dressing room. The era of the big man-manager is dying, (Carlo) Ancelotti is maybe the last one. Pep Guardiola was another but he’s dying. Mourinho is gone. It’s a combination of all these things.”
John McGlynn will never fret over pampered millionaires in the Falkirk dressing room. One of the gnarled survivors of the Scottish game, the 64-year-old is the son of a miner from Wallyford, the village on the outskirts of Edinburgh which gave rise to Rangers treble-winning boss Jock Wallace and Scottish Cup-winning Hearts legend Jim Jefferies.
Over two spells at Ibrox, Wallace managed Rangers for nine years in total. Jefferies led Hearts for six and a half years over two tenures at Tynecastle. By the standards of the modern game, McGlynn’s three and a half years at the helm of Falkirk should land him a long-service medal.
“People often say to me, ‘I don’t know how you do that job’,” he admits. “You talk about Jimmy Thelin losing his job and you never want that. Wilfried Nancy went from Celtic shortly after and Russell Martin has gone from Rangers as well.
“It’s hard at these clubs. There are huge clubs where you are hardly allowed to lose one game never mind a few games. Or lose a cup final to St Mirren.
“And, of course, you’re wide open when you’re not losing games. Everything seems wrong.
‘With Russell Martin it was the way he dressed. With Nancy it was his tactics board. When the criticism and scrutiny start, there is no stone left unturned and that’s the reality of management in this day and age. It isn’t easy.
“But what people forget is that, ultimately, managers are flawed human beings. We are not robots. We’re just the same as everybody else and, alright, in some places they might get paid very well. And some people seem to think that means that you have to take all the abuse going.
“But the other side to it is that we know what we are getting into when we go into this business. If you want to have longevity, you need to accept the rough with the smooth.”
Managers might also need to accept that they’re not as important to a club’s success as people seem to think.
In Soccernomics, the bestselling book written by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski the authors use data to argue that the number of coaches who actually make a difference at a football club is vanishingly low. Some, they claim, add so little value that they could be replaced by a secretary, the chairman or the club mascot. Their importance, they believe, is vastly overstated. Most really are disposable.
More influential in the success or failure of a club, they believe, is the budget available for players. Former Dundee United, Southampton and Plymouth manager Paul Sturrock went some way towards talking himself out of a job when he said: “Money talks and money decides where you finish up in the leagues.”
“The bottom line is this,” wrote Liverpool legend and broadcast pundit Jamie Carragher in his autobiography. “If you assemble a squad of players with talent and the right attitude and character, you’ll win more football matches than you lose, no matter how inventive your training sessions, what system you play or what team-talks you give.”
Former QPR chairman Tony Fernandes acknowledged that “managers do play a big part,” before bursting the bubble. “Ultimately, if you have rubbish players, there’s nothing a manager can do.”
The managerial blame game is a form of scapegoating. Football directors wash their hands and shove the responsibility for their club’s poor performance in another direction. Billionaire owners blithely overlook their own role in the model and structure they put in place, and the poor recruitment over a period of years. If Kuper and Szymanski are right, the relentless, brutal sack race is one the manager never wins.
Not, that is, until the compensation cheque lands in his bank account.