Quick sackings and the Football Manager as a Human Being

It was always on the cards. The notorious Forest owner had never seemed quite patient, and the winless run that the newly appointed Ange Postecoglou was overseeing had finally plunged the club into the relegation places. Minutes after the final whistle of a 3-0 defeat against Chelsea, Ange was sacked.

While the scoreline looked grim, Forest were not quite an abomination on the pitch. They were just a vastly unmatched side against a confident Chelsea. Ange had made some questionable team selection choices, and his pre-match press conference was suffocatingly focused on himself rather than the broader situation. Still, in the first half, Forest had held their own on their home ground. It is the second half that turned pretty ugly. Maresca had a lot to change in the interval, and that worked. His counterpart’s failures looked more obvious. Postecoglu’s side were swiftly two goals down. Fans had started leaving the stadium way before Reece James had added a third in the 84th minute. The fans were not incensed with anger; they were merely resigned to disappointment.

Ange’s Forest tenure now holds the unenviable record of being the shortest stint that a person appointed as a permanent manager has ever had in a Premier League club in terms of the number of days in the job. (While Sam Allardyce has had a smaller stint at Leeds, the conditions aren’t comparable because he was specifically appointed only to see out the last month of the campaign with four matches to play.) At Nottingham Forest, Ange oversaw five Premier League games, losing four and drawing once. Forest’s long-awaited European campaign had begun under his tutelage, where he drew and lost once each. Add to that an EFL Cup third-round defeat at the hands of a Swansea side languishing mid-table in the second tier, where Forest surrendered a 2-0 lead and conceded twice in the injury time. Les Reed, the man whose record was broken by Ange, had a 40-day tenure in charge of Charlton. His points per game figure stood at 0.57. Ange managed a wretched 0.20. The only permanent manager who ended with less than one point was Frank De Boer, who was sacked after four straight defeats at Crystal Palace.

Ange looked like a wrong pick from the get-go. The ego-maniac Marinakis recruited someone with diametrically different football principles from his predecessor. The sack was always coming. Still, such a quick contract termination made me think about what might be behind the transience that marks the role of the manager in football.

Despite the all-pervasive data-drivenness that permeates every decision-making process in modern football, the recruitment of managers still remains very hit-and-miss. The length of an average managerial tenure testifies to how often the clubs decide that they have got it wrong. The analysis of Szymanski and Kuper in their paradigmatic book Soccernomics brought the statistical impact of managers on team performance into sharp focus. They critiqued the over-emphasis on the managerial personnel, who, according to them, were hardly as decisive. But the role of the manager remains notoriously unquantifiable.

Managers not only decide who plays and when and how they play, but also act as communicators within and beyond the playing squad. They act as interlocutors between the players and administrators, often having to represent either to the other. Besides, they also represent the club as a whole in front of the relentless media industry around football.

Such a multifaceted role, that needs a varied skill-set including tactical awareness and a keen understanding of the abilities of individual players on one hand and human relations on the other, makes it really difficult to break the role down to numbers. Additionally, to use a sorely colloquial category, the ‘vibe’ remains of utmost importance.

The football manager is a singular figure. So is the President or the technical director at most clubs, but they remain at the periphery of public sight. Therefore, the manager is also the easiest (and often the cheapest) to get rid of when the administrators want to show that they care about the results and the grievances of the fans.

The football manager, therefore, is unique not only because he is an individual who stays central to the whole discourse of the game, but also because, in his crucial individuality and unquantifiability, he is a human person. Unlike the footballers, whose every second in and around the pitch is closely micro-managed and hence almost mechanised to the optimal, the managers are still somehow human beings, capable of genius and folly, wit and weariness, tact and eccentricity. That makes them very relatable to an average fan, who, just like the manager, often has strong opinions about how the team should play, who should start, what substitutions should be made and what the side represents. Except that the manager is the only one whose opinions count.

Fans are enchanted by the footballers because they can very tangibly and veritably see that the players are capable of something that they can’t do nearly as well. But when it comes to the part of theorising, communication and tactical hair-splitting, they never see the manager at their very work. That creates a unique situation where the manager is a significant element of the spectacle of the sport, but as someone who stands there, often quite helplessly, and reacts. It is the person who is part of the spectacle and not the job. This brings us back to the question of vibe, because at the end, the manager, located in the dugout that is tellingly between the playing area and the fans, is a human person on whom the feelings of football fans are projected. Alternating between restlessness and poise, being a part of the proceedings without really playing an actual role, the manager mirrors and embodies the fans. And football fans are infamously ephemeral. No wonder that managers by the very nature of the role, rarely last long.