It was known as “the roundabout”. Passing troubled Premier League clubs would pluck from the same, revolving set of managers to try to avert relegation. A similar carousel was on offer to those seeking promotion from – or safety in – the Championship.
The names rolled off the tongue, leading to a state of affairs where Alan Pardew and Steve Bruce have each managed five Premier League clubs, and Mark Hughes six. But that trio, each around the age of 60 – Bruce and Pardew on career hiatuses, Hughes in the League Two playoffs with Bradford – are years short of qualifying for the management game’s newest ride, one that’s become all the rage.
In Italy, managers employed for their late-season expertise in keeping clubs in Serie A and Serie B are given the name traghettatore – the ferryman – to add a touch of Chris de Burgh-style exoticism to the role. English football’s equivalent has added a touch of grey, merrily sipping from the last of the summer wine.
“I’ll be back next February somewhere,” said Neil Warnock, 74, signing off on rescuing Huddersfield from Championship relegation. He made much the same declaration this February on returning to a club he previously left in 1995 and found deep in relegation bother. “I like to do my dinosaur thing – it’s amazing what you can bring to the table with experience.” A heist first successfully pulled off at Rotherham in 2016 was duly repeated in Kirklees, and its architect is willing to listen to further offers once next year’s snowdrops begin to bloom. Football management remains a drug to someone with 16 former clubs, though only once the nights start drawing out.
Roy Hodgson, 75, on his 19th club appointment, has done similarly at Crystal Palace, where a second return to Croydon roots has added fresh dimensions to a reputation that already stretched over five decades and four national teams. Instead of grinding the gears to reach safety, Hodgson engaged Palace’s creative players to stay up with a liberal flourish.
When Sam Allardyce, 68, accepted the call from Leeds, his ninth Premier League club, Hodgson and Warnock had already completed their safety detail. “There’s Roy, Neil and me and I hope I get something similar to them in terms of results in the next four games,” he said before last week’s 2-1 defeat by Manchester City, its closing stages revealing a hint of the fighting spirit that may yet save Leeds. “It would be good for the oldies, wouldn’t it?”
Allardyce categorised himself among this new veteran class, where winter is spent not at icy training complexes but on the sun loungers of Dubai, or at a Cornwall farm and fulfilling speaking engagements in Warnock’s case, or perhaps pursuing literary and cultural interests for Hodgson. Once spring arrives, a new assignment comes on board that, if completed successfully, will also yield a healthy bonus, reported to be £2.5m after a basic of £500,000 in the case of Allardyce and Leeds.
“There is no magic, there is no dust you can sprinkle over the team; you can only work with the players who are there,” Hodgson said last week, with some modesty. What he and his peer group offer is a level of man-management, motivation, knowhow and personal touch that modern football’s other developments can sideline.
Amid “underlying numbers” of match analysis to the nth degree certain players, particularly those within struggling teams, may find their sense of self-worth being reduced to a cold, negative spreadsheet. Perhaps a short, sharp shock of Warnock’s ribald dressing-room antics, or Hodgson’s gentlemanly tones, redolent of a 70s London sitcom, can counter that.
The benefits of analytics have become explicit within modern football but just as cricketers and golfers can struggle with their very essence being gauged by bowling and batting averages, putts and fairways missed, there is a danger footballers go a similar way. Leading managers such as Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta marry their technocracy with a collective motivational approach but replicating that among lesser talents offers no guarantee of success.
Nathan Jones’s spell at Southampton became a parable for ill-fated recruitment. A determination to graft his stats-based approach from Championship Luton to an underpowered Premier League squad resulted in seven losses from eight matches. Graham Potter, a manager operating with a purportedly higher level of talent, damned himself at Chelsea when dismissing “the xG” of the very John McGinn goal for Aston Villa that actioned his sacking.
Managerial recruitment has diversified in recent times. That old roundabout rusted to a halt. Different solutions are sought but survival rates lessen considerably, with 14 Premier League managers sacked this season, smashing the previous record of 10.
The late-season relegation equation of three clubs from five is split between three Premier League veterans against two first-season rookies. Only Steve Cooper at Nottingham Forest has stayed the full course. At Southampton, Rubén Sellés’s two wins from 13 will not be enough to cover for Jones’s doomed regime; Bournemouth, staying up, had far more success in replacing Scott Parker with Gary O’Neil.
Leicester turned to Dean Smith, Everton to Sean Dyche. At 51 and 52, both took on challenges in hope of further, “permanent” employment. The Warnock/Hodgson/Allardyce trio, the springtime set, have no such expectation. They may only offer short-term success but is success anything other than short term in modern football?
Come next February, with the right conditions and finances, expect to see the old boys’ names linked with the stragglers again.
