Many years ago, long before the Sheikh Mansour takeover, a Manchester City director observed that the club should have replaced Joe Royle as soon as he had led it to promotion back to the Premier League. He was a promotion specialist, the director argued: Why would he be good at leading a club at a higher level to challenge for European qualification? “You wouldn’t appoint the manager of a corner shop to run a multinational,” he said. Sure enough, City was relegated straight back to the second flight.
That was true then and remains true now. Football is a sport in which loyalty is notoriously lacking, in which successful managers can be sacked after a month’s downturn, and yet it often feels loyal in the wrong places. A board that will happily upgrade a fullback or a center forward as soon as a better option becomes available (and a fan base that will welcome that action) will hesitate to replace a manager when circumstances and aspirations change, yet will dismiss him in reaction to a few poor results.
It is one of football’s great unacknowledged truths that managers are good at different things. Pep Guardiola’s critics will point out he has never done it with a Napoli or an Arsenal, much less a Burnley or an Oviedo, but that’s not the point: he is a brilliant manager of top-level players. Would Lewis Hamilton be a good driver of a school bus? It just doesn’t matter. It’s not what he does. Similarly, certain managers are better in the spit-and-sawdust world of a relegation battle, scrapping for points on a shoestring: Sam Allardyce ended up being relegated with West Brom, but before that, he had saved a series of apparently lost causes; he was good at that, but that doesn’t mean his skills would necessarily have transferred to a grander stage.
