Football is a famously fickle and unforgiving business. One moment you can be on top of the world, idolised by thousands of supporters who can see no wrong in anything you do; the next you can be made into a pariah, a useful scapegoat for a team’s myriad ills.
This volatility in an individual’s stock – whether they be a player, manager or executive – is nothing new to the sport. In an industry where success is rewarded handsomely and failure comes at a high price, it is both natural and inevitable that short-term thinking would triumph over a long-term approach.
The stakes are simply too great in the modern game. The fine margins that separate winning and losing are nothing new, of course, but the financial remuneration that is directly tied to a team’s fortunes on the park have created a culture where past glories mean nothing and the here and now is the be all and end all.
Management, certainly, takes a far more myopic approach now than was the case only a few years ago. The days of coaches being given months to turn a club’s fortunes around were consigned to history long ago but even still, the lens through which we judge their achievements is getting narrower and narrower. Patience wears thin awfully quick these days and the bad news for some of Scotland’s bigger clubs is that the effect is only becoming more and more pronounced.
Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs will go into most campaigns aiming to finish third, and quite rightly: after the Old Firm, these three clubs boast more supporters and resources than any other in Scotland. Claiming the Premiership’s best-of-the-rest crown has pretty much been each member of the triumvirate’s primary goal on an annual basis for the best part of four decades and that won’t be changing anytime soon.
There have been a couple of sizable developments in recent years, though, which are already having a telling effect at Pittodrie, Tynecastle and Easter Road. The first was UEFA’s introduction of a third-tier continental competition, the Europa Conference League, which was developed with countries of our stature in size in mind. The other has been Scotland’s steadily rising club coefficient, which has led to our teams entering European qualifiers later than usual – or bypassing them altogether.
Hearts were the first beneficiaries of these changes to Scottish football’s ecosystem. The Gorgie club entered the fray at the play-off round of the Europa League this term, thus guaranteeing a minimum of eight continental fixtures, and between prize money, gate receipts and a share of the television broadcasting revenue, the Jambos’ run in Europe boosted club coffers to the tune of around £3million – a game-changing sum for those outside of the Glasgow duopoly.
There was a degree of circularity, then, when Robbie Neilson became the latest casualty of these new pressures on Sunday. A run of four straight league defeats saw Hearts drop out of that all-important third spot and the team’s late-season wobble was enough to convince the hierarchy in the capital that a change in management was required. The high-heid yins could see that hefty European payday slipping away and so they chose to roll the dice on a new appointment in the hope that it will provide the squad with a shot in the arm.
The occupants of the boardroom at Tynecastle are not the only ones to have made such a gamble. Since the start of last season, five managers at Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs – Stephen Glass, Jack Ross, Shaun Maloney, Jim Goodwin and now Neilson – have been sacked the very instant the prospect of finishing third appeared to be in jeopardy. The respective boards’ hair-trigger nature of late is understandable (the £3m profit Hearts made from Europe this season is equivalent to around 20 per cent of the club’s annual turnover, after all) – and it is a trend that is here to stay for the foreseeable.
Scotland’s club coefficient means that a third-place finish in the Premiership will remain an extremely lucrative prize for years. It will take a radical swing in fortunes, for better or for worse, from Scottish representatives in Europe over a sustained period for the goalposts to meaningfully shift. Until they do, the option of pulling the trigger when things aren’t going your way will continue to be an awfully tempting one for the likes of Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs executives to squeeze.
Time is a commodity that is always in short supply in football management and it is becoming even more elusive for those in charge of the three aforementioned clubs. That £3m payday is almost certainly waiting for one of the trio and with such an enticing prize on offer, it’s hard to criticise decision-makers at these clubs for casting the die when the going gets tough. When failing to finish third simply results in a continuation of the status quo but securing European football can radically improve the club’s bank balance, who wouldn’t? The upside is huge; the downside is minimal.
It’s this dilemma that means that the manager gigs at Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs will remain something of a poisoned chalice in the coming years. Success will be richly rewarded but the margin for error is getting ever narrower. Every season, two of the three teams will miss out on that alluring prize, and this campaign and the previous one tell us that doing so will simply not be tolerated by those in positions of power.
Even now, Barry Robson and Steven Naismith – caretaker managers at Aberdeen and Hearts respectively – have only been handed the reins on a temporary basis. Club chiefs are clearly wary of committing to anything substantial until they see how the current campaign shakes out, and it’s hard to blame them for their reticence. Robson’s stock is pretty high at the moment but the Dons hierarchy know all-too-well how quickly things can take a turn for the worse.
The managerial merry-go-round will keep on whirling as it always has but the pace been ratcheted up at these three clubs in particular. The money on offer for finishing third has already drastically reduced the shelf life of whoever occupies the hot-seat at Pittodrie, Tynecastle or Easter Road. When it comes to changing the manager at these teams, the risks are low and the stakes are high – and it’s hard to blame decision-makers for deciding to gamble.
