- Fifa accused of wholesale corruption, but the English media really don’t want to know
- Football is standing on the edge of the cliff and looks ready to jump
By Tony Attwood
Supposing you owned a football club which for the last couple of seasons had come 16th and 17th in the Premier League, having been promoted the season before that from the Championship. A manager who then took the club up from that 17th position to seventh, and (through a bit of jiggery-pokery) to a place in the Europa League.
What would you do if in the next season the manager opened with a win a draw and a defeat, leaving the club halfway down the league after three matches?
A manager who, incidentally, this summer, with your permission as club owner and with your approval, had just spent £1224m on new players to help take the club up even higher, and meanwhile, do a decent job in the Europa League.
Really. What would you do at this point?
There are of cours,e a number of alternatives now the window has shut, but quite likely if you are of a moderately sound and stable position in your mental health, sacking the manager who had taken the club up the league and spent a lot on players of his own choosing, would possibly not be your top option. But that is what the owner of Nottingham Forest has done to his manager Nuno Espirito Santo – and to add to the level of bonkersness in the whole affair, he has appointed the manager of Tottenham Hots who was sacked a few days earlier.
Now, sacking managers and employing new managers is not a cheap affair. When you end a person’s contract without good reason (and good reason here generally means being imprisoned for a crime or appearing on TV drunk and slagging off the owner), there is compensation to pay.
And it turns out there is going to be a lot of compensation in this case, since Nuno was the highest-paid boss in the history of Nottingham Forest. And paying off a manager who has been sacked can be an expensive business as Sports Bible suggests For they have provided a list of some of the biggest payouts in football history, just to give us a measure of how much money (that could have been used by a club to buy players) is now going on paying off a manager one of their most successful managers in recent years.
Here are some recent examples of what it costs to be rid of a manager….
- Antonio Conte (Chelsea, 2018) – £26.6 million
- Julian Nagelsmann (Bayern Munich, 2023) – £23.7 million
- Jose Mourinho (Manchester United, 2018) – £19.6 million
- Jose Mourinho (Chelsea, 2007) – £18 million
- Laurent Blanc (Paris Saint-Germain, 2016) – £17 million
- Jose Mourinho (Tottenham Hotspur, 2021) – £16 million
- Luiz Felipe Scolari (Chelsea, 2009) – £13.6 million
- Fabio Capello (Russia, 2015) – £13.4 million
- Thomas Tuchel (Chelsea, 2022) – £13 million
- Mauricio Pochettino (Tottenham Hotspur, 2019) – £12.5 million
Now this money comes at a cost beyond the actual amount of money, because it shows up in the club’s accounts as a regular expenditure, which means that the amount of money available under FFP rules in terms of being available for buying new players has just vanished.
Besides which Nottingham Forest have not been doing that badly…
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 9 |
| 2 | Chelsea | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 7 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 5 | 6 |
| 10 | Nottingham Forest | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 5 | -1 | 4 |
OK they are not in the European places at the moment but they are not too far off. The fact is that Forest spent 14 seasons in the second tier of English football, then got promotion and have since come, 16th, 17th and 7th and then they scak their manager and bring in a man whose record last season in terms of the was somewhat superior
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | Nottingham Forest | 38 | 19 | 8 | 11 | 58 | 46 | 12 | 65 |
| 17 | Tottenham Hotspur | 38 | 11 | 5 | 22 | 64 | 65 | -1 | 38 |
And the question for supporters surely must arise (or perhaps I would say, if this is what happened at Arsenal, it is the question that would arise at once) what on earth makes the owner of Forest think the man who did this to Tottenham is a better manager? To spell out the details, Tottenham lost twice as many games as Forest last season, and although they scored six more goals than Forest, they conceded 19 more goals.
Of course, in football, all sorts of odd things can happen; we all know that and we have seen that, but to sack a manager and appoint one who was so much worse last season than the man you have just sacked is surely one of the biggest gambles of all time.
Since promotions for the second tier Forest have come 16th, 17th and 7th. While Tottenham have finished 5th and 17th in the top league, Forest have finished 17th and 7th.
This is why the vast majority of managerial changes do not work for the better. They are arranged by chairmen with vendettas and short tempers. As Brian Clough might have said, “God save us all from club chairmen.”
It’s nearly always just before they play us.