Using Arteta as an excuse; it had to come sooner or later

 

 

By Tony Attwood

• The curse of the internationals is coming, and plotting a rivals rises and falls
• The appalling side of football, neither clubs nor the media will ever admit to

There are managers who succeed from the start.  Managers who succeed after a few years of carefully planning and plotting.   Managers who fail are sacked, and then claim they were sacked just as their plan was coming to fruition.   And managers who never make it at all and don’t even bother to come up with excuses.

For managers, there are at least three big problems which are outside of their control.   First, they generally inherit a team that is doing badly and which they can only change through buying and selling players.  Worse, the players they want to sell have been doing badly (otherwise the club wouldn’t be struggling in the league) and so their value has dropped.

Second, the club’s success is of course, in part achievable by the failure of other clubs who most certainly will want to beat any club that is in such a state that it has just sacked its manager.  They are not going to go down to a club that by its own admission is in a mess.   So each game is tougher.

Then, some of the club’s players might not fancy the methodology of the new manager and might never have agreed to transfer to this now-declining club if they had seen this new man in charge.  Maybe they have had disagreements with him in the past.  Maybe there are stories circulating.  Only players desperate to leave their existing club will want to go there.

So here we have a situation in which players might not like the new man, fans might not like the new man, and other clubs will be trying extra hard to beat the new man’s team, and thus get themselves higher up the league and out of a possible threat to relegation.

And that’s just the start.   At the next window, the new manager starts buying and selling.  Many managers appear not to be that good at communicating with their players, especially players they have inherited and whom they might wish to get rid of.  Discontent now spreads.

So instantly, we have multiple reasons why a new manager might not always be able to turn a failing club around.  

At Arsenal we saw it with Emery who was appointed in May 2018.  In his first season, Arsenal came fifth and were runners-up in the Europa League, but in his second season, 2019/20, Arsenal were 8th but won the FA Cup.  However, they went out of the Europa in the round of 32.  Not a good thing to do.

What made matters far worse, however, was that in August 2019 Arsenal paid their highest ever fee of £72m) for Nicola Pepe, and a league position of 8th with such an expensive player in the squad was not promising.  Worse Pepe clearly wasn’t that good.

So on 29 November with Arsenal 8th in the league, the manager was sacked with the club having just gone seven games without a win and having just lost a home game against Eintracht Frankfurt in the Europa having previously been knocked out of the League Cup.  Given that after 19 games they were already 13 points behind the league leaders, and that their most expensive signing ever had been dropped from the first team, that is not surprising.

Judging which sort of manager a club should have is one of the big problems for club chairmen, and they are quite probably pretty bad at it.  But of course, the problem is we never really know what might have happened if the sacked manager had stayed.  Although with Emery it really was a case of “no one can be as bad as he is”.

And I think of this today since the word from Manchester United insiders is that Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s headline-hogging declaration that three years is an apt timescale to judge Ruben Amorim, is merely Sir Jim making things up.  While the debate rages on TV, radio, social media, and in drinking parlours, the debate continues about the sagacity of his words.

The problem is that the media love to knock managers who are either already down and out, or heading that way.   It makes the journalists look clever as they suggest they have known about the problems all along.  But then if the journalists were that good, why don’t they go for a management job in football?   It is certainly better paid than being a hack.

And the problem is, no one really wants to discuss the facts.  It is always easier to cast around for different people to attack, because when the sackings come along, no one will bother to look at last month’s column by a hack who happened by chance to blame the guy who finally got the sack.

Discussing the situation, Ratcliffe said, “You can’t run a club like Manchester United on kneejerk reactions to some journalist who goes off on one every week.”  Which is true.  But it has never stopped anyone else from doing exactly that.