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By Tony Attwood
During the review of a book about Arsenal some years back I noted a comment on the volume under inspection, that with Wenger, “It was hard to watch an intelligent man and legendary manager doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.”
By chance. I came across that note while searching for something quite different, and it pulled me up in my tracks. For it made me think, is that not what we are seeing today, only with manager after manager coming to clubs, doing the same things, and expecting something different?
And then I thought, “how many different things are there to be done in football, in order to improve a team?
Looking at the current situation with clubs like Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United, Chelsea, Newcastle United, Everton, West Ham …. none of these clubs are where they want to be.
Of course, part of the problem is that not every club can be top of the league, and not every club can be in the top four, but somehow these six clubs and their supporters do seem to have expectations that they feel they are entitled to have but which are not being lived up to.
But why do fans expect their club to rise up, at the expense of others? I thought it might be interesting to explore this.
Totttenham Hotspur for example have won the league twice and the FA Cup eight times. Although they got the League Cup in 2008, they haven’t won any of the major trophies since 1991.
And yet the media treats Tottenham as a big club, and it appears their fans buy into this concept of the club suddenly winning things. Possibly this is down to the shiny new ground they have and the fact that it apparently earns more than any other ground on match days.
I think also expectations have risen by the belief (a false belief from my reading of the situation, but still a belief among some commentators to this site) that the ground is debt-free. My reading of the situation is that this is far from the truth – with the cost of the ground being a debt that Tottenham has to meet over time. If that is not the case their lack of trophies has no excuse as before last season they had 13 consecutive years in Europe, which surely must have added to the income. But if the club is paying for the ground, then, yes, maybe they do have a very real excuse.
As for Manchester United, after five barren years they have had two years of winning the two domestic cups in succession, but they don’t seem to have found a way to build on their league table position: 6th- 3rd -2nd – 6th – 3rd – 8th. That is not progress, it is more popping up and down. (Compare with Arsenal of late where the numbers read 8th – 8th – 5th – 2nd – 2nd. No trophies there, but progress,)
Chelsea had a golden age under Russian control, and this was extended by winning the Champions League in 2021, just two years after winning the Europa. And yet in the last three seasons they have finished, 3rd, 12th, and 6th and been runners’ up in three cups. This should be a spring board for the club, and yet all we hear are arguments and disputes, and although the new season is still very young their start has been mid-table.
Liverpool have been winning cups over the past few seasons, and their league finishes in the last four seasons have indeed been promising (3rd, 4th, 2nd, 3rd) and maybe with a new manager they can make that final push. They certainly appear to have more possibility than the other clubs we have noted above and have won the opening three games.
Leaving aside winning the Championship after being relegated Newcastle have not won anything since the Intertoto Cup, and yet there most certainly was an expectation, when they were bought by the Arabians that this would happen very quickly.
But their failure to get out of the group stage of the Europa League last season and a decline to seventh in the Premier League was not what was expected.
West Ham United with their huge ground given to them after being paid for by British taxpayers might have expected some progress toward trophies, and they did indeed win the Conference League in 2023, but otherwise their main achievement is that in three of the last four seasons they have finished in the top half of the table.
Now there is a point in listing these clubs that might be seen as underachieving. They are all expected to do better, by their supporters and by the media.
Clubs trying to buy their way up the league with more and more signings are not trying to overcome a group of self-satisfied incumbents, but are trying to rise up the league while getting on for half a dozen other clubs are also trying to do the same thing and the top two are also improving all the time.
We saw with Arsenal that going up the league can take four years after a change of manager – but how many of these clubs are willing to give a new manager four years? And yet as Football365 says the average term of a permanent Chelsea manager since Claudio Ranieri became the first victim of the Roman Abramovich era is just 455 days – one third of the suggested timescale.
Managers tend to be given less and less time, just as more and more reliance seems to be put on buying new players. Yet there is no indication that either approach really works. So on that basis we can expect more and more managerial sackings and more and more transfers – very few of which activities will result in success on the pitch.
