Which manager has not been sacked this week?

 

 

By Tony Attwood

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Well, in answer to our headline question, we could start with Arteta.   And that guy at the City Money Club, and probably a few more, but despite them, the sackings roll on.  Except that for once the headline is probably quite right: “Ruben Amorim is gone, but Manchester United’s forever crisis rolls on.”   For the papers are starting to ask, “Will United’s spiral of crisis ever cease? Jonathan Wilson suggests it’s hard to see a way back.”

But I must divert for a second to bring you this one from Leeds Live

“Ruben Amorim has become the 19th manager in the past 34 seasons to be sacked directly after playing Leeds United.”

And the only point missing is the one that suggests that this is not just happening to ManU.  Indeed, on the same day we had Wilfried Nancy has been sacked as Celtic manager.”    He lasted 33 days.  

But here is a question that I don’t think anyone is asking.   And it is…

“How could so many clubs get the appointment of their manager so wrong, so often?”   And then, “What do clubs do to the people who appoint each manager and get it wrong?

Now the answer seems to be that the clubs ask the people who got it wrong last time to go out and try again.   Which is a bit like me asking an agency to find someone to clean the windows in my house, then to come home to find the windows all broken, and then go to the same agency and let the same people who got it wrong last time do the appointments again.

It is utterly ludicrous – but that is how football works.

Now, of course, Arsenal are not perfect in this regard.   Before Arteta, Arsenal appointed Emery, who spent multiple millions on Pepe, and who was so bad that he had to be given money to persuade him to go away.  Pépé is now with a club that is third in the Turkish league and seems to have found his level.  

But to be fair, although that transfer was an utter waste of money, overall Unai Emery did have a decent win rate of 55.13%.  But the problem was that this was in decline, and there was no way he could be trusted to bring in a decent player anymore, after the Pepe fiasco.   Thomas Partey and Gabriel Jesus each cost under two-thirds of the Pepe price.

So Mikel Arteta made a mistake has now been at the club for 319 games and has a win rate of 60.19%.    And there really is a big point here – in terms of win rate Arteta is the most successful manager Arsenal have ever had who has overseen at least 25 competitive games.

So the issue is not just winning trophies (obviously, Arteta has only won one) but also winning individual matches, keeping the journalists under some sort of occasional link to reality, and making the fans feel good. And Arteta does all that.

But elsewhere the sackings go on, although finally the media are waking up, as with the headline in the Telegraph, “Sir Jim Ratcliffe has got every big decision wrong at Manchester United.”

And looking around the grounds, there is a bit of news about our old pal Edu as we read Edu job under threat at the City Ground.  No one, it seems, is safe.

So what are the problems that are circling around Arsenal at the moment?   The obvious one is the issue of Viktor Gyökeres, for it is only just recently that the media has picked up on the fact that while it is welcome if he scores goals, a key part of his job is to distract opposition defenders who feel that they have to mark him.  That distraction is in part responsible for six players being on five-plus goals this season.  

There is a sign that a few journalists have finally grasped this, and maybe noticed that somehow being just four goals short of the top scoring club, while having the best defence in the league, is something of a success.  True Arsenal have only scored one more goal than by this time last season, but they have conceded four fewer, giving them a five-goal better goal difference than this time a year ago.

Bringing in a centre forward to score goals is old school.  These days, successful managers can bring in players who can not only score goals, but also totally confuse the opposition.