Why changing the manager mid-season generally makes things worse

 

 

• The media sinks into the mud as Arsenal rise to the heights

By Tony Attwood

As you may have noticed yesterday, the one significant contribution made by the new Tottenham manager was that he shouted a lot.  And when that didn’t work, he shouted some more.

That was an interesting development, I thought, as it allowed us to compare the work of Arteta, who mostly points and suggests positional changes.   But then the Tots and Arsenal are different.  Since Arsenal appointed Arteta, Tottenham have had 20 different managers (caretakers included).  (Honest!)

Their latest manager did quite a bit of looking fed up, looking angry, and what I think the journalists like to call “fuming.”  It all seemed to make things worse.  And so, as I watched the game, I began to wonder… Does endlessly changing the manager actually work?   

If you need to check, there is a list of Tottenham seasons on the club’s own website, although it omits quite a few years, but you might want to have a look.

Anyway, no matter how much the Tinies explore their own history in an attempt to show that the Unsporsored Stadium was a good idea, we can actually contrast their results with the position Arsenal have achieved over the recent seasons without ever having an unsponsored ground…

 

 

Now those figures show that it took Arsenal three seasons underArteta to catch up and overtake the Tiny Totts.   But as we have seen in the last few seasons, Tottenham fans and the Totty Board expect their new manager to come in and make their club able to compete with Arsenal straightaway in the League.  And when it doesn’t happen, they get agitated, change their manager again, and down they sink.

And yet the Tots had a flying start in this regard during the Arteta years, since they were established at a time when even if the Tots couldn’t be considered a regular top-four club, they could at least outdo Arsenal in the league.

Now, several things are interesting from this comparison.   One is that the Totts’ new manager Igor Tudor was getting what, in Italy, might be called “molto agitato” or “raging” as the Sun called it.  We can only assume that no one had told the poor guy that what he saw yesterday is how Tottenham normally behave at the unsponsored stadium.

But it did raise the question, why he was raging, and why his ragingness didn’t make a blind bit of difference, except perhaps make matters worse on the pitch.   Did no one tell him that raging at Totty players doesn’t help?  

Which leads me to ask why any new Tottenham manager should come in, knowing their league record at home, see Tottenham play as they normally play at home, and then go into a rage.  It suggests a profound lack of preparation on his part.  

And yet how the Tots played yesterday is how they regularly play at home, which is why only Burnley and Wolverhampton have worse home records than the Tots.

In fact, the antics of the new Totty manager yesterday seriously suggested no one had shown him the Tottenham home form league table.   And that is amazing, for when a club that is sinking fast and appoints a new manager, the least you can expect is that the new manager might have looked at the Totty home form before taking the job.

Could it be possible that someone actually gave the new man the home form table upside down, and he didn’t notice?

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Manchester City	14	11	2	1	34	9	25	35
2	Arsenal	13	10	2	1	31	8	23	32
18	Tottenham Hotspur	14	2	4	8	17	22	-5	10
19	Burnley	13	2	4	7	12	19	-7	10
20	Wolverhampton Wanderers	14	1	3	10	13	30	-17	6

 

I also wonder if he was told about the Tottenham fans.  Not for them showing the patience we showed at Arsenal with two eighth-place finishes while staying loyal, as we did when Arteta came in and sold or gave away half the team.   No, Totfans demand success now, and “now” means yesterday.

And then there is the issue of the players who quite clearly have lost belief in a) themselves, b) their support, c) the new superground, and d) whatever bloke happens to be running around on the touchline shouting a lot this week.  In short, quite a few players want out, and the sooner the next window opens, the better for them.  They have seen managers rave before, and this one isn’t impressing them.  

And so we reach the inevitable conclusion: the new Tottenham manager has lost the plot before we even saw the script (as it were).   As for the stadium, that has been a double disaster.   The club banked on selling naming rights for twice the amount Arsenal got, and nobody wanted to play.   Then, with results declining, those who were offering to buy the naming rights at the actual going rate have thought, “blow this for a laugh” and pulled out.

No one wants to be associated with failure.