- 7 clubs have won the Double. Can Arsenal do it for a record 4th time
- Why on earth would some supposed Arsenal fans turn on a young player?
By Tony Attwood
If you have ever sat down with, or worked closely under a chairman of a fair-sized organisation, you might just find yourself reaching the conclusion that
a) The individual who is the chairman believes in his or her (generally his) own ability even when all the evidence points in the opposite direction
b) The chair doesn’t have that much regard for the people working under him/her and seriously believes that he (I’ll stick with “he” for now as most are “he”) has to solve most crises himself, that he is surrounded by idiots (forgetting that by and large he either appointed the people he thinks are idiots or at least appointed the people who in turn appointed the idiots), and that in appointing his underlings he was severely let down by those giving him advice.
c) As a result of the above the chairman is often overly impressed by his own abilities despite the lack of evidence supporting this.
d) The chair doesn’t have that much grasp of what is going on around him, although he invariably thinks he does.
But now in reitrement I have the luxury of looking back and pontificating on all I see around me, including, just at the moment, the fact that Nottingham Forest’s global head of football, Edu, has been told to remove himself from all the club’s premises. (Forest, you may have noted, are on their fourth manager so far this season). It looks likeEvangelos Marinakis had told Edu to stay away from club with accusations that his performance is not up to standard. That, I guess, is what you get for leaving Arsenal.
So yes, Edu has been in post for eight months, but he is being blamed at least in part for the fact that Forest are 17th in the league (and to emphasise what that means, they are actually below Tottenham Hots!!!).
Nottingham Forest is part of a group of clubs which also includes Olympiacos and Rio Ave FC, and I may have got this wrong, but it seems to me that although ManC have made the multi-club idea work by pouring billions into the club at the top of the pyramid, most of the other multi-club experiments have failed. And perhaps part of that is due to the oddity of the behaviour of the owners, Tottenham, we might note have had eight managers, including temporary managers, in the last five years alone, and although I’d agree that the club is probably unmanageable since the criminal activities of the owner were revealed in court, their plight is symptomatic of clubs that change managers regularly.
The fact is that evidence suggests that lots of hiring and firing in football doesn’t take a club up the league, and that clubs can’t be turned around in a few months. But Forest are typical of the new approachh having kicked out Sean Dyche as manager after about three and a half months in charge.
The new man at the top is Vitor Pereira, their fourth manager of the season. Although Forest have spent around £200m on new players since the summer. And of course Edu can be blamed as he is in charge of transfers, but the fact is that most clubs that go on spending sprees find they don’t work – or at least they don’t work at first. Certainly, four managers in a season does not help either.
And as we have often noticed, Arsenal finished 8th, 8th and 5th under Arteta at the start of his reign, and the club has stayed with him, even without a trophy since he won the FA Cup.
Mind you, sacking managers just because you can is something that club bosses do these days. Take Flamengo in Brazil, who sacked their manager immediately after his team beat Madureira in the Rio state cup semi-final. This has apparently been one of the club’s best seasons in years, winning five different trophies!
Of course, with most sackings, the underlying problem is the transfers – players are brought in and then don’t deliver immediate success. The player can’t be sacked because he’s on a four-year contract, so they sack the manager, forgetting that players can often take some time to develop and evolve when joining a new team.
It really does seem that some owners actually believe that, given enough money, any team can instantly rise to the top, which is quite simply gibberish.
Of course, I am loving Arsenal being top of the league, but I am not forgetting there were calls for Arteta to leave at the end of last season because he didn’t have “a winning mentality”.
