A lot has been said on here and 'Pinkun' re getting a new manager to replace CH and has caused serious rifts amongst the fans. Seems ManUre and Villains fans are heading the same way!!!
...and don't forget Palace, Fulham, Sunderland, Cardiff and the Baggies have already sacked their managers before the turn of the year. What a funny old season so far!
I dunno, they will almost certainly be a fair few quid better off with compensation and all that. AVB has supposedly earned somewhere in the region of £10m from Chelsea and Spurs for less than 18 months work
The whole thing is sickening. Wherelse do you get handsomely rewarded for failure and are back in employment so quickly. One big gravy train paid for by the general public.
Trouble is - how do you define failure. In most sectors of the economy success /failure is judged over a period of years without too much short term pressure from the media or the shareholders but in football? An owner brings in a new Manager with instructions to slash the wage bill, get rid of overpaid under performing players and bring through a new squad of talented youngsters either from outside or through the academy. Good long term plan but then you run into the curse of football - the media and the fans!! If the Manager hasn't succeeded in 3 months they want the poor sod sacked. Spurs were 5th when AVB was sacked - where did the fans expect them to be? Everybody knew that Moyes would have to rebuild the squad when he took over. They are 5 points off the top 4, in the semis of one cup and in the latter stages of Europe despite long term injury problems to their 2 best players. Did people think that Moyes could just wave a magic wand? Villa are 11th after years of steady decline and only 18 months into a major reconstruction project - where did some fans expect them to be? Same applies to all the other teams who have sacked Managers. I look at the league table and cannot see too many under-performing clubs based on where I would have expected them to be.
Couldn't agree more with this. The desire for instant success seems to have clouded everyone's view of reality; Not everything will go your way and blaming someone wont suddenly make everything better!
The complete league has gone ' sack the Manager ' mad. The top 6 refuse to accept that only 1 team can win the league and so in the summer Man City and Chelsea get new Managers. Even Wenger was under threat. Spurs get slightly off the pace and it's goodbye AVB - now the pressure is on Moyes. No different with the mid table clubs. After 8 years of over achievement Stoke fans want a style change - goodbye Pulis. WBA go through a sticky patch and it's out with the black cap. As soon as any team we all expect to be in the bottom 6 appears there - off with his head. You could see it coming at Carrow Road and I warned against it at the time. Just because we spent a lot of money by our levels a European adventure was allegedly on the cards completely overlooking that what we spent in total was half of what Arsenal spent on 1 player and less than most of the top 8 spent on 1 player. The money we spent improved us from a bottom 6 side likely to go down to a bottom 6 side less likely to go down. Now either because false expectations have not been realised or because of the style of play - does it matter if it keeps us up - Hughton must go without any realistic replacement lined up and in the middle of the transfer window. Could it be that football fans are feeding off each other and feel left out if their club hasn't sacked a Manager in the last 3 months?
Well said 1950 in your two pieces. I cannot argue with anything really but it makes you laugh that on the back of some perceived under-achievement in one club you automatically become the Messiah at another. Although we came at it from different perspectives, I do think that we are in full agreement about the state of the game and the stupidity of it and that 'failure' is a strange perception.
Not everyone's Colk Also, among clubs there are plenty of examples of greater sanity if you look for them -- Norwich, Arsenal, Swansea, Southampton, Everton, ...... As for fans, when did football fans ever have a robust grip on reality? Wenger was never under threat. A section of fans (always a minority) made a lot of noise, and the media did their best to stir the s***. But Kroenke and the Arsenal board (and even the hostile major shareholder Usmanov) have all repeatedly said that Wenger will stay until he himself says otherwise.
Let's be honest though, it's hardly surprising that for three of those clubs the manager's job isn't under threat given that they have had stellar seasons so far. I've no doubt that Hughton would be significantly more popular if we were in So'ton's position. And Laudrup has a lot of credit in the bank with last season' scup win, so that's not surprising. We are the anomaly in terms of success, league position, transfer spend , etc., given that Hughton has not been sacked. That's not to say he should have been, but from the outside looking in it is surprising.
You're right, I should have said a lot of people's view of reality. It's a shame that it's those people that tend to make the most noise!
You say that, but before Christmas a lot of outsiders couldn't conceive of why Hughton would be under threat. His position is a little worse now, and the quality of the football a bit more widely reported, but it's still not catastrophic from the outside.
I have this theory-I call it the "Big Half Theory" and it goes like this. Put two people in a situation where something has to be divided,inheritance,marital proceeds,sale of business etc and whenever two people are involved it's more likely than not that each will put forwards reasons why they should be in receipt of more than fifty per cent."I looked after mother for fifteen years" "I brought up the kids/went to work all hours" etc etc.This fits well with Premiership football clubs. If you look at them virtual every set of fans can put forward some sort of argument that their own club is an underachiever. In some cases -Liverpool for example this may be based on their heritage,they do significantly less well than they used to.Manchester City,spent colossal amounts of cash for one QPR gifted goal difference title and nothing in Europe.And you can go through The Premiership like that.Really only Everton,Newcastle,Southampton and Hull can be satisfied with their league positions.Even there Pardew gets regular doses of abuse. Of the bottom half nobody accepts that they should be there.I would say turn the clock back five years to January 2009.We were 21st on goal difference in The championship.
The simple solution to your initial analogy is for one to divide up the inheritance and the other one has first choice of what has been declared!
With respect Rob, you are missing the point. What the clubs I list have in common is that the people running them have long term strategies which they stick to irrespective of the short term ups and downs. Their priority is the long term interest of the football club, and they have beliefs about what sort of club they are and the type of football they want to be known for. Their response to how things go in the short term is governed by these long term objectives, not by the vagaries of the short term here and now. Yes, Arsenal are now doing well, but when things weren't going so well two or three years ago there was no panic and knee jerk reaction. The board held their nerve, kept to their financial strategy of paying off the cost of building the Emirates even if it meant losing players like Fabregas, Nasri and Van Persie, and backed Wenger's strategy of buying and developing youngsters. Every day the media harped on about Arsenal not having won anything, ridiculed the idea that Champions League qualification year after year was any sort of success (when it was actually crucial to the club's financial strategy and therefore the real priority), gloated when there were setbacks, and stoked the dissatisfaction among a minority of supporters. Kroenke, Wenger and the board took the flak and stuck to what they believed in. The other clubs are run in a similar fashion. In the case of Southampton, Atkins was replaced when he had turned their first seaon back in the PL round, not when they were struggling. He was replaced because the board felt it was the right move in terms of their long term plan (and despite the considerable support for Atkins among the fans). Swansea have had managerial changes forced on them by the incumbent being poached (Martinez to Wigan, Rogers to Liverpool), but because so much of what makes Swansea the club it is is not dependent on the manager (indeed quite the reverse, the manager has to be a fit for the club), the transitions have been managed smoothly and without stopping the club's development in its tracks. Chris Hughton's current popularity or unpopularity with our fans is, I suspect, a relatively minor consideration for our board. Likewise, the current ups and downs of our performances on the pitch, and the variability of readings on the fan entertainment index. These only represent a small part of why the board brought Chris Hughton in. People generally recognise that the squad CH inherited needed fundamental over-haul, and that the task couldn't be accomplished in one season or even two, given the financial contraints. But little consideration is given by the critics to what CH is doing behind the scenes in terms of a scouting network, ancillary staff, building the Academy, etc. Yet these are all much more crucial to the long term success of the club, and that is what the board will prioritise.
