Will This Endless Cycle In Football Management Ever Stop?

Carlo Ancelotti has the look of a resigned man. It’s a look we’ve all seen many a time. Another dead man walking, who knows that his time is almost up. Whatever he does from now until the end of the season, he is almost certainly going to be relieved of his job in the summer. His billionaire owner has decided, once more, that a change is needed.

You would imagine this would put an enormous strain on a man to have this hanging over you. Imagine being sat at work knowing that the press are constantly running stories about you losing your job in a couple of months. And yet you have to carry on as normal, as if nothing has happened. You have to inspire your workforce, you have to make them believe that there is an incentive to try their hardest. You have to face the press and answer questions about your future and pretend that it is not affecting you.

But Ancelotti does not look too stressed to me. Resigned to fate perhaps, the eyebrow is still permanently arched after all, but he seems no different otherwise. And you have to wonder if being sacked as a football manager is as bad an experience as it used to be.

Being sacked always presented two immediate problems. Financially, you were out of work and needed to find a new income in a market with limited opportunities. And secondly, and linked to the first point, being sacked would not look good on anyone’s CV, so that made finding another job rather more difficult.

Whilst nothing has changed for some of those managers that operate in the lower leagues, for many managers towards the upper echelons of the game, such concerns often don’t apply anymore.

Firstly, getting sacked is no longer an automatic sign of failure or lack of ability. When Jose Mourinho can be forced out of Chelsea, then anyone is fair game. Ancelotti, should he wish, will walk into another job, and will have a near-endless line of suitors. If Roberto Mancini were to be sacked by Manchester City in the summer (unlikely), he too could find a new job without any fuss, and could probably get his dream job at Juventus right now, if reports are to be believed. Roy Hodgson had a nightmare at Liverpool, but walked into another job, admittedly at a “smaller” club.

In the lower leagues, there are a raft of managers that seem to achieved little, if that, but continue to get jobs, which invariably they will leave within 2 years. It seems sometimes that breaking into management is hard to do, because of the Catch 22 situation of not having any experience, which of course you can’t get until someone gives you a management job. And so it is often a jobs for the boys culture that pervades, and the same managers chop and change over and over as chairmen go for people they know.