The Poisoned Chalice at the City Ground
Who'll be next to take the hotseat at the City Ground?
After just 39 days in charge of Nottingham Forest, Ange Postecoglou was sacked on Saturday after they were beaten 3-0 at home to Chelsea in the Premier League. Twenty minutes after the final whistle, an announcement was made by the club on Postecoglou’s future by the Forest Chairperson Evangelos Marinakis, and now Forest are looking for their third manager of the season, which is only eight league games old.
Sadly, decisions like these from football clubs at the top level are becoming more and more common in the modern game. The ink was barely dry on Postecoglou’s contract, and yet now he has already been handed his P45 by the club. Of course, he had a difficult start and hadn’t won any of his eight games in charge of the club, but there were perhaps some mitigating circumstances for him.
Ange had taken the job knowing that the Chairperson has a history of being trigger-happy and sacking managers at both Forest and the other club he owns in Greece, Olympiakos. He also knew that last year Forest were very successful, getting into the Europa League, but their previous manager, Nuno Espírito Santo, played a very different style to the one that Ange plays.
That was going to be the big problem for Ange, and he didn’t have the players to play the way he wanted to, yet he still insisted on it. Perhaps the best decision for him to make would have been reverting to their old style until the January transfer window opened, where he then could have signed players that fit his system.
For Forest and their owner, sometimes the grass isn’t always greener. He sacked a manager who had brought European football to the club for the first time in thirty years. The counter-attacking style suited the players that were at the club, but the owner wanted a change in playing styles, and now look where that has got him, back to looking for another manager.
We will only know if the decision to sack Ange was right or wrong later in the year, but it shows just how the game has changed in the past three decades since the Premier League was formed. In the 1990s or early 2000s, a manager was often given years to shape a side.
Alex Ferguson famously survived a brutal start at Manchester United. His first four years yielded no trophies, yet the board held firm and kept faith with him and look how they were rewarded.
Arsène Wenger endured seasons of rebuilding without fear for his job and is widely regarded as the best manager in the club's history. The average tenure for a Premier League manager now is around fifteen months, and in the Championship in England, it is less than a year, which goes to show the pressure that managers are under to get results right from the start of their tenures.
While it doesn’t seem right to sack a manager after such a short spell in charge, unfortunately for us all, the modern football game at the top level has become a game of money, and the fear of relegation and the loss of Premier League money is what drives these decisions.
Staying in the Premier League isn’t just a sporting success for some clubs, but it is also a matter of financial survival. Owners and investors of clubs treat them like any other business, and when results dip, leadership changes.
Social media plays a role in these decisions, too. Every poor result is highlighted in real time across the social media networks with hashtags calling for people to be sacked. Each game is dissected by pundits minutes after the final whistle, and then the social media pile-on starts. The boards and owners of clubs are fully aware of the public perception of the manager when things aren’t going well at a football club, but a bad month can feel like a crisis when it is replayed thousands of times online.
Ange Postecoglou won’t be the last manager that Evangelos Marinakis will fall out with or sack at Nottingham Forest, and just who ends up as the new Nottingham Forest manager is anyone's guess. They will have plenty of managers who will want the job, but equally, they will have managers who they might feel they will be able to entice to the club who won’t take the job because of the chairperson, especially how the last two managers have been sacked. One for being very successful and bringing European football back to the club, but it still is not enough, and one who only got 39 days and no transfer window to make his mark.
