Post by QPR Report on May 4, 2009 7:44:32 GMT
The Times
The sack race turns brutal: no job, no hopeOwen Slot
With the regular Football League season complete, here is a stark, raving statistic laughing out of the madness. Dave Penney’s departure from Darlington on Thursday made him the 39th managerial change of the season. That is not taking into account Joe Kinnear’s sick leave at Newcastle United, Joe Royle’s curtailed caretaker role with Oldham Athletic or, significantly, the fact that with every manager’s departure, two or three other staff tend to accompany him out of the door.
Penney, of course, went by his own volition. Which is rare. The reason he went was to take up the Oldham job that Royle will vacate. Yet Penney aside, of the 39 changes this season, only six others are back managing elsewhere in England.
The chances of re-employment are shockingly slim. The average tenure of a managerial position in England hit an all-time low this season at 1.47 years and will probably dip farther as more sackings come out in the post-season wash. Of those managers who have left their first job, only 49 per cent of them get a second.
Comparisons with the foreign game are particularly condemning. In Italy, for instance, one in five managers will stay in employment through more than two different clubs. In England that is one in 50.
It is a cliché to point out that clubs have an obsession with overnight success, but for managers, opportunities to learn, assemble and improve their skill-sets, to enhance experience to do a better job? Such concepts are as good as unheard of.
It has got to the stage where the managers’ fight to preserve their reputations means that some will soon be calling time on their clubs rather than vice versa. The Times knows of a number of managers who are so concerned with the threat of budget cuts next season that they are considering jumping now rather than reboarding a ship they no longer believe they can keep afloat. Expect at least one to have left work in such circumstances by the start of next season. It is simply not worth having a failure against your name; a sullied reputation means a manager who may have blown his last chance.
Life after sport is a challenge facing any retired professional athlete, no matter the success of their playing days. But for the many footballers looking at management, the prospects are bleak.
“I’m out of work,” Wayne Allison said. Allison is intelligent and broad of experience. He retired as a player last year, having been through nine clubs, and has just completed a season in which he was in and out of Chester City as assistant manager and in and out of Bury as a coach. He is now doing a PhD in sports science while he awaits his opportunity.
“Life is difficult at times,” the former striker, 40, said. “It can be a case of trying to fill your days. If you haven’t got anything else, it could drive you to depression. I am just finishing my Pro Licence and I am hoping to get back into football in some capacity. I’ll accept anything at the moment. I’m not in a position to turn work down.”
Allison is knocking on doors that Kenny Hibbitt, the former Wolverhampton Wanderers player, fears have closed on him for good. Hibbitt managed Walsall and Cardiff City in the Nineties; since then he has got his golf handicap down to scratch, does childcare for his grandchildren — “I’m spending time with them that I missed with my own kids,” he said — and works on average a game a week as an assessor for the Premier League.
“I don’t want any violins,” Hibbitt said. “For my health, I took a step back after Walsall and Cardiff. The year out may have caused a problem in terms of re-employment, but the stress was causing heart palpitations. I needed a break.
“But I would jump straight back in. It’s doubtful I would get the chance, but I love football and would love to have the opportunity to manage again.”
Yet Allison and Hibbitt know that they are pursuing jobs and not careers. “I think it takes four years to build a foundation to take a club forward,” Hibbitt, 58, said. “But the present climate is: we want it now. When directors appoint a new manager, they think they have waved the magic wand. And when the success doesn’t come quite as quickly as they had hoped, they dispense with them. We call it the magic roundabout.”
Allison said: “It’s all about results — and results quickly. You may have a vision of how you want to progress, but it has to be about progressing quickly.”
There is a solution to this, one that the League Managers Association (LMA) pushes for with no apparent reward. “Owners, boards and supporters continue to raise their expectations and desire for success,” Richard Bevan, the LMA chief executive, said. “The setting of unrealistic short-term expectations can be very destabilising for a manager. A manager must be given time, clarity and a structure that he can operate in to the best of his ability if he is to be successful.”
He should be so lucky. Short-termism rules. This season has proved that and so will the next
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article6216247.ece