Eleven managers have lost their jobs since Christmas, but whether their clubs will benefit is a whole different matter
And then there were 11: Peterborough United's sacking of Gary Johnson this week brought the number of managers shown the door in England since Christmas Day to a full team. Going back to the start of December the running total of severed managerial heads now stands at 14: Chris Hughton (Newcastle United), Sam Allardyce (Blackburn Rovers), Paul Trollope (Bristol Rovers), Brian Laws (Burnley), Darren Ferguson (Preston North End), George Burley (Crystal Palace), Mark Stimson (Barnet), Chris Hutchings (Walsall), Phil Parkinson (Charlton Athletic), Paul Simpson (Stockport County), Roy Keane (Ipswich Town), Roy Hodgson (Liverpool), Kevin Dillon (Aldershot) and now Johnson. Never mind a first XI, at this rate by the time the transfer window closes we should be up to the levels of the most boisterously stocked Premier League squad.
Looking back it was Newcastle's wretched decision to fire Hughton at the start of December that seems to have blown the plug on the managerial dam. Currently we're on a run of nine sackings in 11 days and it is hard to recall a more concentrated period of boardroom blood-letting. Is this simply a perfect storm of mass underperformance twinned with directorial impatience? Or is something else going on here?
En bloc it is easy to make a case for a strain of mass hysteria. On a case by case basis, and looking specifically at those who have departed in the last week, the situation looks less clear:
Roy Keane
It isn't hard to see why Keane lost his job. Ipswich are 19th in the Championship and have lost seven of their last nine league games. Keane has had 18 months and �8m in transfer funds to make things work. Popular as he remains with fans of his former clubs, this is still sacking form for a manager. A 7-0 defeat at Chelsea immediately after Keane's departure has been held up by some as evidence of the board having made a mistake; exactly the opposite argument could quite easily be made.
Kevin Dillon
Left Aldershot by "mutual consent" after four straight defeats and with the club 20th in League Two. The Shots reached the play-offs last season. Fear of losing a hard-won league place seems to have been the main motivation for sacking Dillon, plus a stated boardroom dissatisfaction with the fiscal management of his squad. A textbook relegation-haunted dismissal.
Gary Johnson
A statement on the club's official website earlier this week read: "It was mutually agreed that Gary Johnson and Peterborough United Football Club Ltd part company. The manager and chairman could not see eye to eye on policy." Apart from, apparently, the policy of getting rid of Johnson himself just 10 months after his last sacking, by Bristol City. This looks the most brazenly unfair of recent managerial P45s. Johnson had just nine months at Peterborough, who are currently in the League One play-off spots. Perhaps more significantly, the club has had eight managers in six years since Barry Fry moved upstairs in 2005.
Looking above the headline figures, we shouldn't be particularly surprised by any of this. Sacking managers is as old as the football manager himself. Managers have always been sacked, always with alarming abruptness, usually unfairly. Between 1899 and 1993 there were 1900 managerial changes in England, and going even further back it was one of the basic functions of the early secretary-manager to be sacked: he came into being as a dispensable frontman, a visible sacrifice to football's new and slightly alarming mass audience in times of failure. Even now he enjoys this same status at many clubs, a recurrent patsy for deficiencies further up the hierarchy, whether of competence or basic means.
The average tenure of a newly appointed manager is just over two years which doesn't, on the face of it, sound that bad. In the 1920s the average stay was four years, albeit inflated by some record-breaking inter-war long distance merchants. By 1993 that figure had fallen to 2.72 years. Two years ago it was at a record low: 1.72. The recent upturn in average life-span perhaps explains the levels of ambient shock at the rash of January sackings. Last December and January just five managers were sacked in the Football and Premier Leagues. The year before it was four. Looking back it is this unusual clemency that looks like the anomaly here.
For now it is impossible to be certain whether the current spike has run its course or if a hunger remains for more. But if there is some comfort to be found for those already in the departure lounge it is perhaps in the fact that statistics suggest sacking your manager rarely does anybody any good. Most studies suggest a brief uplift in results will be followed by a reversion to previous success rates for struggling teams. Also, perhaps there is something reassuring in the karmic circularity of managerial rotation: Johnson may be feeling hard done by right now. Ferguson, reappointed in his place at Peterborough on Tuesday, has managed to catch hold of a career-reviving updraft.
In the end, being sacked is simply the lot of the manager. He exists to be sacked, nourished only by his successes in a sport where success is by definition a limited commodity. Perhaps the only really relevant question here is: who's going to get it next? In the Premier League Avram Grant is 1-4 favourite; in the Championship at least one major bookmaker has stopped taking bets. "With so many changes recently this market has temporarily been suspended," reads a statement on the company's website. Right now this seems like an eminently sensible decision.
Has your club's manager been sacked? Were you calling for their departure? Do you think your club's fortunes will now improve?
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