There’s a funny Lars Von Trier movie called ‘The Boss Of It All’ about a company owner who invents a pretend boss on whom he can pin all the unpopular decisions. A fake figurehead, there to absorb all the frustrations of the organisation and to take the blame for its performance issues.
Mark Hughes, Southampton FC’s boss of it all, got the sack this week. There was only so long he could be pinned with the dead-end struggles of a club outside the Premier League Big Six (or Five).
The ‘Klopp of The Alps’ Ralph Hasenhüttl takes the reins, the perfect obscure Von Trier-esque replacement to get it in the neck when the Saints rise and then inevitably fall a few places in the Premier League bottom-half death zone.
Hughes – like most managers – is mostly scarecrow, there to look like he is doing a job but largely ineffectual and with the longevity of a mannequin covered in Trill stood in a field of ravenous pigeons. A pantomime character from a bygone age, there largely for repartee with the crowd.
A Sky Sports study last year found that the average tenure for a departing manager was at an all-time low of just 423 days. In an industry with all too little supporter engagement, getting a manager sacked is the one thing that fans can properly effect and they do so with gusto. The club boards stays the same but the boss of it all gets the boot.
The talent pool for managers that can produce on a consistent basis has been gradually dwindling, mainly due to the role being seen as a retirement perk for ex-players. The same old tired ideas are rehashed with the illusion of tactics board modernity.
Player power is stronger now than ever and there is still no answer to the potential for playing staff to down tools when they have had enough of a manager. There’s no suggestion that happened to Hughes, but in what other job does your livelihood rest so precariously in the hands of 11 people? Tough guys get laughed at.
What then is the point of the football manager? The game would go on if the current, washed-out brigade of ex-footballers were relieved of their position and the ‘Mister’ role abolished.
In its place you’d have a modern team of coaches making the touchline decisions, using the latest in-game technology. Gone would be the flat view of the touchline gaffer with the in-stand position of the rugby Head Coach offering a more rounded view of the game.
Alternatively, the outmoded ‘player-manager’ could return to the fore, with senior performers making in-game decisions based on the match going on around them. Players are bullet proof when it comes to getting fired so chants to sack the manager would be replaced with little more than clenched fists from fans.
In place of the shorted and booted touchline manager who won’t accept his best days are behind him or the manager with an ill-fitting jumper and tie combo, veins bursting out of his head, you’d have…nothing.
Chairmen, of course, would miss the characters that take the flak for them. Arsenal’s Stan Kroenke and Alisher Usmanov would certainly have copped it more if company man Arsene Wenger hadn’t absorbed the pressures of an organisation in flux into the deep folds of his sleeping bag coat.
But the days of the football manager seem numbered, the speed dial to the likes of Hughes, Pardew and Allardyce about to be switched off for good. Make a flower arrangement in the technical area or something.
Tom Reed
