The managerial merry-go-round never comes to a rest, but in recent weeks its speed has really picked up. Leicester City fired Claude Puel in late February, and then Claudio Ranieri (who replaced Slaviša Jokanović earlier this season) suffered the same fate at relegation-doomed Fulham. Meanwhile, Chelsea’s slide from the top end of the table—suspended, possibly arrested with their recent win over Tottenham—has left the Blues outside of the top four places, though they have played one fewer game than both fourth-place Manchester United and fifth-place Arsenal. It’s somewhere between possible and likely that, should Chelsea fail to qualify for the Champions League, Maurizio Sarri will also be looking for a new job come May. (Sarri is pictured above, left, with Fulham interim manager Scott Parker.)
Advertisement
A typical reaction to a spate of managerial firings is to bemoan the lack of patience in the modern game. Alex Ferguson, as we know, only finished above 11th once in his first four seasons in charge of Manchester United, and it wasn’t until his sixth full season that he led United to the league title. Managers need time. On the other hand, the same Claudio Ranieri who just got the boot from Fulham needed exactly one season to elevate Leicester City from relegation battlers to the most unlikely champions in Premier League history. And even he failed to survive the next season. If the most successful manager Leicester City have ever employed couldn’t survive a second year, is it any wonder that Puel couldn’t either?
The calculus over whether and when to fire a manager begins with the club’s immediate and long-term goals. For those battling relegation, it’s pretty simple: Avoid dropping to the Championship and suffering the financial catastrophe that comes with relegation. Firing a manager in the hope that his replacement will provide just enough of a new-manager bump to save the campaign is a tried and true approach. Southampton accomplished it last season when they brought in Mark Hughes to replace the struggling Mauricio Pellegrino. The problem, of course, is that after Hughes kept them afloat, Southampton made the mistake of keeping him around. After another poor start to the season, Southampton once again sacrificed their coach and brought in a new one in a bid to escape relegation. Ralph Hasenhüttl replaced Hughes and the new manager bumper became the new manager bumpee.
There’s nothing wrong with changing managers in order to avoid relegation, but as Hughes showed, the manager who kept a team up isn’t necessarily best equipped to help that team thrive. The Sunderland vortex beckons for teams that fail to recognize this. Sunderland cycled through a string of managers including Paolo Di Canio, Dick Advocaat and Sam Allardyce—each of them taking over in midseason, piloting the club out of relegation danger and then sticking around into the next season only to be replaced in turn. It is possible to draw the conclusion that Sunderland, like Southampton, should have moved on faster from the manager who kept the team alive but perhaps wasn’t best positioned to lead them on a more permanent basis.
Manchester United under Jose Mourinho was in no danger of dropping down to the Championship, but they weren’t far from being relegated from the top six. Their turnaround under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has been remarkable, but if the same logic applies, the Norwegian club legend may not be the best choice to lead United after this season. However, once we move up the table, the motivations get murkier.
Advertisement
In what regard did Claude Puel fail? His midtable team was decidedly in the middle of the table when he was let go. And with Leicester City’s squad built around young English stars like James Maddison and Harvey Barnes, it always had the feel of a long-term project. It’s true that the team lost an unfortunate number of home matches in a row, and they were occasionally boring to watch. But should that be a firable offense for a manager overseeing a roster overhaul, breaking in exciting young players and not even flirting with relegation in the process?
Superficially, it might seem as though being content with Puel’s performance could signal a lack of ambition on the part of Leicester City’s board. Shouldn’t the recent Premier League champions aspire to more than mediocrity? Indeed they should. But that aspiration requires a multi-year plan, the ability to execute it and trust in the fact that, under certain circumstances (for instance when a whole bunch of players who are barely 20 years old are getting their first extended Premier League run), you will necessarily have to trade some poor results in the short term for long-term gains. Firing a manager who is successfully overseeing that plan isn’t being ambitious; it is, in fact, a doubling down on mediocrity, even if that manager happened to suffer a very embarrassing 4-1 loss at home to Crystal Palace. The saving grace for Leicester City is that Puel’s replacement, Brendan Rodgers, has experience coming into a project midstream and keeping it rolling, as he did very successfully at Swansea City.
Midtable teams are making a mistake if they sacrifice a long-term project in favor of wringing every point they can out of the current season, but the equation gets more complicated the higher up the table you go. And that’s what makes Maurizio Sarri’s situation at Chelsea so interesting.
Chelsea have spent the better part of the last decade lurching from one high-profile manager to another, regardless of stylistic preference. The result has been a dizzying ping-pong pattern between success and failure as each manager tries to impose his system (mostly with the existing players), meets with various levels of success and then gets fired, only for the process to repeat yet again. Sarri has gotten a newish midfield, with both Jorginho and Matteo Kovacic acquired to fit his style. In January the team added Gonzalo Higuain, the aging striker who starred under Sarri at Napoli. Higuain’s addition might seem like a further degree of buy-in from Chelsea, but he is 31—too old to be around when Sarri’s project comes to fruition at Stamford Bridge, provided the coach is afforded enough time. Chelsea want to build Sarri a squad that fits his style, but they also want to win now. And it’s exceedingly difficult to do both.
But with a transfer ban looming, the question for Chelsea is this: How successful does Sarri need to be in order for the club to continue their commitment to remaking the squad in his image? If Sarri can’t guide this team to the Champions League with his preferred midfielder, his old striker and the remnants of a team that, only two seasons ago, won a league title under Antonio Conte, is he really the man in which Chelsea want to invest major resources? Sacrificing points now for a shot at success in the future is a lot easier to do when the difference is between finishing seventh and 11th than it is when the difference is between third and sixth.
Advertisement
The desire of Chelsea fans for a long-term manager is understandable. The constant upheaval has led to league titles in two of the last four seasons, but it has also created a tremendous amount of instability. It’s nice to think that all it would take for Sarri to succeed would be a year or two of tinkering with the roster and lots of training sessions and games, but the reality is more complicated. Getting star players of the caliber Chelsea need is itself made easier when the club is enjoying success. Conversley, it’s far more difficult and more expensive to convince a star midfielder to join your team if you’re not playing in the Champions League. At the loftiest levels of the game, rebuilding cannot come at the cost of too many points dropped.
Like the teams battling to escape relegation, Chelsea are in a situation where every point matters. At both the top and the bottom of the table, building for the future necessarily means deprioritizing the present. It’s the Leicester Cities of the world who have the luxury of being able to do so. And even then, as we can see, it’s pretty rare for them to take advantage of that fact.
(Photo by Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)