On Sunday afternoon, Bournemouth face Crystal Palace: Andoni Iraola, in his fourth-last league game in charge of the home side, against Oliver Glasner in his fifth-last league game in charge of the away side – although the latter also has the Europa Conference League to deal with. Both managers are out of contract at the end of the season, and both hope to move on to a club with a substantially bigger budget.
That’s understandable. This has been an uncomfortable season for Glasner, whose frustration at the club’s financial limitations was perhaps expressed a little too publicly, but history will remember him as the manager who won Crystal Palace the FA Cup. More prosaically, with the 12th-highest wage bill in the Premier League, he has taken Palace to 10th and 12th, while they started the weekend 13th. And there remains the possibility of a glorious farewell with Conference League success in Leipzig.
Iraola may not have won a trophy, but his achievements in overperforming the wage bill are even more striking. Bournemouth over the past three seasons have had the 15th, 18th and 17th-highest wages bills in the division but have finished 12th and ninth. They went into this weekend seventh with a realistic chance of Champions League qualification should Aston Villa triumph in the Europa League and finish fifth, giving the Premier League six qualifying slots.
Given Bournemouth lost their goalkeeper and three of last season’s regular back four in the summer, and sold their most reliable creative presence in January, that is remarkable. But does it mean he could cope with managing a bigger, more scrutinised side who have to juggle perhaps 12 to 15 additional games in the season?
Several years ago, the director of a club that had just climbed from League One to the Premier League suggested to the board the best thing to do would be to sack their manager. “But he’s just got us promoted twice! He’s a great manager!” came the predictable protests. “He’d done brilliantly with the corner shop,” the director replied, “but now we’re a multinational.”
The board ignored the director’s advice, the club were promptly relegated and the manager was sacked at the end of the season. If the idea that managing a club with aspirations to play in Europe was very different to leading a side through the lower divisions was true then, it is even more true now. The game has never been more stratified, and that creates a dilemma for everybody.
Scott Parker, say, has been promoted out of the Championship with Fulham, Bournemouth and Burnley. He’s evidently very good at that part of the game; indeed, he’s never failed to be promoted in a Championship season as a manager. But his Fulham and Burnley sides were relegated straight away while he was dismissed by Bournemouth after losing three of his first four games in the Premier League.
Parker’s Championship record is: P128 W76 D41 L21. His Premier League record reads: P86 W13 D21 L52. Does that make him a great Championship manager? Does it make him a bad Premier League manager? Or does it make him a manager adept with financial advantages in the Championship who cannot then overperform his budget in the Premier League?
Perhaps Parker with a bigger budget in the Premier League would thrive. His Burnley picked up 0.59 points per game in the Premier League; Vincent Kompany’s Burnley achieved only 0.04 more per game than that yet somehow he moved into the Bayern Munich job. Although Kompany’s stint in Belgium with Anderlecht was rather more impressive than Parker’s with Club Brugge, there is little in their management of Burnley to suggest that it should be Kompany overseeing a Champions League semi-final while Parker waits for a call from a team defeated in the playoffs.
That’s a problem for aspiring managers, but it’s also an issue for clubs looking to make an appointment. How do you judge which coaches will be capable of leaping between tiers? The shadow of Thomas Frank looms large.
At Brentford, Frank had seemed affable and pragmatic; there was every reason to assume that he would make the step up. He even started quite well at Spurs, with a good performance in losing on penalties to Paris Saint-Germain in the Uefa Super Cup and wins over Burnley and Manchester City.
But it didn’t take long for performances to dip and, as soon as they did, Frank suddenly seemed dwarfed by the job. Within a few weeks there had been indications of a lack of respect from players and some odd comments about fans. The genial figure of Brentford became somebody far less assured, Frank’s anxiety spreading through the club.
Might something similar happen with Glasner or Iraola? The truth is that, while there are certain indications as to personality, until a manager has actually been in the spotlight, it’s very hard to be sure. Glasner has experience of balancing league and European football and has done so with success, winning the Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt and taking Palace to the verge of the Conference League final. However, the Austrian seems a spikier figure than Iraola, with a degree of acrimony towards the end of his spells with Wolfsburg and Frankfurt as well as Palace.
A willingness to be self-assertive, though, while it may mean he is not the easiest employee, may be a positive trait in a manager. The biggest doubt over Glasner, in fact, is probably his football: can his counterattacking style transfer to a club that expect to dominate possession?
Iraola’s football is more proactive and so may be a better fit for a bigger side; Chelsea and Manchester United, certainly, are interested. Iraola’s teams, though, have a tendency to run out of steam late in games, hence his semi-regular grumbles about game management. If that is happening now, how bad might the issue become with the added rigours of the Champions League?
Glasner, eight years Iraola’s senior, has already had a fine career: two major trophies at the level of club he has managed is no small achievement. Iraola has impressed so far with style rather than silverware. Both hold the promise of more, but the possibility remains that they are simply what they have already proved to be: very good mid-table managers. Stepping up is, inevitably, a step into the unknown.
