Football gafferdom’s equivalent of coming into possession of the Hope Diamond, blundering mob-handed into King Tutankhamun’s tomb or pimping one’s ride with spare parts from remnants of the “Little Bastard” Porsche 550 Spyder in which James Dean drove fast and died young, winning the Premier League manager of the month has long been viewed as a portent of imminent doom. Admittedly not doom on the scale of King Tut-bothering Lord Carnarvon dying from pneumonia, prompting lights to go out all over Cairo and his dog to mysteriously drop dead back home in England, but a more underwhelming football-related woe.
Just as “death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a pharaoh”, defeat is widely believed to come on wings to he who is photographed beaming at the training ground after being presented with his little football-shaped trophy rewarding results from the previous calendar month.
Garry Monk won the first managerial gong this season, then with monotonous predictability watched his Swansea City side lose their first match following his presentation with the award. It is not entirely inconceivable that this monotonous predictability had more to do with the fact that they were playing Chelsea at Stamford Bridge than any superstitious execration, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good myth, eh? Oh, go on then.
For all the managerial joshing and faux fretting about the inevitable defeat that traditionally follows the ceremony, there is little evidence to suggest it actually signals an immediate slump in form. Ronald Koeman picked up what could be the first of many manager of the month prizes on Friday and his Southampton side did not exactly disgrace themselves the following day.
Of the nine trophies handed out between August and April last season, February’s recipient, Sam Allardyce, was the only winner to oversee a defeat in the fixture following the announcement of his victory, with his West Ham side losing at Stoke City. By contrast, the clubs managed by Arsène Wenger (September), Mauricio Pochettino (October), Alan Pardew (November), Manuel Pellegrini (December) and Brendan Rodgers (March) all won the games that came after their respective coronations, with Manchester City’s manager so dogged by misfortune with his success in the run-up to Christmas that he made it two in a row by winning it for January’s as well.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that Pellegrini’s double is far from unprecedented. Since the inception of the awards in August 1993, Joe Kinnear (Wimbledon), Kevin Keegan (Newcastle), Roy Evans (Liverpool), Alex Ferguson (Manchester United), Wenger (Arsenal), David O’Leary (Leeds United), Stuart Pearce (Manchester City), Paul Jewell (Wigan Athletic), Rafael Benítez (Liverpool) and Carlo Ancelotti (Chelsea) have all won the manager of the month award on consecutive occasions, with Ferguson doing so three times.
With 27 awards, the mantelpiece of the former Manchester United manager groans loudest under the weight of the baubles, but if a QPR resurgence happens to coincide with the beginning and end of a particular calendar month, Harry Redknapp will almost certainly add to his impressively unique record of having been manager of the month with four Premier League clubs.
Of course some months the award takes a lot more winning than others. Last March, Rodgers claimed it after steering Liverpool to victories over Southampton, Manchester United, Cardiff City, Sunderland and Spurs, scoring 18 goals in the process. The vagaries of the calendar mean that, in September, Southampton only needed a 100% record against Swansea, QPR and Newcastle to increase the duties of whoever wields the feather duster in the Koeman home.
Much as they would probably like to, Saints can’t play Sunderland every week, so it is extremely unlikely they will continue the blistering run of form that earned Koeman his Mr September accolade. Indeed, it came to an abrupt end with defeat at Tottenham in their first match of October. With the average points tally accumulated per game by manager of the month winners being 2.5, any team sustaining that level of performance over an entire season would finish with 95. Coincidentally, this is the record number with which Chelsea secured the Premier League title in 2004-05.
With injuries, fatigue and the varying quality of opposition ensuring that the vast majority of clubs are clearly unable to maintain such exceptional levels of performance for long periods, statistics show that in the four weeks after their leading man wins the manager of the month award, clubs earn 1.6 points per match. That’s the equivalent of around 61 points over a Premier League campaign and would have secured eighth place last season.
In the case of Koeman and Southampton, Champions League qualification will almost certainly remain a pipe dream, but the many pre-season harbingers of doom for the south coast club have already been made to look extremely foolish. It is to be expected that the performances of clubs whose managers are rewarded for ridiculously good performances over a random period will inevitably drop, but the reasons are mired in the mundanely statistical rather than the mysteriously mystical.
