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The Guardian - UK

Sport

Louise Taylor

Sacked Chris Powell and Chris Ramsey draw sympathy from Sam Allardyce

A 2-2 draw for Huddersfield Town at Reading on Tuesday night was not enough to prevent Chris Powell from being sacked by the club. Photograph: BPI/Rex Shutterstock

Leaves are piling up on pavements, Christmas merchandise has flooded the shops and managerial casualties continue to mount. Lengthening nights invariably coincide with a rise in the sackings count and, sure enough, this week alone saw Chris Powell and Chris Ramsey dismissed from their respective Championship posts at Huddersfield Town and Queens Park Rangers.

Already this season 16 managers have fallen across England’s top four divisions, six of them in the Championship. That figure does not include Dick Advocaat, who opted to walk away from Sunderland, but his successor Sam Allardyce is not surprised by the latest round of carnage.

“It’s not unusual,” sighs Allardyce. “We’ve had it before – although there’s been a change recently. There used to be more sackings in the lower divisions than anywhere else. If you survived more than a year you were doing well. Now, though, it’s happening mainly in the Championship because those clubs are getting more foreign owners who want to turn them into Premier League outfits. If they don’t quite get there, the managers fall foul of these new regimes. The financial promise of the Premier League means that, this year, more Championship managers than ever might lose their jobs.”

Such suspicions are endorsed by statistics compiled by the League Managers Association. Of 47 dismissals across the four leagues last season 20 came in the Championship, with second-tier coaches surviving an average of 0.83 years.

“The relentless hiring and firing of managers undermines stability, costs a great deal and causes significant disruption,” says Richard Bevan, the LMA’s chief executive. “The lure of Premier League riches means the desire, both from fans and club owners, to find that ‘magic bullet’ and gamble on a new manager is increasingly powerful.”

This impatience is rarely rewarded. “Studies have proved that, in the main, changing managers has negligible effects [on results] over the medium to long term,” says Bevan. He is acutely conscious of the collateral damage – both financial and emotional – sustained by backroom personnel. Last season’s 47 managerial firings were accompanied by the culling of more than 150 support staff.

All this upheaval is set against a landscape in which many owners are more dictators than democrats. Increasingly such autocracy is camouflaged by slavish adherence to supposedly financially efficient recruitment models. Aston Villa and Newcastle United are, for instance, concentrating on importing cut-price young players from overseas in the hope of eventually selling them on for a profit. It is a policy that arguably cost Tim Sherwood the Villa job.

Then there is Brentford and the almost evangelical faith of the Championship club’s owner, Matthew Benham, in analytics. Benham believes in signing only players who digital performance data suggest are most effective – and should offer the highest potential re-sale values – but Allardyce shakes his head at this “computer says no” approach.

“You’re asking about the algorithm aren’t you,” he says. “I met Billy Beane after I read his book Moneyball in 2002 and ever since then the question was always going to be could someone to do that programme in football?”

As certain managers – including Mark Warburton, dismissed by Brentford last spring despite almost unprecedented success, and, to a lesser extent, Brendan Rodgers, late of Liverpool – can testify, Moneyball has much to answer for. Essentially involving the successful application of analytics to baseball in the United States, it contains an obvious appeal but rarely thrives after transplantation across the Atlantic.

“It wasn’t going to be easy in football,” says Allardyce. “In baseball and American football the basic stats are much more reliable. As far as I can gather Mark Warburton lost his job because he didn’t want a player identified by the algorithm. But football’s about the all-important human factor. About how the player fits into the team emotionally.

“You have to marry up all the other stuff with the algorithm. You can’t lose old-fashioned instinct. If I sit down with a player and I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me it’s not going to work – no matter how good he is. Recruitment’s everything – and to do it right you need a bit of everything, scouting, stats and, sometimes, taking a gamble.”

Bevan is not about to minimise the human factor’s importance. “It’s vital a manager has a strong and influential voice when shaping a squad,” he says. “They have the closest insight into the team’s dynamic.”

As in so many spheres of life, communication is imperative but Bevan is noticing more and more connection failures between head coaches and owners. “Almost one in three of the 92 clubs are now owned overseas with owners making decisions remotely,” he says. “It makes a manager’s job even more uncertain. The traditional lines of communication and responsibility are changing rapidly and managers often struggle to build a close working relationship with those who ultimately decide whether they stay employed or not.”

Allardyce has qualified sympathy for his fallen colleagues. “If you come into the frying pan you’ve got to accept that, to survive, you need wins. My job is not safe if I don’t start winning. That’s something all of us, even José Mourinho, have to face.”