The EFL Championship: A league in which no-one is good enough
The season hasn't even ended yet, but still the managers of the teams who finished sixth and seventh have been sacked. Welcome to the division in which madness overcomes strategic decision-making.
They finished in sixth and seventh places in the table respectively. Between them, they won 40 of their 92 league matches during the regular season. If both Robert Wagner and Leroy Rosenior are going to be sacked within nanoseconds of their teams’ seasons ending, what hope is there of ever finding some degree of sensible ownership in the EFL Championship?
The Championship has a unique place in English football's landscape in that practically no-one in it actually wants to be there. The rainbow is just too close, too bright and too vivid. You can almost smell the pot of gold. And it's long been the case that such close proximity to so much money and status seems to have a most peculiar effect on the people who run its clubs.
What, exactly, were the owners of Norwich City expecting this season? Of the five teams that finished above them in the table, three were in receipt of tens of millions of pounds than they in parachute payment money. One of them beat them in the playoffs this week. And yes, that was a heavy defeat, but yanno… sometimes that sort of loss happens. It was a bad result, but resilience is important, if you're going to be successful in a highly competitive environment.
Perhaps there was a hint of embarrassment about it all at Carrow Road. After all, Ipswich Town, over whom they'd been lording or for a few seasons, bypassed them on the slipstream and will now be playing Premier League football amid an absolutely flurry of global praise for manager Kieran McKenna and, by extension, the owners of the clubs themselves.
That must hurt, but if there are other McKennas out there—and it should be remembered that he got Ipswich up with precisely zero parachute payment money—is the prospect of finding them and holding onto them enhanced or degraded by being the club that sacks them for finishing well up the top half of the table? Whoever Wagner's successor is will have less money to play with next season, but will the Norwich owners’ demands be tempered by that? Is any thought whatsoever given to the impression given that is given by this sort of impulsive-looking decision making?
One example of this lack of accountability has come this season at Birmingham City. New owners rode into town at the start of the season, sacking John Eustace and replacing him with celebrity manager Wayne Rooney. Eight months on and with Rooney sacked, the club tumbled into League One on the last day of the season, but have there been any directorial resignations? Of course not. That would mean an acceptance of their role in the club getting relegated to the lowest level of football they they've played at in the last thirty years.
At Hull City, meanwhile, Leroy Rosenior (a young coach who has been spoken of in extremely glowing terms by others who know the ins and outs of coaching far better than you and I) didn't have the benefit of any parachute payment money at all. Hull have been under the new ownership of Acun Ilicali for a couple of years, now. He's put some money into the club and sure, I agree that seeing that go in smoke must really suck.
But hold on a minute, there, because there seems to be a misunderstanding of what is going on here. This sort of spending is routinely described as ‘investment’, but the actual likelihood of it offering a return is such that it would be more accurate to describe it as akin to putting a bet on a horse.
The best that can be said for Ilicali is that if he is an investor, he's not very good at it. If he was, he probably wouldn't have funnelled millions of pounds into trying to get a football club into the top flight which have had five years there in 120 years of existence, and who have never finished above 16th place. As ever, the old adage that the best way to become a millionaire is to start out as a billionaire and buy a football club remains apposite.
Somewhere in the distance, from the vicinity of Humberside and Norfolk, the sharpening of pencils intensifies, so it's important to remember that Norwich and Hull are the just the latest examples of this counter-productive craziness. This is a phenomenon which has become endemic throughout the division.
Astonishingly, just five of the managers in place a year ago—McKenna, Carlos Corberan (West Brom), Michael Carrick (Middlesbrough), Mark Robins (Coventry) and Ryan Lowe (Preston North End) are still in their positions. There are nine clubs who have changed managers at least twice, including all three of the relegated clubs. So, how's that hire ‘em and fire’ em strategy working out for you lads? With compensation and all, we already know that it sure ain't cheap.
Of course, part of the reason why this culture exists is that managers often seem to act as deflector shields for the incompetence of others. Consider Norwich and Wagner, for example. It's been said that one of Norwich's issues this season was poor recruitment. If that's the case, then is it reasonable to assume that the head of recruitment will be tendering his resignation too? What happens to sporting director Ben Knapper, who presumably has the ultimate responsibility for all of this?
This all feels like a level of mathematics that shouldn't need explaining. Only three out of 24 Championship clubs can go up every season, and the dice are loaded against most of them because of parachute payments. In any given match, only one team can win and it's literally infinitely more likely that neither team will win than that both of them will.
At the risk of sounding like a letter writer to the Daily Telegraph, we can't *all* be winners. That's built into the very nature of sport, and the current owners of Championship clubs are only setting themselves up for expensive and repeated disappointment with their ridiculous overspending and constant sacking of managers.
And the biggest irony of all is that, if the carryings-on of Evangelos Marinakis at Nottingham Forest this season have been anything to go by, it's perfectly possible that it won't even make you very happy once you get there. To reach the promised land and start believing there's a conspiracy against your club is an irony almost beyond description. This time last year, Forest's promotion was extremely popular, but fast forward a year such has been the whininess of Marinakis's complaining all season that their relegation straight back would likely have been greeted with a shrug of the shoulders.
The capacity of football club owners to keep repeating the same experiment while expecting different and better results is astonishing. And they'll keep repeating the same mistakes in perpetuity because there's no-one to sack them, and because they seem to lack both the imagination to try and break out of this cycle and the nerve to stand by the appointments that they made in the first place. As such, it does rather feel as though some of these clubs are doomed to repeat this loop perpetuity. We shall see, whether this includes Norwich City and Hull City.
Knapper has only been in role at Norwich since November, so recruitment failures can't all be laid at his feet. Now had you used Craig Gardner as an example...
Just to clarify, Norwich were recipients of parachute payments this season. Those payments stop now, so a major rethink on the way the club wants the team to play. As a Norwich fan, I was concerned about his treatment of Todd Cantwell and Bali Mumba, young players with huge talent, we were either cast aside or not made welcome when they returned to the club.