The new Rooney Rule: stop getting distracted by the shiny things when everything's going okay

Birmingham City sacked a perfectly serviceable manager and replaced him with a big name who's flopped. It's not even the first time they've done this in the last few years.

Well, no-one can say that they haven’t been here before. In sacking John Eustace because they were dazzled by the starlight emanating from somebody else, Birmingham City could be considered to have merely repeated a mistake from their fairly recent past. In December 2016, a couple of months after Trillion Trophy Asia bought the club, manager Gary Rowett was sacked and replaced by Gianfranco Zola with the team in eighth place in the EFL Championship. By the 17th April when he was sacked, Zola had won just two games out of 24 and Birmingham were in 20th place. They ended the season in 19th, two points and two places above the relegation places.

Fast forward a little less than seven years, and it would appear that no lessons whatsoever were learnt from this debacle. The club was sold in July to Knighthead Capital Management and the team started the new season encouragingly. By the first week in October they were up to 5th place in the Championship. So what did they do? They sacked manager John Eustace and replaced him with Wayne Rooney. Fourteen weeks on, Rooney has now left the club with just two wins from 15, and with Birmingham City having dropped to 20th place in the table, albeit this time six points above the relegation places rather than two. At least seven years ago, Blues supporters knew that Aston Villa were also a shambles. They haven’t even got that gossamer-thin consolation, this time around.

Just as the decision to replace Rowett with Zola didn’t make any sense, neither did the decision to replace Eustace with Rooney. This isn’t even really a matter of Rooney’s suitability for the position. Eustace had been Birmingham’s most ‘successful’ permanent manager since Rowett, with a win percentage of 33.3%. On both occasions, new owners arrived at the club believing that they knew best, and that they could ‘make a statement’ by replacing a moderately successful—these things are all relative—manager with a BIG NAME. And both times they’ve fallen flat on their faces. If there weren’t thousands of people who’d paid a lot of money to watch all of this unfold in real time every other week, it would be quite funny. Aston Villa supporters could be forgiven finding this history repeating itself pretty amusing.

Perhaps the greatest trick that the devil ever sold us was the idea that financial might is always right. Birmingham’s new owners arrived at the club in a familiar blaze of fine words that bordered on hubris. CEO Garry Cook—who remains in his position, because the higher up the food chain you go within a football club, the more difficult they are to dislodge—said at the time that, “we aim to be world class in everything that we do.” Well, we can all aim, Garry, but if you actually intend to become “world class in everything we do”, it’s probably best to not almost immediately start following a playbook so hackneyed that you could paint it black and call it a taxi.

The one time that these goons ever do seem to learn a little humility is when these BIG NAMES become available. At this point, it seems to make perfect sense to them to jettison everything that had been planned for this season, and in the Championship, a division not known for being a particularly forgiving environment, that can come at a not-insignificant cost. Far from having a shot at a play-off place for a spot in the Premier League, which the new owners presumably believe to be the promised land and a place where they definitely belong, their club is back in a position with which supporters have become rather too familiar, in recent years; manageress, just above the relegation places, and looking nervously over their shoulders at those below them in the table.

Have they learned anything from this? Perhaps, perhaps not. Steve Cooper is the current favourite to replace Rooney, and he would certainly be a convincing choice. But there are potential hitches, here. Cooper took Nottingham Forest into the Premier League, kept them there, and likely would again had Angelos Marinakis not had an attack of the yips and pulled the trigger on him just before Christmas. If there is a possibility that other, better positions could become available as the season continues to progress? Would Cooper want to take a step down from the Premier League to the nether regions of the Championship? If it can be pulled off, it would be quite a coup. But then you read stories potentially linking the club with Frank Lampard and you start to wonder.

The Lampard connection, however tenuous it may be, raises inevitable questions about “The Golden Generation” of their managerial credentials, considering Rooney's time at Birmingham. As ever, this is a somewhat more complex question than it might at first appear. Wayne Rooney’s managerial record prior to his arrival at St Andrews was patchy, but also covered in asterisks. It’s difficult to believe that anyone would have been able to do much with Derby County, considering the condition they were in at the time, while his time at DC United in the USA was hardly conspicuous by its success either. And there have been suggestions that he struggled to articulate the ‘no fear’ football about much had been made at the time of his appointment, but this again feels like a headfirst crash between what the owners wanted to happen and what was realistic once the season had started.

Everybody wants their team to sail to the top of the table while playing open, expansive football. But if a team is in a decent enough league position, why change that a few weeks in? All the preparations that had been made throughout the summer had been pointing towards playing a particular type of football. Changing that completely while maintaining the savage timetable that a 46-game Championship season demands was never going to be easy, no matter who the new manager turned out to be. It’s telling that, at the point that Eustace was relieved of his duties, Birmingham hadn’t spent a single second of this season in the bottom half of the table. Rooney was appointed on the 11th October. Seventeen days later, after he’d lost his first three games in charge, they dropped out of the top half and haven’t been back there since.

Does this make him a ‘bad’ manager? Maybe, maybe not. All we can say for certain is that the skillset required to be a great manager is very different to the skillset required to be a great player, and that it has been noted before that great players, to whom brilliance on the pitch came naturally and easily, can struggle to understand the extent to which other players may need guidance. But broadly, it is unclear whether he is any good. It might even be a broader question of the nature of management, that it takes a degree of chemistry between coaching staff and players that is close to indefinable to make things work on the pitch. Certainly, if success was as easy as hiring the most famous former player you can think of and just sitting back while the silverware piles up, everybody would be doing it.

The owners of Birmingham City have been given a sharp lesson in the dangers of the desire to ‘make a statement’. This particular club, which hasn’t finished above 17th place in the Championship in the last seven years, could be forgiven a degree of excitement at their change of ownership during the summer. But senior executives aren’t paid for soundbites and hubris. They’re paid to make the right decisions to make their club as successful as it can be. They’re paid to be the sensible voices in the room. On this, Birmingham's new owners and senior management have failed their significant first test. But while managers are increasingly disposable, those who make these guiding decisions are considerably less so. Garry Cook will remain as the CEO of the club because no-one does confusing symptoms with causes quite like football clubs. As yet another season dissolves before their very eyes, Birmingham supporters will be praying that they make the right decision this time around.