Sacking the manager is the easiest decision a football board can make. It is also, in most cases, the least useful one.
You can announce a sacking within hours. It generates immediate media coverage. It signals to fans that something is being done. It costs money but not the kind of effort that examining your own decisions requires. The manager is the most visible person at the club. When things go wrong, the manager is the obvious variable to change. Boards love obvious variables.
The problem is that most struggling clubs do not have a manager problem. They have a structural problem. And sacking the manager does not fix the structure. It just creates the illusion that something has changed, while everything that caused the failure remains exactly as it was.
1. The manager is not the one who built the squad.
This is the foundational point that gets ignored every single time a board reaches for the sack.
Look at Manchester United after Ferguson. The club has had, depending on how you count, seven or eight permanent and caretaker managers since Ferguson retired in 2013. Moyes. Van Gaal. Mourinho. Solskjaer. Rangnick. Ten Hag. Amorim. Each one inherited a squad with problems. Each one was blamed for those problems. Each one was eventually removed. The squad problems persisted because the squad problems were not caused by the manager. They were caused by years of dysfunctional recruitment, overpaid players on long contracts who had no motivation to perform, a dressing room culture that tolerated mediocrity, and an ownership model at Old Trafford that prioritised commercial returns over sporting investment.
No manager can fix that. Not even Ferguson could fix that if he walked in today, because the problems today are structural in ways they were not when he was building.
Sacking the manager does not fix the structure. It just creates the illusion that something has changed, while everything that caused the failure remains exactly as it was.
2. Chelsea is the clearest example of what managerial carousel actually looks like.
Since Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, the club has had more than twenty managers. Jose Mourinho alone was sacked twice. Conte won the Premier League and was then pushed out. Lampard came in twice and left twice. Tuchel won the Champions League and was sacked anyway. Graham Potter. Frank Lampard again. Mauricio Pochettino. Enzo Maresca.
What changed structurally between all of these? Not very much. The ownership changed. The ownership changed to Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, who then spent close to a billion pounds on players, playing with transfer structures involving multi-year amortisation that had never been done at that scale before. They built a squad with so many players that the dressing room became impossible to manage. And then they blamed the managers for not managing it.
Chelsea are a cautionary tale that nobody is learning from because the lesson requires boards to look at themselves, and boards do not like doing that.
3. The real problem is always something the board can control but refuses to.
Take Tottenham Hotspur. They have had some of the best managers in Europe cycle through White Hart Lane and now the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — Pochettino, Mourinho, Nuno, Conte, Postecoglou. The pattern is consistent. A talented manager comes in, hits a ceiling that is directly connected to how Daniel Levy operates the club commercially, gets frustrated, leaves or is removed. The next manager inherits the same ceiling.
The ceiling is not the manager. The ceiling is the ownership philosophy. Levy has built a world-class stadium. Levy has not built a world-class football operation. As long as that remains true, no manager appointment will produce sustained success.
This is the uncomfortable truth that fan frustration makes hard to say. When fans are losing and losing, they want a scalp. The manager is the most accessible scalp. He gives press conferences. He picks the team. He is the face of the failure. Sacking him feels like justice.
But justice and solutions are not the same thing.
Fan frustration wants a scalp. The manager is the most accessible scalp. But scalps and solutions are not the same thing.
4. We do this in business and in life too.
The reason I find this pattern interesting beyond football is that it maps exactly onto how organisations and individuals make decisions under pressure.
When a team is underperforming in a company, the first instinct is to change the team lead. When a product is not growing, the first instinct is to change the product manager or the head of growth. When a marriage is struggling, the first instinct for some people is to change the person rather than examine the dynamics.
We are wired to change the most visible variable. It feels decisive. It feels like leadership. What it actually is, most of the time, is avoidance of the harder diagnosis.
The harder diagnosis at most struggling clubs is: the recruitment infrastructure is broken. The scouting is poor or poorly funded. The people responsible for identifying and signing players have been making bad decisions for years and have not been held accountable. The wage structure is bloated with legacy contracts that should never have been signed. The dressing room culture has calcified in ways that new players cannot easily break into. The ownership wants trophies but is unwilling to make the investments or structural changes that trophies require.
That is a five-year problem. Minimum. You cannot sack your way out of it.
What you can do is build your way out of it, slowly, with consistency of structure, quality of recruitment, and — yes — a manager who has enough time and trust to implement a philosophy. Which means the very thing clubs keep refusing to give their managers is the thing that would actually help.
We are watching Ruben Amorim at Manchester United right now. He inherited a squad that has been mismanaged for over a decade, with contracts that should not have been handed out, with a training ground culture that three or four previous managers could not fix. The results have been difficult. The pressure is already building.
If United sack Amorim and bring someone else in, the new person inherits the same squad, the same structural problems, the same dressing room, and the same cycle starts again. The fans will feel briefly hopeful. Nothing structural will have changed.
The most expensive thing a football club can do is keep changing the manager to avoid doing the harder work of fixing the structure.
The most expensive thing a football club can do is keep changing the manager to avoid doing the harder work of fixing the structure. Not expensive in transfer fees. Expensive in years. Expensive in the talent that passes through and never reaches its potential because the environment could not support it. Expensive in the institutional knowledge that leaves every time a manager is pushed out and takes his coaching staff with him.
The answer is never the new manager. It is almost always something the board has been avoiding since before the last manager was sacked.