In this week’s column, Nick Bruzon has a look at five of the worst managers to have played the game professionally.
It’s been quite the fortnight in football. International break has been front and centre with qualification for EURO 2024 continuing apace. We now know nine of the twenty-four teams who will be present at the finals in Germany. Joining the hosts are Spain, France, Turkey, Belgium, Austria, Portugal as well as, from the domestic perspective, Scotland and England. Qualification finishes in November when the numbers will rise to twenty-one, with the final three teams earning their places in the play-offs that are scheduled for March.
Say what you want about manager Gareth Southgate’s selection policy and we do, a lot, on these pages but one can’t deny his starting XI is effective. Defending champions Italy were brushed aside 3-1 on Tuesday evening as England guaranteed their place in the summer showpiece. Let’s just hope he doesn’t need a Plan B. Moreso given how the untested scratch XI laboured to the narrowest of victories over Australia on Friday.
With Scotland also qualifying and Wales placed second in their group, the tournament promises to have plenty of interest – at least, in the build-up and group stages. After that, who knows? Could the Welsh repeat their marvellous run in 2016 when they reached the semi-finals in France? Might Scotland get out of the group? Most importantly, can anybody silence the England Supporters band?
Anything is possible although I suspect there’s more chance of Gareth finally slaying the albatross of 1966 than there is in sparing us yet another off-key rendition of ‘Seven Nation Army’. I’ve said it before and will no doubt say it again – Nobody. Cares. Nobody asked for them and nobody can honestly say their experience is enhanced by having the game interrupted by yet another flat version of the theme tune to The Great Escape. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Of course, even with the Premier League, Championship and this column on hiatus due to the break for qualification, there was still news. None moreso than at Birmingham City -a club who seem to shoot themselves in the foot with regular aplomb. After years of doing, well, not much at this level, the St. Andrews’ team have gotten off to a flier.
Head coach John Eustace had guided them into the play-off zone with Blues sitting sixth when he was relieved of his duties. Three days later Wayne Rooney, who had left his role in charge of MLS team DC United after they failed to qualify for the play-offs, was installed in his place.
The appointment of the former Wayne Rooney’s Derby County manager was one which even City Chief Executive Gary Cook seemed to describe as a gamble, telling reporters: “With risk comes great reward. We know that as a board and we’re not backing just Wayne, we’re backing ourselves.”
No matter how confident they are in the risk being undertaken, Rooney’s time at The Rams was hardly the stuff of tactical genius. Despite a positive start, in the end on pitch relegation was barely swerved (until administration then took over)
Will he find things different at this level second time around? No matter what unconscious bias we may carry, the only true answer will be that delivered by results. Whatever else happens, we now have the what has already been dubbed ‘El Grassico’ to look forward to.
16th December will see Jamie Vardy and Leicester City taking on Rooney’s Birmingham City. Assuming he survives that long. Oh to be a fly on the wall in the player’s lounge for that one….
In the meantime, it leads us into today’s question of the day. Whilst nobody can doubt Rooney’s prowess when gracing the Premier League, stepping into the managerial hotseat isn’t as easy as simply swapping full kit for tracksuit.
There have, of course, been some former players who have taken to management like a duck to water. The likes of Peter Reid, Mikkel Arteta, Roberto Mancini and Pep Guardiola – to name but a few.
Likewise, those who have sunk without a trace. Whilst the jury will remain out on Wayne Rooney until he gets going, for now we’ll look at some of those who swapped boots for tactics with less than positive results.
Remi Garde - Aston Villa
The former Arsenal defender got off to a (relatively) good start but it soon went South very fast. By the time he left Villa Park in March 2016, 147 days into his tenure, Garde had set the unenviable record of just two wins in his twenty games.
A Premier League win percentage of 10% gave him the worst record of any permanent incumbent to the Villa Park hot seat. His time ended with Jack Grealish having been dropped for ‘partying’ and the club sliding towards top-flight relegation after 28 successive seasons at this level.
Former Villa player Gabby Agbonlahor summed it up in an interview on TalkSport, saying: ”He was a French manager and we had a lot of French speaking players and even they couldn’t stand him…. He was a really bad man manager, very grumpy, zero tactical awareness. You may as well have got Postman Pat to come and be a manager!”
Tony Adams – Portsmouth
The former Arsenal defender (is there something in the water in North London?) has all the respect one could imagine for his time as a player. He did it all for club and country. scooping up silverware by the bucketload whilst becoming the first, and only, player to represent England at major tournaments in three separate decades.
Sadly, once he hung up his boots it became a different story. He joined Portsmouth as Harry Redknapp’s assistant, with the club winning the 2007/08 FA Cup in his first season. Yet when Harry went to Spurs the following season and Adams was appointed full time manager, things began to slide.
The sixteen gamer that preceded his sacking in February 2009 yielded just ten points and also gave us ‘that dance’.
A season on ‘Strictly’ followed
Terry Butcher - Brentford
Success in the top two tiers of English football has only been a relatively recent thing for The Bees. Prior to owner Matthew Benham’s arrival, not going bust was considered a good season with shoestring budgets and the rattle of a collection buckets a regular occurrence.
After Leroy Rosenior proved that great players don’t always make the best managers by guiding Brentford into League Two, Butcher took over and seemed to go out of his way to prove the point. Taking over in summer 2007, by the time he was sacked Brentford were just four points above the drop zone into the conference with a mere five wins from his twenty-three games ‘in charge’. A run of six defeats from the final seven games being the straw that broke this camel’s back.
Once again, the mantra that being a legend for club and country does not make you a shoe in for a manager’s job was proven
Frank De Boer - Crystal Palace
Jose Mourinho’s damming indictment said it all regarding the Dutchman’s very short-lived stint at Crystal Palace in 2017. “Seven matches. Seven defeats. Zero goals” He went on to add, “ If he (Marcus Rashford) was coached by Frank he would learn how to lose. Because he lost every game”.
Whilst Mourinho’s figures are slightly askew, nobody could be in any doubt as to how bad things were. Palace became the first top-flight team since Preston North End in 1924/25 to lose their opening four matches without scoring. A moment of awakening that prompted the board, concerned by his apparent tactical naivety, to swing the axe. Fast.
They parted ways just four Premier League games and an EFL tie into a three-year contract.
Frank Lampard - Chelsea (twice) & Everton
Where to even start? Like Tony Adams, he had done and won it all as a player. The opportunity to take over at his beloved Chelsea in 2019, for whom he had played 429 games, was too much of a lure for the former Frank Lampard’s Derby County manager.
His first season saw marginal success – especially by current standards (fourth in the Premier League and an FA Cup final). In the following campaign, things took a turn for the worse.
The club had fallen to ninth in the league as reports of disagreements with the board and playing staff were rife. A run of just two wins from eight games proved too much and he was replaced by Thomas Tuchel
January 2022 saw him take over at Everton where the club swerved relegation before the following season saw him guide them to nineteenth before being sacked just short of a year into his time in charge. A run of one win from eleven saw Sean Dyche called in to bail them out whilst three months later Lampard ended up…. at Chelsea. Again.
Parachuted in until season end to try and salvage what was already a tumultuous season, even by their standards, a bad situation became even worse.
There’s an almost ghoulish statistical interest in figures that show him as having the worst win record (9%) among every Chelsea manager who had led 3 or more matches. In simple terms, that’s just a victory in his eleven matches in charge.
A bottom-half finish of the table saw them closer to the relegation spots than the Champions League, with Brentford and even Fulham finishing above Chelsea in the West London bragging rights.
