Premier League managers these days are giving the impression of always being in transit.
“It has changed over the last couple of years,” an official at a Premier League club told me recently. “A lot of them feel like they are just passing through.”
This might explain why lots of managers, not just the departed Brendan Rodgers, describe their clubs as being in a ‘transitional period.’
It would be very easy at this point to blame the players. To say they’re lazy, they don’t care about the club, they only care about picking up their massive wages, picking up their washbags, popping on their Beats headphones, getting in their gas-guzzling wheels and heading back to their cribs. But should we be surprised at their perceived lack of loyalty and willingness to change clubs when the clubs themselves treat them as commodities.
With the demise of Rodgers, a club’s transfer policy has been in the spotlight again. Yes, you can talk about the transfer committee (although with a board member, the chief exec, the head of scouting, a director of performance and the manager himself, the Liverpool method sounds a lot like most top clubs) but it is the ideology that really affects the direction a club goes in. ‘Resale value’ is what they were looking for in a player.
Liverpool are not alone in that philosophy. Manchester United went through a phase earlier this century of signing young player after young player from around the world as they tried to replicate their success with Cristiano Ronaldo. Sign him for £12m, turn him into one of the world’s best players and sell him for £80m.
The problem with this process tends to be the middle bit. It is quite difficult to turn somebody into a world superstar. It takes time, great coaching, the will of the player and some luck. There are a lot of variables and ifs and buts and that can’t make it a viable policy. There will be more failures than successes. Bebe anyone?
And if this is a policy that your club won’t stray from then it stands to reason that the performances on the pitch will suffer because essentially you will have a squad full of players with potential rather than the finished article. It is no coincidence that when Manchester United broke their rules and signed the finished article in Robin Van Persie, they won the title.
Let me bring in David Pleat here. Welcome everybody. You can throw any question about anybody in football and he will know them, have scouted them, worked with them. He is a font of all knowledge if not pronunciation. He told me last night that the club’s chairman, board and bank manager may not sanction a manager’s first choice player for reasons of club capital outlay, salary structure, age of player etc. And therein lies the problem of a manager not getting whom they really want.
We are told Rodgers wanted Ashley Williams but that he didn’t fit the criteria mentioned by Pleat. Instead the club brought in Mamadou Sakho. Newcastle have spent more than £50m this summer and I have no idea how many were Steve McClaren’s first choices, but none of the players they have signed are the finished article. Mitrovic, Thauvin, Wijnaldum have all been bought with one eye on the future.
This meant that after being thrashed 6-1 at Manchester City, McClaren had to be honest when he was asked whether his players were mentally tough enough to bounce back,
“Things like this either toughen players up and make them mentally strong or they don’t,” he said. “They’re going to have to change mentally otherwise we are in for a fight for the rest of the season.’
A squad packed full of young players, in the hope that one of them will become the next Yohan Cabaye and realise a decent profit for the club, might not be best-equipped for a relegation battle.
The Newcastle board will highlight Cabaye as a business success but did it help the club football-wise? Were they stronger without the French midfielder? Were United stronger without Ronaldo? Spurs without Bale? Liverpool without Xabi Alonso or Luis Suarez?
Always looking for resale value is a lottery to start with, and it becomes a tricky process to then manage as you try to mould a team full of individuals with potential. And then it gets even harder to manage in the aftermath when on the off-chance it has all worked you lose your star player and have to start all over again.
So while it is easy to moan at the manager or the modern day player, the real problems might just lie at boardroom level.
