Yes-Dave Washington
Football management is a risky business. However successful you have been you seem to only be half a dozen games away from the sack, such is the cutthroat nature of the modern game. Gone are the days when managers would spend decades at a club, instead you are lucky if you remain in one position for more than two or three years.
This season 34 managers have been dismissed in the English leagues already, and the season is still not at its close. Clubs such as Nottingham Forest and Blackburn are on their third or fourth manager of the season, and there really is no such thing as being safe in the management profession.
By bringing in Paul Ince’s suggestion of a manager transfer window, clubs would be forced to hand managers who face a tough challenge more time and greater opportunities to turn around their fortunes. Young managers would have a better chance to establish themselves at a club and develop their skills, whilst overall there would be greater stability in the profession.
Decisions on managers’ futures are often made by wealthy chairmen who have little or no knowledge of the sport. Blackburn is the perfect example of this, a club thrown into disarray by the incompetence of their chairman. Clubs are just toys for many of these millionaires, which they throw money at as they choose and in turn demand instant success.
There are undoubtedly some incredibly talented young managers currently developing at all echelons of English football, but the opportunities for them to blossom is being hampered by the current situation. A managerial transfer window would help to quell these difficulties, and would encourage retired professionals with incredible football brains to take the plunge into the realms of the managerial world.
No-James Scott
While the football managerial merry go round has been getting pretty ridiculous lately, particularly in the championship where the average managerial tenure is 14 months, bringing in a transfer window for managers won’t help to change this.
All it would do is codify the managerial sacking period into one or two periods a year. It won’t stem the tide of kneejerk managerial sackings it will only heighten the intensity of changes when the transfer window opens. Can you imagine the intense speculation and resulting pressure on managers leading into this period as the media speculate on who’s getting the chop and moving where in the new window?
Indeed it may actually encourage greater instability as clubs will have a lot more time to plan their managerial changes in advance and it would be naive to think they wouldn’t do this in collusion with other clubs. Thus the whole market would become pretty much pre-ordained with each club aware of the status and plans of each club and manager; this would actually make it easier for clubs to change their manager as they will effectively have control over the market.
Also let’s not delude ourselves that there are times when it is right for underperforming managers to be sacked as quickly as possible. Can you imagine where QPR would be if they hadn’t sacked Mark Hughes in November after a dismal run of 4 points in 12 matches? Prolonging the agony of loveless football marriages is bad for clubs and for managers. Effectively it would create periods of potentially upto 6 months where the manager is an effective lame duck, whom everyone knows is getting the sack during the next window, if anything this would undermine the professions dwindling authority even more.
[poll id=”29″]