UK Edition
Appointing a football manager is far from an exact science. If it were, then there would not have been 43 managerial changes among the 92 Football League clubs this season alone.
Even choices that might have seemed logical at the time can appear foolish in a matter of weeks, as Ed Woodward is discovering with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at Manchester United.
Yet there is one universal truth in the process: do not appoint a manager your supporters already hate. There is a difference between making a seemingly underwhelming appointment, such as Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, and selecting a manager your fans viscerally loathe. All managers need a bank of goodwill to draw upon when results inevitably dip. When they enter the club with their account overdrawn, it is only going to end one way.
Tottenham’s hiring of former Arsenal manager George Graham, who joked about having the Gunners’ emblem inscribed on the floor of his swimming pool, caused fist fights between Spurs supporters. Despite delivering the League Cup in his first season, he left under a cloud in 2001.
Aston Villa supporters, meanwhile, were in full-scale revolt for the duration of the wretched 2011-12 season that Alex McLeish, twice relegated with Birmingham City, was in charge.
Harry Redknapp lasted less than a year in charge of Southampton, which included relegation from the Premier League, and later admitted that his heart was not in it before he returned to his “spiritual home” at Portsmouth.
It never ceases to amaze me how owners – who you have to assume possess a modicum of intelligence to have accumulated their respective fortunes – can fail to heed this most basic lesson. Paul Scally, the chairman of my club Gillingham, looks like being the next man to enter such a Faustian pact.
Last Friday, Steve Lovell, a popular former player, was pushed out of the club. Lovell had guided Gillingham to safety in League One and taken them to the fourth round of the FA Cup, which I would say constitutes a decent season. Scally, though, has eyes on the Championship. Sitting in the stands at the Priestfield recently has been Lovell’s apparent successor, Steve Evans, the managerial Voldemort of lower-league football.
He has been successful in certain environments, usually with the caveat of large budgets, but his track record of promotions pales in significance to his list of misdemeanours.
In 2006, Evans received a suspended jail sentence for tax fraud after disguising wages and bonuses as expenses when manager of Boston United. Evans was also banned by the Football Association for 20 months. That was far from his only brush with authority. During his reign at Crawley Town, he was sent to the stands six times in a single season. In 2012, he was accused of exposing himself to a female member of staff from Bradford City for which he was fined £3,000 and handed a six-game stadium ban. It seemed fitting that he became the first manager to be suspended under a new FA rule on misconduct in the technical area.
You would struggle to find a set of fans that he has not offended at some point. Discovering that this is the man who will manage your club is like treading barefoot across a field of Lego. Threats of boycotting season tickets have already been made.
Will all these reservations disappear if he leads Gillingham to promotion?
Maybe for some but I feel a large part of my attachment to the club will fade if his appointment is confirmed. As the examples of Graham, McLeish and Redknapp prove doomed marriages only result in one outcome.
Rule one of football club ownership: Do not appoint Lord Voldemort