Ian Porterfield turned up at Harlington on a Monday morning to take his players through a training session, as he had done every Monday for the previous two years.
Unbeknown to the Chelsea manager, however, as he took the likes of Dennis Wise, Andy Townsend and Eddie Newton through their usual routines, he had already been sacked.
This was 15 February 1993, a time before the instant updates of social media and 24-hour Sky Sports News, so he was not to know that club chairman Ken Bates had made the decision after a defeat to Aston Villa at the weekend and was already preparing to speak to the press.
Porterfield wasn’t necessarily expecting it, but it had been coming. A fast start to the inaugural Premier League season put Chelsea in contention for the title. But 12 games without a win over the Christmas period saw them plummet towards relegation, and Bates had seen enough.
So Porterfield became the first ever manager to be sacked in the Premier League. Not something you would want to be remembered for but, fortunately for Porterfield, sacking a manager during the season would become the norm, not an irregularity.
That season, Porterfield was joined by Brian Clough, whose glittering 18-year reign at Nottingham Forest was brought to an end by relegation. Those two casualties remain the fewest managerial departures in the Premier League era, the only other time occurring in the 95-96 season.
That the Premier League saw managers sacked mainly in single digits during the 90s makes it feel like a more innocent time compared to the harsh, ruthless roundabout of modern football.
Since then, sackings have steadily increased through the decades. And in the past 10 years, 92 managers were axed, a rate of 9.2 per season and around 46 per cent – a staggeringly high turnover for any profession.
Last season, however, there were only four: Jose Mourinho, Chris Wilder, Frank Lampard and Slaven Bilic. And the season before that there were 10, yet nine came before the halfway point of the campaign, and only one – Nigel Pearson as Watford attempted to avoid relegation – after the Covid-19 shutdown.
The worst global crisis since the Second World War wiped out hundreds of millions of pounds in football revenues and suddenly made chief executives and owners realise that spending almost all of their turnover on player wages and transfer fees might, on reflection, not have been the smartest way to run their businesses.
Has the pandemic pinch made them think twice about getting rid of the managers? Are we entering a new era of managerial stability? Will somebody really have the chance to prove they can create a dynasty not seen since the days of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger?
We have lived through a long period of Premier League insanity, where managerial sackings are met with glee and celebration and where the pitchforks and torches of social media following a few defeats can create enough disharmony to drive a manager out of town.
It has become a modern-day bloodsport and, in some ways, you can see why there is little sympathy for those involved.
It is a victimless game – the ex-manager invariably owed millions in compensation, sums that would afford them a wealthy life of retirement in their 40s and 50s, and often enough they find another job within 12 months.
Already this season: Mikel Arteta has been under fire for Arsenal’s worst start to a Premier League campaign, we are told cracks are forming in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United plan, while Tottenham’s new manager, Nuno Espirito Santo, is the latest said to be in crisis.
Then you have Steve Bruce, who appears perennially on the brink of the axe, like some grizzled old death-row inmate awaiting his fate for years.
But owners appear to be ignoring the noise and before long the story changes. Arteta was seemingly redeemed instantly with a thumping north London derby win against Tottenham last Sunday.
That defeat for Spurs, following a few poor results, saw the tide turn on Nuno, who was Manager of the Month in August. A quick glance at the table shows that Manchester United are fourth, joint on points with Manchester City and Chelsea and one behind leaders Liverpool. They will go top, albeit probably temporarily, if they beat Everton in the lunchtime kick-off on Saturday. Already you can see cracks forming in the doom-and-gloom narratives.
The issue? Sacking managers is an expensive business. Jose Mourinho was reportedly owed £15m after being sacked by Spurs at the end of last season. And even smaller names cost plenty: Everton’s accounts show they paid Marco Silva £6.6m in severance in 2019.
Perhaps this managerial reprieve could be a flash-in-the-plan, a blip in the history of English football. Perhaps as the money starts rolling in again, the heads will start rolling.
“Ian Porterfield is a good friend of mine and I’m sorry to see him go in such circumstances,” said David Webb, the former FA Cup-winning Chelsea defender, when he took charge as caretaker manager. “But the door to success is the same distance away as the door to failure.”
That may have been true in 1993, but while the door to success feels impossibly far away to all but a handful of clubs, the door to failure loomed much closer behind almost every manager at all times until the pandemic struck.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3D55nFc
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