The Premier League can be an unforgiving, helpless place for a manager. Bournemouth have lost three of their four league matches this season against last year’s top two and the only team in England with a perfect league record; they won the other. Scott Parker has been sacked. It is the earliest sacking of a promoted manager in the history of English top-flight football.
There will be sympathy for Parker – much of it is reasonable. The 9-0 loss to Liverpool on Saturday was wretched and contained no reason for anything other than abject despair. But then every promoted club faces this reality: the holding of breath when you face an elite club and become acutely aware that the opposition could score every time they venture forward. The financial inequality in the Premier League provides a thick natural ceiling and no floor. Anyone can still beat anyone; that’s not the point. This is a game of averages and they are weighted against you.
Parker’s record suggests that he has been badly short-changed. He was appointed as the manager of a club that had finished sixth in the Championship and took them to automatic promotion in his first season. He developed Dominic Solanke into a prolific striker, converted Philip Billing into a creative, goalscoring central midfielder and overcame the loss of Arnaut Danjuma by bringing through academy graduate Jaidon Anthony.
He used a central defensive pairing of Lloyd Kelly and 36-year-old Gary Cahill and made them the meanest defence in the division. He has, to be blunt, paid for promotion and yet he would probably have been sacked if Bournemouth had not gone up anyway. That leaves so little wiggle room that you struggle to take in a breath.
But that is only part of the story here. Parker has not been sacked for Bournemouth’s results during this or last season, nor even the style of play (which was, at times, criticised during his tenures at Bournemouth and Fulham). Bournemouth’s statement on Parker’s departure makes no reference to the team’s performance on the pitch. Instead, Parker is the victim of his own honesty and misguided attempts to engineer transfer activity.
After Saturday’s thrashing at Anfield, Parker was asked for his thoughts. Managers in his situation typically pull for cliches: “It is my job to pick the players off the floor”; “everything that could go wrong, did”; “this league is unforgiving but it demonstrates the standards we need to reach”; “this is the time to stick together, work harder and longer and improve”.
Parker deliberately chose not to do that. Not only did he ignore the easy-to-reach epithets, he chose to use that interview to attack the club’s transfer policy. Parker insisted that the club could not be competitive with the current squad. Rather than express his shock at such a heavy defeat, he did the opposite. Parker used an interview with national media to suggest that these types of results could well be repeated. It was a bold strategy.
We have heard that missive over Bournemouth’s lack of competitiveness before. At the end of July, six days before the new season started, Parker told the local newspaper: “It’s clear that we are lacking in a lot of areas at this present moment in time. That’s just very clear. We need to work out whether we want to give ourselves a chance of being competitive this year. At the moment, that is not the case.”
If you were a player in Parker’s squad, how would that make you feel? Just before the season began, you were being told that your manager thought that you weren’t good enough for what would follow. With five days remaining in the transfer window, and with your confidence broken by the heaviest loss of your careers, the same message was repeated. When you needed protection and guidance, your manager chose deflection and self-preservation.
You can understand Parker’s frustration, of course. Nottingham Forest finished below Bournemouth last season and have spent freely to try and engineer a survival bid. Fulham have spent twice as much as Bournemouth this summer. Parker has been given five new signings, but the squad does look weak. But if those were Parker’s reservations, they should have been saved for private conversations with his seniors. Telling your players that they are unfit for purpose is no sensible man-management methodology.
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That interview was the primary cause of Parker’s sacking. The club’s statement refers not to the record defeat but of “showing belief in and respect for one another” and the desire to run the club sustainably. If Parker was limited by Bournemouth’s past transfer mistakes, so too was Jason Tindall before him. Tindall sold players for fees totalling £85m after relegation and did not spend a penny on transfer fees. Promotion for Bournemouth was financial salvation; they have made it clear that they are not prepared to take the same risks again.
And so Parker chose to play a game of brinkmanship to force the issue. He presumably hoped to generate transfer window frustration amongst supporters that generated support for his cause. That interview was not a call-to-arms, as is typical. It was a back-me-or-sack-me message to those who employed him. And they have swiftly taken one of those options.
Is that harsh? Maybe. Do results alone make a sacking reasonable? Absolutely not. Will Bournemouth’s owners pay the price for their relative parsimony with relegation? Quite probably – although the same could well have happened had they spent an extra £50m.
But whether Parker likes it or not, whether the sympathy flows in his direction or otherwise, those are the club’s decisions to make. Managers are not omnipotent. You are the head coach of the team but you are also an employee of a club and its most public face. Tell the club that they don’t know what they’re doing and you better hope that you have enough goodwill in the bank.
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