Tuesday, February 15, 2022

A Transfer Window for Managers

Aberdeen have been having a shockingly poor season, with the result that they have sacked their manager, Stephen Glass. As a consequence of this, there is the usual round of speculation about who will take over, with most of the names in the frame being managers of smaller teams. So it's likely that Aberdeen's sacking their manager will lead to them taking the manager from some other team, who will then poach a manager from a yet smaller team... and so it goes down the table.

The effect is that because Aberdeen's players can't get their act together, half a dozen teams have their seasons disrupted.

Similarly, a few years ago the then Celtic manager, Brendan Rodgers, accepted the offer of a job from Leicester City while the season was still in the balance. As it happened, it was Celtic's good fortune that Neil Lennon was currently out of work, or that could potentially have had a title-altering effect on that season.

And, of course, this season Steven Gerrard has moved from Rangers to Aston Villa. And, again, it is Rangers' very good fortune that Giovanni van Bronckhorst was out of work... though it remains to be seen what the effect on the title may be, if any.

What I'm coming to is this: a club's manager is massively important. Indeed, in all but the most extreme cases, the manager is a more important figure at the club than any single player (with perhaps half a dozen exceptions - Ronaldo, Messi, etc). Yet while we have a transfer window for players, limiting the ability of the big boys to disrupt an opponent's season by poaching talent, we have no such equivalent for managers.

I think it's needed - both to prevent the sort of cascading disruption we're about to see, but also to give managers a bit more job security.

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