Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher discuss increase in manager sackings
Tuesday 9 May 2017 00:21, UK
Is changing your manager late in the season a gamble worth taking?
Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher debated the issue on Monday Night Football after watching Middlesbrough - who replaced Aitor Karanka with Steve Agnew in March - suffer relegation following a 3-0 defeat at Chelsea.
Boro have picked up fewer points per game since making the change, but Crystal Palace, Swansea, Hull and Leicester have all improved under their new managers
Neville highlighted statistics that show changing a manager after Christmas is now much more successful than it used to be - and says it is a "scary" trend.
He said: "Pre-2015 it was proven not to be that successful. Only 13 times out of 38 managerial changes had there been an improvement.
"However, the scary thing is that in the last 18 months or two years there have been eight improvements out of 10. Does that signal a change because that's a pretty big shift?
"If you look at this season, Crystal Palace, Swansea, Hull and Leicester have seen improvement. For Middlesbrough there has been a drop in a very similar position under Agnew.
"We would never support managerial change and to this day I still think the Leicester change is the most distasteful moment of the season and for a long time, when Claudio Ranieri was sacked.
"Recently, sackings have been improving teams' positions but it hasn't for Middlesbrough."
He added that he'd rather see managerial changes fail because it's not good for coaches, nor for youth development.
"I hope that's not a trend, I hope that's a momentary thing," he said.
"My view would be that if every time a manager changed late on in the season and was sacked I'd love the next manager to fail just to prove it doesn't work.
"But the reality is that it is working. We are getting a bounce effect. Players have great power, are on great contracts and it's impossible for the club to get rid of all the players - so we will see it more and more because of the money in the Premier League.
"The drop of money between the Premier League and Championship is absolutely huge and until that is dealt with you'll always see managers getting sacked and youth will not come through."
Carragher agreed that the statistics are bad for young players, but says being sacked is almost a rite of passage for British managers now.
"I don't like it because I don't think it helps young players," he said.
"There's that much money involved now that owners are saying it's worth the risk. What have we got to lose? There's £60m or £70m at play here.
"For managers now, I don't think it's as big a stigma getting sacked. I think it's part of being a manager; people say you're not a manager until you've been sacked.
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"As soon as you go away from what an owner sees as acceptable you're going to be gone because there's too much money at stake.
"We're getting to that stage of Serie A and La Liga where teams are going to have two or three managers a year."
