Football Observer

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The Guardian/Paul Wilson
We can laugh at Manchester City but finding a new manager is no joke
The sacking of Mark Hughes was bungled, but sounding out successors is the way of the world

The Manchester City joke doing the rounds towards the end of the last century involved Francis Lee, the then chairman, spotting an old woman struggling to cross Claremont Road with two heavy bags of shopping. Lee stopped his car and wound down the window. "Can you manage, love?" he asked. "Bloody hell, don't tell me you're fed up with Alan Ball already," the old lady shouted back. "I'll come if you're desperate but I insist on a three-year contract."

All right, I didn't say it was a great joke. Just an old one that shows how little has actually changed, despite eight managers, four chairmen and untold millions from overseas bank accounts. Garry Cook may be the butt of all the jokes now, not to mention some trenchant criticism that he richly deserves for the way he supervised the ousting of Mark Hughes, but in the dozen or so years that have passed since Lee realised that any joke he happened to make about City was likely to come true, one significant thing actually has changed.

City are no longer a comedy club to the extent where they sack a manager without having a replacement lined up. Cook is having to put up with all sorts of abuse for staging preliminary talks with Roberto Mancini while he was still offering public support to Hughes, but in the real world that is what football clubs do. Everyone knows it, and Cook's biggest crime is not covering his tracks particularly well. Anyone who doesn't believe that should take a second or two to consider the alternatives. Either the club withdraw public support for their present manager, hanging him out to dry in an even more public manner than was Hughes's fate, or they stick with him right up to the point of relegation or dismissal, then start looking round for someone else.

There is no doubt that the latter is the honourable course, but the whole point of club management is to avoid relegation or a run of poor results, and that applies to the people around and above the manager, not just the poor sap in the dugout. Plus, once you are relegated, or once you have sacked another manager for only winning one of the last dozen games, you tend to find replacements of the highest calibre are not beating a path to your door. Given that most managers leave their jobs due to failing in some way – there are exceptions, and Manchester City do not have to look very far to find one – the only way a smooth transition can be organised is to have a replacement ready to step into the breach. The caretaker manager is an old- fashioned idea that no longer really works. Either the team keeps bombing, in which case you still need to find a new man in a hurry, or the team does so well you end up making the caretaker permanent, which is fine until you want to sack him six months later.

Even clubs where things are going well under long-serving managers, such as Arsenal and Manchester United, will not allow the present incumbent to ride off into the sunset before beginning their search for a replacement. A club such as Manchester City, with an ingrained reputation for both under-achievement and comedy plus a not unrelated habit of changing managers every couple of years, have to be hard-nosed and businesslike about the matter. Yet one of the very few chairmen I can think of to state publicly he would have no truck with talking to successors behind his manager's back was Francis Lee. "I want to trust my manager and he needs to trust me," Lee said in the mid-90s. "I am not about to lie to him or go behind his back."

Quite admirable, really. Certainly more principled than the way Cook has just gone about things. Yet, inevitably, Lee did eventually find himself with a managerial vacancy that was difficult to fill. He also stuck with Ball for too long, because he was a mate, and the pair of them did not see relegation coming until it was too late. In point of fact, or at least a much-loved part of City folklore, Ball famously did not see it coming until the last few minutes of the last game, because someone in the crowd with a radio had misinformed him about results elsewhere.

Despite his evident love for the club Lee did not last long as chairman. He eventually sold his shares to Thaksin Shinawatra. First and foremost Lee was a businessman, and he quickly realised that football decisions cannot always be worked out with a calculator or a profit sheet.

Just before City sacked Hughes, the Middlesbrough chairman Steve Gibson revealed he had sounded out Gordon Strachan before removing Gareth Southgate, even though the latter was a mate. Because you have to, was the gist of his argument. Having no manager, or being turned down by one's preferred choices, is worse for morale than keeping faith with the original. Following a rather charming form of protocol, Strachan obliquely replied that he could not consider Boro while they already had a manager, though might be interested in a club of that stature and a challenge of that sort should a vacancy ever arise. That's how things are done in the short-term world of football management and, for all Lee's misgivings, there is nothing really wrong with it.

While there is no excuse for Hughes finding out he was toast from the media rather than his employers, having been sounded out when Sven-Goran Eriksson was still in charge at City he knows as well as anybody how the system works. He will be disappointed at the way things have panned out, but compensation will arrive in several forms. He will not have been all that surprised." Guardian