Avoiding the Drop

Before we get into the rest of the day’s stuff, we’ve got a couple of updates for you on the management situations at a few vacant clubs. One of those updates involves Preston North End, who according to The Guardian apparently just appointed Darren Ferguson to the position that was strangely vacant. Former Preston manager Alan Irvine had saved the Lilywhites from relegation a two years ago and led them into the playoffs last year; Preston’s currently in sixth place, too, which is pretty good.

Ferguson formerly managed at Peterborough; on November 9th he parted company with the club “by mutual consent” after leading them to back to back promotions. So to paint this with a broad brush, a manager who was “sacked” by his club for no reason has replaced a manager who was sacked by his club for no reason. This should end well, no?

The other management change we have to discuss hasn’t happened yet, but appears to be imminent apparently happened while I was writing this: the switch of Owen Coyle from Burnley to Bolton. This one we need to talk about a bit more.

Okay, let’s first give some background. As we discussed last week, this time last season Bolton had five more points than they have presently. That being said, they had also played two more games; should Bolton win both games in hand they’d have surpassed last season’s total at this time last year. It’s fair to say, then, that they’re within striking distance of being better at the break than they were last season (by one point and one rank on the table). It’s a slim margin, but it’s still an improvement.

It also isn’t far off of where Bolton’s wage bill ranks. As we discussed two weeks ago, the wage market is insanely efficient. That essentially means that if you’re ranked twelfth in wage spending, you can probably expect to end up in about twelfth place at the end of the season. If you do better than that, you’re overachieving; if you do worse, you’re underachieving. I’m sure there are standard deviations and whatnot, and I’m not clever enough to figure that all out right now, but the general principle holds true.

So guess what? Bolton, who are ranked twelfth in wage spending, are within a stone’s throw of being in tenth place on the table. The obvious thing to do in that situation, then, is to fire Gary Megson for slightly exceeding reasonable expectations.

Now, I understand that there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that. Megson, for instance, had a tendency to take off strikers in the dying minutes of games for midfielders, which more than once cost him when he needed more firepower on the field. He also irked fans a couple years back when he fielded a reserve squad in the octofinal of the UEFA Cup back in 2008. Mostly, however, the real problem seems to be that Bolton fans just plain old didn’t like Gary Megson; it had very little (or, at least, should have had very little) to do with Megson’s actual performances.

Enter Owen Coyle. Coyle’s Burnley squad is a little bit on the bubble. They’re second from the bottom in terms of wages, for example. They can barely score on the road. Even their promotion was a bit of a shock. And at the center of all of that is Owen Coyle, who’s loved and adored by his fans; should they be relegated, it’s doubtful that they’d be surprised; stay up, and you’ll be the biggest thing to happen to that club since they got to the European Champion’s Cup quarterfinal in 1961.

So there’re two issues here. One: why would Coyle want to leave Burnley in the first place? That one’s easy to answer; Burnley, for all it’s character and ambiance, is still a small club. There probably isn’t an infrastructure in place to withstand a long spell in the Premier League; ultimately, there’s not enough stadium revenue and not enough wage money for the club to stay competitive. Coyle’s stock is high right now, especially since Burnley hasn’t fallen apart on arrival; it’s as good a time to leave as any.

The second question is a little bit more nebulous: Why would you want to leave Burnley for Bolton? That’s a lot harder to answer, particularly when you consider the fact that Coyle was the front runner for the vacant Celtic job over the summer. All things being equal, being the manager at Celtic is probably a better job than the one at Bolton; you’d have practically guaranteed European competition, you’re practically guaranteed to finish at least second, and you’d get to play in front of 60,000 rabid fans a week. Sure, there’d be pressure, but that’s part of the ladder of success…and anyways, you could assuage some of that pressure by kicking the crap out of everyone in that league.

At Bolton, however, it isn’t like that. For one, the fans seem to be a bit cranky. Megson hinted as much in an interview with The Guardian:

“The football club is in a lot better state now than it was when I arrived. [The fans] seem to think it was tantamount to taking over at Real Madrid and then it not going too well. That place was in a huge mess and most people didn’t realise it.”

Also, they didn’t like his style of play, which involved (mostly) being a really hard team to break down. For goals Bolton relies on set piecs; they’re the leading scorers from set piece goals in the entire Premier League, in fact. Megson doesn’t have a lot of  “flair” on his team, but he’s got players that play well in the system they’re given.

So Coyle’s plan, which is to come in and add some of that flair, could be doomed from the start. First off, the flair players just aren’t there at Bolton; Megson dumped them for cash and reinvested in role players. Secondly, there’s no money to spend on those flair players, which is why Megson dumped them in the first place. So you’re looking at a situation where you’re going to try and take a team that’s played in a very rigid way and then infuse the creativity that Megson’s drummed out of them into their play. Good luck with that.

All told, I have a feeling that at the end of the day both Bolton and Burnley will be bemoaning their fortune: both teams will have lost the guy that’s defined their play style. Good luck to both of you; you’re gonna need it.