UK Edition
The surprise is that it lasted as long as it did for Paul Scholes at Oldham. Thirty-one days after being appointed as manager and telling reporters he would not have taken the job were he not sure he would have total control over playing matters, he walked out of Boundary Park last week shaking his head at the manner in which his control turned out to be substantially less than total.
Scoring the winner in the last moments of a Manchester derby at the Etihad in 2010 suddenly appeared a lot easier than negotiating the course of modern football management.
That takes to five the number of managers Abdallah Lemsagam, the Oldham owner, has seen off the premises in the past 18 months. Scholes, not financially dependent on the job, was able to jump before he could be pushed. But it felt, even at his inaugural press conference, when he sat in the club’s hospitality suite awkwardly failing to appear at ease alongside the owner, that his stay at the club close to his heart was always going to be short.
Though, as he departs to spend more time in the television studio, the haste of his exit feels less of an aberration, more of a trend. So far this season, 36 League managers have lost their jobs; 20 of those to be shown the door had been in the job for less than a year. Never the most secure of callings, management is fast becoming the football equivalent of lion taming: long-service medals are not something to anticipate.
The first thing Scholes was obliged to negotiate when he took up the managerial position at Oldham was that the owner employs his brother, Mohamed, as director of football.
Having a relative of the boss staring over his shoulder was never going to be the easiest of positions to be in. And when the new manager discovered that, without consulting him, Mohamed had offered 12 players new contracts for next season, long before he had made any decisions about the future make-up of his squad, he realised any hope of fashioning things his way was a chimera.
It is hard to put out the team you want when you are not in charge of deciding who should be in the squad. This was less a poker hand he had been dealt, more a pair of handcuffs.
There is not much about which Scholes would find himself in agreement with his least favourite Manchester United manager, Jose Mourinho, but on this they are of one mind: a director of football reduces a manager’s room for manoeuvre. Where there is a director of football, the manager is never going to stick around for long.
At a club of United’s international heft, where the clamour for such an appointment seems to increase every time the team are beaten, there is an argument it might prove a helpful addition to the overall operation.
Provided, that is, recruitment decisions are taken in full consultation with the man in charge of the playing side.
At Oldham, having the owner’s brother decide who is going to play next season without actually asking advice from the manager, however, merely added another nail in the coffin of the coach’s independence. This was less interference more emasculation.
Even down the divisions, the days of the impresario manager, controlling everything about a club from the centre-forward’s length of contract to the brand of pies on sale at half-time, are on the wane.
Owners with the tightest of budgets are evermore frequently employing someone above the manager to keep a beady fiscal eye on such matters.
In the process, a cycle is developing: owners bring in directors of football to provide a touch of continuity because they know the manager is not going to be around long, which in turn merely accelerates the speed with which managers are dispensed.
What has long happened at clubs such as Chelsea, where the owner’s representative presides over a revolving door managerial recruitment policy, is becoming ever more the norm. Continuity comes from upstairs, not from the dugout.
Scholes went to Boundary Park with the assumption he would have the same power over day-to-day running as his mentor Sir Alex Ferguson did in his day. He discovered that in the modern game he would have about as much control as Theresa May does over the direction of Brexit. The difference is, when he realised quite how powerless he was, he walked.
Powerless Paul Scholes did well to last just 31 days at Oldham Athletic