Last Sunday night I sat and watched the excruciating demolition of Manchester United by Liverpool in England’s Premiership League. It was a brutal sporting moment, not only for the extent of the defeat (0-5) but the way it exposed an uncertain United team and called into question the future of their manager Ole Gunnar Solskaer.
Beaten by Liverpool
For the uninitiated, he is a United hero – having scored the winning goal in the 1999 Champions League final, though such exploits offer little sanctuary today, during the week Barcelona sacked their manager Ronald Koeman, who scored the winning goal for them in the 1992 Champions League final.
Solskaer’s apparently uncertain situation is part of a pandemic of managerial sackings (mostly in the UK). Steve Bruce another former United player lost his job as manager of Newcastle as its new Saudi Arabian owners took control.
Should Solskaer leave United, he will be the fourth manager since Sir Alex Ferguson retired. Together with Sir Matt Busby, Ferguson is distinguished by not only great success, but longevity of tenure. He and Busby are two of the longest serving topflight managers and it is worth mentioning both are Scottish – another distinguishing characteristic of the best managers in the history of British football.
Scots to the fore
Today, there are few Scots at the helm of British football clubs (I count five in the 90 main League clubs) and few have tenure. Indeed, in the post war period the average tenure of a British football manager was seven years, at the start of the 1990’s it was three years and today it is not far off 450 days. Those readers who are not football fans will be wondering at the relevance of this trend.
In my view, football is a sign of the way we live now, and a very public testimony to the forces acting on public and corporate life (there is even a Harvard Business School case study on Sir Alex Ferguson’s management technique, and he co-authored a book with venture capitalist Michael Moritz). To exaggerate a little, in football, the robustness of an institution is on display every week, and not only quarterly earnings in the case of companies, or elections in the case of politics.
In this respect there are parallels in the corporate world, a striking one is that the tenure of CEO’s is shortening to about five years for the large US companies, with a small group of ‘survivor’ CEO’s managing to stay on for longer, according to work at Harvard and some…
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