Why Championship managers must learn to manage with what they've got

By Ian Winwood

Published 11:49 27/08/10

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With three games of the season already gone, the time has arrived for deciding which teams have started the campaign well and which have not. With just two points from a possible nine, last season’s playoff semi-finalists Nottingham Forest have quickly been thrown into the camp containing those who ‘could do better.’

You could of course look at this in a positive way and say that Forest have so far lost only one game. But who in football looks at things in a positive way?

On Saturday night’s 5-Live phone-in programme, 606, questions were already being asked as to whether there is trouble at the City Ground. Host Mark Chapman wondered if the club’s sluggish start might have something to do with the fact that players at Forest are recruited by an ‘acquisitions committee’ rather than by ‘the gaffer’, a state of affairs with which manager Billy Davies is said to be unhappy. Co-host and Derby County footballer Robbie Savage piped in by saying that any players brought into a squad must be chosen by a club’s manager and him alone.

In recent years football has changed in all manner of ways, but the notion that the decision on which players to bring into a club should ‘the gaffer’s decision alone holds firm. Looking at the altered landscape not only of the Premier League but also the Championship – and to some extent, Leagues One and Two – I’m not sure why.

Football players are different from one another, but surely not that different. It’s not as if a manager arrives at a club with instructions to form a Beatles tribute band using an opera diva, a saxophonist, a speed-metal guitarist and a bloke who owns a kazoo.

Any manager who starts a new job will do so equipped with a certain number of players in various positions: goalies, defenders, midfielders, attackers. Unless something has gone wrong in truly drastic fashion, these players will be skilled to a professional level.

What’s more, this club will have a budget, and will only be able to afford new players of a similar quality. It’s not as if anyone has the option of swapping a 39 year-old boat-footed clogger for Didier Drogba.

But yet the mantra persists: a new manager must be able to bring in his own players. If he can’t do that, then how can he be expected to succeed?

Well, how about this: he manages the players he has when he arrives. That’s why it’s called managing .

Obviously any gaffer should have a say on which players are brought into a club as and when they are bought. But the idea that he should be able to clear house at the earliest opportunity seems reckless, to say the least. As does the notion that other people at the club should not have a say in which new faces join the squad.

Three games into the Championship season has seen two managers already leaving their posts: Steve Coppell at Bristol City and Kevin Blackwell at Sheffield United.

It’s probably a fair bet that at least six more second-tier gaffers will be shown the road or will resign before next Spring. If each of their replacements is allowed to change the squad then a good deal of footballing churn is set to take place.

No player in the Championship is earning £100,000 per week, but you can bet that a good number are on ten grand, and some will earn a good deal more than that. As with the Premier League, many clubs in the division downstairs are spending money they don’t really have on players they cannot afford. The idea that these players should change on the whim of something as temporary as a manager is something that could be looked at.

You never know, it could be that the culture of the gaffer is seen as one whose days are numbered.

And that football managers, just like the rest of us, will have to learn to manage with what they have rather than what they want.

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