The firing of manager David Moyes was a forgone conclusion and its details are still being discussed. One doesn’t have to know a great deal about soccer (or Euro fútbol if you prefer) to weigh in on the difficulty that any manager or coach will have in replacing a legend. What may surprise some is the varying factors in how well or poorly a new field boss will do and that they might not be limited to ability, personnel and cachet.
There are certain questions that need to be asked when giving credit for a smooth transition or allocating blame for what’s viewed as a failure. Let’s take a look.
What was the nature of the success?
Depending on how the club was built, the new person in charge might be able to slide in unobtrusively, take the controls quietly and lead the team on its merry way without having to do much of anything. A system-based organization that doesn’t rely on any one person is far easier to handle than if significant changes must be made in both personnel and strategy.
According to analysts, Moyes changed so many things at Manchester United and didn’t have the personality to sell them that the veterans tuned him out, fans grew angry and frustrated, the media undermined him and ownership was unwilling to give him the money he’d need to bring in the players he wanted when his system was so drastically different from what made the team great in the first place.
An example of a smooth transition based on the system is the San Francisco 49ers and their two Super Bowl victories in five years after Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh retired. George Seifert was a respected defensive coordinator on Walsh’s staff for two of the three Super Bowls they won during that time. When he took over as head coach in 1989, there was little for him to alter or do.
Paul Holmgren, a future potential Hall of Fame coach himself, was the offensive coordinator, Joe Montana was still playing brilliantly, the team policed itself and they spent money to maintain. His mandate was to not screw it up and he didn’t. While that’s not as sexy as “he rebuilt the team in his own image and still won,” it’s a notable accomplishment.
As the 49ers’ dynasty began to decay, they were still reaching conference title games but losing to the younger, stronger and faster Dallas Cowboys. Panicking, the club reached back into the past and brought Walsh around not in any specific capacity, but as an “adviser.” He hovered around and looked out of place. The 49ers won another title after a spending spree in 1994, but Seifert never received much credit.
When he went off on his own to take over as coach of the Carolina Panthers, he went 8-8, 7-9 and 1-15 before being fired. He was 61 at the time and could conceivably have gotten another job, but he never did. Part of the problem with being the one who replaces the legend is that there’s never any credit, but plenty of blame.
Is the former boss still around?
Obviously, a clean break will make it easier for the replacement, but that’s not always possible. In the case of Manchester United, the looming shadow of Ferguson turned into a constant problem. Moyes was Ferguson’s handpicked successor, and Ferguson is going to have a hand in picking the next coach as well.
The best-case scenario for the new manager in this type of circumstance is if his predecessor leaves entirely either to go to a new organization or head into retirement with no influence on the club whatsoever. With a former legend still involved, it’s not a matter of two heads being better than one. What has to be understood with many of these coaching stars is that their egos are part of the process and what made them so good. While they don’t want to see their former teams fall to the depths of despair, it’s an ego boost to have the structure come undone as soon as they left.
It’s a reach to imply intentional sabotage, but a small smirk of self-satisfaction that the ever-present ‘I’ was responsible for team’s greatness is natural.
Vince Lombardi retired as coach of the Green Bay Packers and handed the reins to Phil Bengston. Bengston didn’t have Lombardi’s force of personality, eye for talent or his penchant for motivating his players through psychological trickery. Had Lombardi retired after 1965, perhaps Bengston would have been the coach for the Packers’ first two Super Bowl wins when the team was still on cruise control.
When Lombardi did finally step down, he’d wrung just about everything he could out of the Packers’ core group of Bart Starr, Max McGee, Forrest Gregg, Jerry Kramer and Paul Hornung. Replacements weren’t on the horizon for the old cast and unlike today’s game, Bengston was picking the players even with Lombardi as the GM.
For someone like Lombardi, constantly hearing how he was the basis of the team’s success stroked his self-image and assuaged his insecurity. While he was loyal to the Packers and wanted to see them win, it couldn’t have been completely painful to watch them collapse when he departed for the Redskins.
Was the team trending downward?
Cowboys fans were sad at the way Tom Landry was treated when Jerry Jones fired him in favor of Jimmy Johnson immediately after taking control of the franchise. But because they were sad doesn’t mean they thought it was a bad thing.
A majority of the same fans who were aghast at the way in which Landry was fired were calling for Landry’s scalp for the previous five years as the innovative and forward-thinking Cowboys were left in the dust by Walsh and Joe Gibbs. Landry later said that he had intended to draft Troy Aikman with the number one pick implying that he felt he could rebuild the Cowboys.
Maybe he could have. Even so, it’s hard to imagine the team turning around under Landry as quickly as they did under Jones/Johnson.
A firing of a legend is never an easy thing, but it’s sometimes necessary to cut the ties and start again.
When Joe Torre left the Yankees/was fired by the Yankees (depending on whose version of events you believe), it was a mutual positive. The team had gone as far as they could under Torre and it was time for someone younger and more energetic with less of an old-school sensibility. For all the fatherly appellations attributed to Torre, he was more canny and clever with subtly twisting public perception into his favor by playing the victim. He had a tendency to be greedy and there was the aforementioned ego that is a common denominator. His contentious departure gave the Yankees the freedom to hire Joe Girardi who has turned out to be a fine choice.
Girardi managed to survive a similar situation to Moyes by missing the playoffs. The Yankees were lucky that George Steinbrenner had receded from the public because the 2008 missed playoff season would have cost Girardi his job had it happened five years earlier.
As for Torre, he went to Los Angeles for a lot of money, made the playoffs a couple of times and cemented his image as a pure winner who could do well even without the Yankees money. He also escaped a situation that was clearly draining his health for the more relaxed atmosphere of LA.
How was the new coach chosen and what’s the strategy?
As said earlier, having the former boss being influential in the new hire is almost always a negative. A team has to determine what they are, where they’re going and how they’d like to get there.
When Earl Weaver retired from the Orioles after the 1982 season, the Orioles were still one of the best teams in baseball. Rather than hire a manager who would barge in and flip the garbage cans, they hired veteran coach and manager Joe Altobelli.
Altobelli had been a moderately successful manager with the Giants, but he wasn’t an obvious manager-in-waiting. He was experienced in the American League East from his time as a Yankees coach and wouldn’t make demands and changes to the “Orioles way” that had been cultivated under Weaver. He smoothly walked in and perhaps it was a relief for many of the Orioles players that Weaver’s caustic nature and ruthless dispatching of players who could no longer help him was gone. The Orioles had only won one World Series under Weaver, but they won the World Series in Altobelli’s first year.
Inevitably, the players began to age and there were few replacements on the horizon. As a manager who was put in place to oversee what was already there, Altobelli was fine. When something actually needed to be done to fix holes, it didn’t work and he was fired. Weaver came back for a year and a half, but didn’t fare much better than Altobelli did. He didn’t have the players anymore.
When Phil Jackson left the Chicago Bulls, it was a different dynamic because the coach’s status was tied to the star player. Had Michael Jordan decided to keep playing for the Bulls after their second three-peat, Jackson, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman would have stayed.
Once Jordan was gone, all left in quick succession and a rebuild was started under new coach Tim Floyd. Bulls GM Jerry Krause had his eye on Floyd for years and with an awful team replacing a cacophony of Hall of Famers, Floyd had no chance.
What are fans’ and media expectations?
Manchester United is one of those sports franchises that can never properly rebuild. They can’t tell their fans, “Just wait, we’ll be good again in three to five years.” Like the Yankees, that won’t fly; people won’t be patient; no one will buy tickets and memorabilia.
It’s lost on many Yankees fans that the only reason the Yankees were able to become a dynasty again was because they executed a proper rebuild in the early 1990s while George Steinbrenner was suspended. They happened to have an inordinate amount of luck with Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and many of the players they acquired during that time.
Even the most irrational fans of the aforementioned Bulls could not have thought that the team was going to survive and thrive post-Jordan, Pippen, Rodman and Jackson. It was a grudging acceptance that it was time to start a new era — not by choice but by necessity — and be happy with the six championships.
The Cowboys were so destitute when Jones and Johnson took over, that the fans were willing to take the beating if it meant that they’d turn things around eventually.
With Manchester United, they’re not going to be able to sell that in part because there wasn’t an utter collapse, just a subpar year from their lofty expectations. Part of winning so many titles and being world-renowned is that any decline will be magnified.
The new coach will face much of the same scrutiny that Moyes did. How he navigates it will determine his fate. Unlike Moyes, however, he won’t be replacing the star. That makes things exponentially easier for him to do his job and not have that constant reference to what Fergie would do interfering with every call he makes.
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