What Happens When It All Goes Wrong?

Every story has a beginning, middle and end. Some prefer the journey and others prefer the destination, but great stories make both meaningful. Writers can struggle to figure out the ending, while some writers can make the journey tedious but worthwhile once they deliver that shocking yet satisfying emotional climax.

But football has no one storyteller. None of it is carved in stone ahead of time, what lies around the corner is a mystery to each and every participant of its story. Football is not unique in this way, this is true of every facet of our lives.

However, sport, and particularly football, captures that emotional roller-coaster of authentically great storytelling and infuses it with the weighty real life impact that leaves our jaws on the floor.

We all remember the last minute winners, the dramatic comebacks and the cliche that no one could write “something” like “this.”

Ultimately, football is largely a story of the journey. The trip to and from games, the 38 matches that teams play in a league competition, the weeks and months of training and the conversations and arguments of what will happen next.

This means it can often be anticlimactic. Everton finishing consistently mid table isn’t a particularly compelling narrative. Porto being knocked out of the Champions League last 16 doesn’t satisfy any overarching theme, or tell a story of heroes, redemption or failure. A lot of stories simply exist to pass the time.

In a world with this many football teams and football players, there are simply too many spinning plates for it all to come together in a cohesive narrative that a TV show or a film can. But because it’s simply on every week, that makes it ok.

Throughout it all, there are actually quite a lot of overarching stories that have layered narratives. Tactical trends, play styles, winning cycles, all these important parts of the sport work in tandem to create stories that we all cherish.

All of this is to say that there is currently a very striking narrative seeping in at the very top of the game. Well, actually, there are loads, but the one that this piece will focus on is what exactly is the endgame to the trend of big clubs hiring inexperienced yet legendary former players as managers?

Frank Lampard is 42. Mikel Arteta is 38. Andrea Pirlo is 41. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, 47. With the exception of Solskjaer, these former players are all undertaking either their first or second job in football management.

Lampard’s CV before taking over at Chelsea? A solid 6th place finish with Derby County. Arteta was assistant coach to Pep Guardiola at Man City and Pirlo had spent ten days with the title of Under-23s coach at Juventus before getting the big job.

But that’s the beginning of their stories. Managers of top clubs don’t normally get those roles into much later in their careers and lives. Ronald Koeman, 57, now at Barcelona is the perfect example of this.

So, what happens to these young coaches when it all goes awry?

It happens to all coaches, nothing lasts forever. Where is there to go but down? Is the football world ready for a bunch of has-been managers to rock up at mid table sides at the age of 45? Or is early retirement their only option. When your first job is at the very top, then there is no upward trajectory.

Would Lampard or Pirlo accept a job away from their current clubs? Surely the reason these two greats of the game got into management is to manage the sides they played for. So, when they get those jobs out of the gate, what are they really working towards?

For Arteta, there is the potential that he could move on from Arsenal and step into a better side, but that says more about the limitations of current day Arsenal than it does Arteta’s ambitions. But for Solskjaer, the only alternative to Man United is to go back to Norway.

These jobs are a once in a lifetime chance. Circumstances have found themselves in a weird position. Chelsea of 2008, 2013 or 2016 would not have hired Lampard as manager. Juventus of 2012 would not have hired Pirlo.

At Chelsea, the position as top coach became less viable due to their transfer ban, the loss of their best player Eden Hazard and the seemingly disinterested owner. The job was no longer the attractive force it once was, so Lampard was gifted an opportunity he likely wasn’t expecting for another few years.

Meanwhile, Juventus have become bored of winning. Yes, the club known for the saying “​Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that matters.” After nine scudetti in a row, it is no longer good enough for the manager to win the league title.

Either they must compete with the upper elite of European football by winning a Champions League, something the club has only done twice in its entire history, or it must be different, it must be cool. And who epitomises cool in football better than Pirlo?

Most importantly, it is significant that a club like Juventus, or Chelsea or Man United, can feel so secure in its position at the top that it can recklessly take a stab at a rookie manager, rolling the dice that the nostalgia trip will blind fans from how moronic a strategy it is.

Naturally, this comes down to the money in the game. It has distorted the sport as a whole that much that these clubs can feel safe from consequence. In years gone by a poorly thought out plan such as this could set back a club so far that it would take years, or even decades, to course correct. That doesn’t answer the human element of this story though. It doesn’t quite explain what happens next.

Naturally, it is quite exciting for fans of Juventus, Chelsea, Man United and Arsenal that their manager is a former player. And not just any former player, all four of those left their mark on the clubs they played for in significant ways.

Pirlo not only won league titles but helped to transform the club from mid table back to being on top. Lampard is Chelsea’s top scorer and one of its most decorated players of all time. Solskjaer scored the goal that secured the first, and only, treble in English football history, and Arteta captained the side that won Arsenal’s first piece of silverware in the post-Highbury era.

While football has no one story teller, the closest thing it has is the role of the board member and chief executive, the owner making the decision. These are the people who have power and control among the chaos of it all. If a player or a manager isn’t working out, it’s the decision makers at the top that can dictate what happens next.

Over the years, these people at the top have become extremely trigger happy. Sacking managers at a rate never seen before. People have been craving for the bygone era of people being given time in charge of the team. One positive from this sudden change in direction of managerial appointment trends, is that perhaps that legendary status as a former player will mean that they will be given more time.

In the past, a string of bad results has been compounded by fan fury at the poor form and managers have become easy scapegoats to change the mood around a club.

Now fans have this strong emotional bond with their manager through their playing days, which is only made stronger by football’s incredible ability to play off nostalgia. Then backlash against poor results should be much less severe and thus these managers will no longer be such easy scapegoats.

Will, say, Ed Woodward — an already very unpopular figure among United supporters — regret the day he gave up that power over fan emotion? When Jose Mourinho was performing poorly, there was simply no comparable bond there between the fans and the Portuguese. Sacking him was an easy decision because supporters simply didn’t care if Mourinho or van Gaal were the ones to bring success, they just wanted success.

However, the idea of your club not only being successful but doing so with an icon of the team’s glorious past is so compelling that the reasons for failure won’t so easily be pointed at the manager’s run of bad results.

Only a select few ever get to bow out on top. Sir Alex Ferguson achieved this with his 13th league title in his final season as Man United manager in 2013. His success is the rarest of feats, and will not be matched any time soon. Solskjaer, despite his best efforts to emulate the Scot, is no Alex Ferguson.

The day will come, sooner rather than later, when on-pitch results will leave the club well off their target of top 4 and it will be enough for Woodward to pull the trigger, but will it be enough for fans to accept that the manager was to blame?

Woodward hasn’t helped his case in the way that Roman Abramovich has. Man United’s inactivity in the transfer market, particularly in comparison to high-spending Chelsea, has not gone down well among supporters. If United fail to land their targets, Solskjaer won’t be such an easy scapegoat and the mood around the club could see messy days ahead.

Or, perhaps, the Norwegian will prove all the doubters wrong, lead his team to a 21st league title or a fourth European cup, or even both, and his legend will be further etched in stone. Maybe Pirlo is the next great tactical innovator and Juventus’ period of domination is only just getting going.

These are the mysteries and uncertainties that the beautiful game makes us all question. While we may be at the start and the middle of the stories, the ending has us all gripping the edge of our seats that it might just blow up any day now.