Quote from: Juan Loco on Yesterday at 05:27:41 PM
Ruthless say some, reckless says I.
Whilst people are lining up to praise them for ruthlessly dismissing Comolli for last summer, they’re missing the wood from the trees. The idea that the DoF is perhaps the most long-term role at the football club, and also that it was recklessness on their part initially to hire Comolli in that role through sheer nepotism.
I’ll be repeating myself a fair bit here, so I’ll just quote what I wrote about the situation last weekend:
My concern was given a bit of credence this morning when I had an email off someone who had been told by a pretty sound journo that Comolli’s appointment was basically suggested by Billy Beane, a baseball man, but a close friend of Comolli’s.
So here we have a couple of businessmen who think of themselves as the Thinking Men of sports business. Their first move after getting in the door is to give the most powerful, all-encompassing role at the football club to a friend of a friend on the recommendation of someone they admire in baseball. Oh yeah, we’re really moving forward and innovating.
It’s arguably a stupider call than Hicks & Gillet using Klinsman as a ‘football consultant’. Arguably that’s exactly what FSG needed. They needed someone who could help them out as they went along, safe in the knowledge that if they were undermining anyone it was a short-term manager who was deeply unpopular with the fans. The total opposite of H&G with Rafa.
But no, FSG with their self-appointed images of being both innovators and gamblers jumped straight in, appointing Damien Comolli to the role of Director of Football Strategy (and then ultimately Director of Football).
As I say, this is an organisation that expects us to grant them time and patience with decisions like the protracted firing of Hodgson, the search for an MD and the non-movement on the stadium front. How can they ask for patience, and expect us to trust they’re carrying out a full and proper search through the best candidates, when they give the role with the most power on the footballing side of things to Comolli on a whim.
This isn’t about the job Damien Comolli did. I happen to think he did alright and that long-term his signings will look better than they currently do. But that’s long-term. Whether you think Comolli pissed money up the wall this summer or not, I think you’ve got to say it is rash to give someone such a long-term role and then sack them so quickly for disappointing.
My point isn’t necessarily about Comolli though – I think he did ok, but I also don’t see what made him the stand-out candidate for the job in the first place, other than he was the only one. That’s kind of the crux of this. Whether you think Comolli was good or bad, the question should be why he got the job in the first place.
There’s plenty on here now praising their vision and their strategy for correcting their mistake so quickly, but once again they seem to have made the decision with no consultation from someone with experience in football, which is what got them into the mess in the first place.
Personally I think a Director of Football is essential at a club our size. I think a coach has to earn that level of power through success, which is what Ferguson and Wenger have done. A club shouldn’t be modeled on the whim of an individual whose job expectancy is usually two years (or at Liverpool probably close to 4-5 in the last 20 years).
You need someone to ensure that the vision remains consistent and unaltered. You need a support system to ensure the manager can do his job with people working around him. It’s about giving Kenny a platform that allows him to do his job. You don’t just give him that platform in name only and then hang him out to dry as has happened countless times this season, specifically with the Suarez case but on other issues as well.
You don’t necessarily call it a Director of Football, because that title carries a certain stigma in this country for some reason. It’s too foreign to swallow perhaps. You have someone in position to carry through that long-term strategy though. If you want Kenny to use more of the kids from the academy you have someone who says that to the press, who says that there isn’t immediate pressure if the results go wrong. You don’t have people giving us a target at the start of the season whilst simultaneously querying why we’re not seeing 5 or 6 home grown teenagers a week (ok, slight hyperbole, but you see what I’m getting at).
I could rant on this a while, but I’m arsed. I’m being asked to place faith in a long-term strategy where people are employed through nepotism, and now we’re being asked to hold faith while they correct that ‘mistake’, with another decision on a whim with seemingly no advice behind it from someone of a football background. We’ll see.