TIt’s a familiar pattern: a promising young manager gets a chance at a Championship club. He leads the team to promotion. He speaks elegantly about pressing and positioning, shape and transitions, passing and control. Then the financial realities of the Premier League hit. The manager is unwilling to adapt his philosophy, and maybe doesn’t know how. his The style that got him to the top.
Maybe they achieve some notable results. Maybe people think the young manager is the real deal. But they play against elite teams and lose. The cumulative effect of playing top-tier opposition week after week takes its toll. Players who were thriving in the Championship become error-prone and in the Premier League those mistakes are punished. Confidence fades, form declines and results go against them. A cycle of decline is born.
The manager has changed his approach, realising that his attempts to dominate the ball from the back are resulting in wasted possession in dangerous areas. He plays more direct. His team isn’t really structured to play that way. The results don’t improve. Relegation follows. The manager will probably be sacked. His time in the Premier League is over. Maybe one day he’ll be given a chance at another Championship club. Sisyphus is gone again.
The role is filled by Scott Parker, whose career reads almost like a typical British managerial career: he is personable and eloquent but speaks mostly in the sleepy modern-managerial ramblings that spill out of his mouth like a mountain stream washing over training cones, flip charts and data columns into a valley below.
“He looks like a manager, he talks like a manager. Even as a player he gave the impression he was in charge and knew what was going on. It should work.”
Parker took over from Claudio Ranieri at Craven Cottage in late February 2019. Fulham were second from bottom of the league and 10 points off the relegation zone. Few managers get the job under favourable circumstances, especially not a first-time role. Fulham won three of their remaining games but lost the rest and were relegated. It was the first relegation on Parker’s record.
Fulham were promoted the following season, but their first Premier League win came in November, marking his second relegation, before the cycle was reversed again and he left the club that summer.
Appointed manager at Bournemouth, he led the team to automatic promotion by two points over Fulham.
They beat Aston Villa on the opening day of the 2022-23 season, but then conceded 16 goals in consecutive league games against Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. Parker said his team was “ill-prepared” for the Premier League. Three days later, he left the club.
In some ways, the tough start to the schedule had worn him down, but Parker was also a victim of experience: he knew how hard it was to fight week after week for every last point against a team with greater resources and a compromising policy.
His mistake was to publicly admit that a manager’s job is largely a con, to instill in players a sense of their own greatness so that they achieve more than they are capable of.
His pragmatic argument was bolstered when Gary O’Neill took over as manager and led Bournemouth to 15th in the table. Not that it was enough for O’Neill to keep the job – he, too, had to find another struggling club and start afresh. But that tends to happen.
It is so difficult to break into the top half of the Premier League that there are so few English managers with that experience, and clubs aspiring to reach the top half tend not to appoint such managers in favour of those who have shown promise in perhaps less demanding leagues overseas.
The obvious solution for an English manager is to go overseas, which Parker did, joining Belgian champions Club Brugge in December 2022.
He was in charge for 67 days, winning just two of 12 games. One of Brugge’s stars, Dutch winger Noah Lang, seemed to like Parker’s methods, and a packed fixture schedule gave him little time to let his ideas percolate. But Parker seemed out of touch with the league, constantly tweaking the team, playing players out of position and disliking the CEO’s well-known desire to be involved in tactics and team selection.
After newsletter promotion
The period in Belgium can be somewhat ignored – it’s relatively common for good managers to struggle to settle in a new country – but those 67 days may have made it less likely that another foreign club would hire him – and Parker returned to the top of the Championship once again, this time with Burnley.
Like Fulham and Bournemouth, they are a mid-tier club who look too good for the Championship but never quite feel comfortable in the Premier League.
Burnley themselves may be a little hurt that, having remained loyal to Vincent Kompany throughout their slide into relegation, he became a target for Bayern Munich and received an offer they could not refuse. That Parker was named head coach rather than manager, as Kompany was, is perhaps significant as it signals both that his role is not as extensive as the Belgian’s and that the club is keen to establish a framework based on principles rather than the identity of an individual manager.
The retention of Kompany’s first-team coach Mike Jackson and the appointment of assistant coach Henrik Jensen, which was planned before Kompany’s departure, are part of a process of establishing a structure centred around the head coach.
Despite five players leaving the squad and the possibility of more leaving, Burnley should still be one of the strongest teams in the league, which is why they are the second favourites for promotion after Leeds.
Parker is used to it – his previous stints in charge of Championship clubs have been ones that had only just been relegated and were still receiving parachute payments – and promotion was always expected.
Just as there is a tendency to have sympathy when a manager beats one of the mezzanine clubs, there has to be a degree of scepticism when a manager beats one of the mezzanine clubs. And that is the curse of the English manager.
His achievements at Fulham and Bournemouth prove that Parker is not a bad manager; it is much harder to tell whether he is a genuinely good manager or just getting on with it.
