It feels unusual to be writing about the same club twice in a row on here, but the situation regarding the new Wolves manager is too interesting to pass by.
Looking down the list of the last few individuals to have taken on the poisoned chalice that is managing Wolverhampton Wanderers, it’s difficult to see much of a pattern. Nuno Espírito Santo, Bruno Lage, Julen Lopetegui, Gary O’Neil and Vitor Pereira. It doesn’t exactly scream, “We’ve got a clear idea of what we’re meant to be doing, and this is how we intend to achieve it”, does it?
Except, of course, there is one very clear theme. Four of those five previous incumbents are Jorge Mendes clients. The super-agent who linked up with this club years ago still apparently holds a lot of away at Molineux, to the point that it’s now to be expected that any list of potential new Wolves managers will come with an Iberian name and a contract already signed with a certain person.
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And now the one of those last five without an Iberian surname has removed himself from contention to take over the position, with a statement which cuts right to the heart of the rudderlessness of the club at the moment. If Wolves have a rudder, it’s being held onto by someone with a vested personal interest in ensuring that they’re one of his clients.
Gary O’Neil was always an absurd choice as the replacement for Vitor Pereira. This isn’t because he’s a hopeless manager or somebody doesn’t understand how to coach a football team. It’s because he was the Wolves manager less than a year ago and was sacked himself when they were in a pretty ghastly position, with two wins from their first 16 matches of the season and having conceded the most goals in the division. That they ended up surviving in the Premier League retroactively vindicates that decision.
Wolves fans were incandescent that O’Neil was even being considered as a potential replacement for Pereira, and while a lot of the reaction was a little hyperbolic, it wasn’t without good cause. Their team was calamitous, this time last season, and while that probably wasn’t entirely to do with the choice of head coach, it was enough of his responsibility for them to not want to do another lap of him.
But then, even after discussions which had reportedly progressed to quite an advanced stage, O’Neil removed himself from the race. This is extraordinary, and for more than one reason. It remains the case that, in terms of global club football, the Premier League is the place to be. Unless you’re one of a tiny cabal of elite managers or head coaches - and it is reasonable to say that, for all the qualities that he may or may not have, O’Neil isn’t in that elevated echelon - youdon’t turn down such a position at a Premier League club. The opportunity might not come around again.
Furthermore, it’s also important to understand justhow rare it is for this to happen. We’ve seen managers rule themselves out of contention for positions only to turn around and make a complete volte face before. Football is an insular world, and the majority of what goes on happens very much behind closed doors. For someone to go this far down the road of negotiating terms and then pull out with a public statement is extremely unusual.
And it doesn’t say very much about those who run the club, for this to happen. For the senior management of the club, this is a complete humiliation. There can barely be a more damning indictment of the way in which the club is being run, for an out-of-work manager to turn down such a position. It doesn’t even take a great deal of reading between the lines to take this impression from it all.
So, what other options do they have? Michael Carrick or Rob Edwards, perhaps? Two Championship managers, one of whom was sacked at the end of last season after failing to make the play-offs? Erik ten Hag? A manager who needs to rebuild his reputation following two ultimately disastrous appointments? How’she going to carry out that work for himself at a club that feels so much like a walking disaster area? He might do okay out of severance packages in the eventuality that he ends up as much of a success as his predecessors, but that doesn’t feel like the best reason for accepting such a position.
But this isn’t about Erik ten Hag or Gary O’Neil, really. This is about Wolverhampton Wanderers and those who are running the club. Solid examples of an almost complete lack of joined-up thinking present themselves all over the place.
Why did they give Vitor Pereira a new contract just six and half weeks before firing him from a cannon into the Sun? This won’t quite be the financial disaster that some believe it will be - there will often be a clause in a manager’s contract saying that they’ll only pay up to a point at which he’s working again, and it can hardly be said that Pereira has found work hard to come by in the past.
Again, you don’t have to read between the linesthat hard. Pereira signed a new three-year contract with Wolves on the 18th September. At that point, they’d played four Premier League matches and had lost all four. They were, of course, bottom of the table. In what world, underwhatcircumstances, did the senior management look at this and think, “This guy is the one we need to tie down for another three years”?
It doesn’t make any logical sense, unless you view it through the lens of what may be best for his agent. But even then, the owners of the club have noobligation to do what’s best for Jorge fucking Mendes, and certainly not if it’s to the detriment of their club. The Premier League season is short, at 38 games, and there’s little room for do-overs. And the security blanket of the newly-promoted teams being irredeemably terrible does not seem to exist, this season.
There will be a new manager. Of course there will. That manager may even manage to pull them up to 16th and 17th place in the Premier League table. And that, in all likelihood, is the end game, to keep their snouts in the top-flight trough for another season. The one thing it isn’t is what the supporters of the club want, and was evinced by their decision to return to Gary O’Neil in the first place. You’d like to think that those who run the club will learn something from all of this, but the evidence of the last few days suggests that they won’t.
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