Does sacking the manager always help a Premier League club?
Penalties for and against Arsenal. The Mike Riley factor
By Tony Attwood
This summer sees one of the great anniversaries of Arsenal football club – the 100th year since Herbert Chapman joined the club, and as a result changed it from a football club that was about to slip into what was then bottom division of the league, into a club that was likely to (and not long after did) win the top division league.
In fact, in the final season of manager Leslie Knighton, Arsenal missed relegation to the lower tier by just one place. Knighton – a manager who never won anything with any of the many teams that he managed – however did not accept this as being his fault.
Knighton was indeed the great excuse maker always blaming everyone but himself – even though he picked the team and handled all the transfers, being given a very generous transfer budget by the owner Sir Henry Norris.
After his sacking by Norris, and his replacement by Herbert Chapman, Leslie Knighton moved on to other clubs where he once again had no success at all, ending up manging non-league sides. And if that had been all he had done, he would now be totally forgotten – yet another manager who managed to win nothing.
But he didn’t leave it at that. For Knighton then wrote an autobiography, which blamed all of Arsenal’s failings during his time, on Sir Henry Norris.
This autobiography then was serialised in a Sunday newspaper, despite the fact that the allegations made therein were accompanied by no proof. And Knighton and his publisher were able to get away with this because of one simple reason: Sir Henry Norris by then had passed away and so could not sue.
However as we know, Sir Henry’s appointment of Chapman was a huge success, and as this is the 100 year anniversary of that event we are publishing a series of articles on Chapman at the Arsenal on the Arsenal History Society website.
This seems particularly appropriate because it was the Arsenal History Society that persuaded Arsenal to start putting statues up around the stadium – including of course the Chapman statue, for which the Society set out the design (of Chapman looking up at the ground as if to say “I did that”.)
You can find the latest in our history of articles on Chapman and an index to the whole series on the Arsenal History Society Blog.
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Does sacking the manager always help a Premier League club?
Penalties for and against Arsenal. The Mike Riley factor