KEN EARLY: Lambert may regret Villa switch
Rodgers, who had recently signed a contract extension with Swansea, said: “I’m trying to build my career, not destroy it.”
Three months later Rodgers left the Liberty Stadium for Anfield, having calculated he could spend the next 10 years building up his career at Swansea and still never be offered anything bigger than the Liverpool job. Some clubs are bigger than others and some opportunities are too big to turn down.
The last couple of pages of Alex Ferguson’s autobiography is all about the quality he claims has been the guiding light of his life: loyalty. Early in Ferguson’s career, he was confronted with the dilemma of whether to leave his first club, East Stirlingshire, for St Mirren, who are below them in the league. Ferguson is proud of what he has achieved at East Stirlingshire and wavers on the side of loyalty, until Jock Stein talks some sense into him. Don’t mind the league table: East Stirlingshire will never be a St Mirren, Stein tells Fergie. You’ve got to move on up when the chance comes. The most important loyalty is to yourself.
Paul Lambert has shown plenty of that type of loyalty throughout a managerial career that has taken him to five clubs across five differentdivisions. Now he is finding out that being truly loyal to yourself sometimes means turning down what appear to be short cuts to the top. At the end of last season, Lambert had kept Norwich in the Premier League after two successive promotions.
There was plenty of room for improvement, and the great thing about the Norwich job was that there was a stable platform to build on. Lambert had built the team, he understood its strengths and weaknesses and what was required to do better, and Norwich were financially stable.
For whatever reason Lambert decided to abandon all that and try his hand at the managerial mincing machine that is Aston Villa, and now he’s staring at the prospect of relegation.
Aston Villa is a graveyard for managers. The last manager to leave Villa Park with his reputation enhanced was Graham Taylor, who led Villa to second in the league in 1990 before succeeding Bobby Robson as England manager. Lambert is the tenth coach Villa have hired since and none of his predecessors won much praise for their work at the club.
The man who got closest was probably Martin O’Neill, who took them to three consecutive sixth-place finishes between 2008 and 2010. The only problem was that O’Neill achieved this at considerable cost, spending more than £80m net on players and inflating Villa’s wage bill close to parity with that of Spurs, whose turnover is 80% larger.
In the summer of 2010, Randy Lerner told O’Neill that players would have to be sold and Villa’s wage bill reduced. O’Neill promptly quit. O’Neill understands Fergusonian loyalty and he wasn’t about to let Lerner’s cost-cutting make him look bad.
Caught off-balance, Lerner foolishly appointed Gerard Houllier, who presided over a run of results so bad that he was able to scare the owner into splurging on Darren Bent and Jean Makoun in the January window. Weighed down by these panic buys Villa failed to reduce their wage bill, and the situation was not improved by the following summer’s trading, when players like Shay Given, Alan Hutton and Charles N’Zogbia were added to the squad on long contracts.
In hindsight it probably would have been better for Villa to have resisted the urge to sign Bent and Makoun and faced relegation that summer of 2011. Some high earners would have left and others would not have joined. They would probably now be back in the Premier League with the younger, leaner squad Lerner wants to see. Staying up ultimately only allowed them to do more damage to themselves.
It was obvious last summer to anyone who had been paying attention that the next Villa manager would have to preside over a period of grinding deflation. Lambert’s freezing out of Shay Given and Darren Bent suggests that he is on board for this. Managers don’t get much credit for presiding over austerity programs though, particularly not if they get relegated in the process. If Villa go down, Lambert will need two unbroken years of success to get back to the position he walked away from last May.
Ambitious managers who want to build a career, not destroy it should copy Rodgers, not Lambert: don’t leave behind a stable job for a bigger job unless you’re sure it really is a bigger job.
