SIMON JORDAN: Every manager sacked this season deserves it… they were all useless

There have been 12 Premier League dismissals this season, but for some reason this is seen as a shocking statistic.

I don’t like unfairness and inequality, but which of those firings was inherently unfair?

Look through the list and ask yourself who finds themselves hard to do. Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, Nathan Jones, Scott Parker, Bruno Lage or Jesse Marsch? It’s hard to make an argument for any of them. Besides some of them being household names as players, in their most recent incarnation they’ve been kind of damn useless.

Ralph Hasenhuttl threatened to be sacked at Southampton for years. Patrick Vieira may have had some winable games ahead, but Crystal Palace didn’t think they would win them with him heading a passive side that went through a number of games without scoring a shot.

Thomas Tuchel was replaced due to a clash of personalities. Antonio Conte made it clear he didn’t want the Tottenham job and engineered an almost reverse constructive dismissal. I don’t think Brendan Rodgers was in the fight to keep Leicester in the league and Graham Potter should never have taken the job at Chelsea. His convention was flawed, like asking a one-legged man to run 100 meters in 10 seconds and berating him for not being able to.

So we are not talking about unfair dismissals. There’s a case against pretty much all of them – they all deserve to be on the unemployment line. The irony is that they pop up elsewhere as if previous lessons hadn’t been learned.

All the tears for those managers are crocodile tears. They all got what they deserved, the sack. It may be a bit blunt, but that’s the reality.

But didn’t we all get what we asked for? Fans have no tolerance for failure, so why should owners? We say the game belongs to the people, except maybe Chelsea, whose manager has been alive for 18 months anyway, which group of fans were clamoring for one of them to keep their jobs?

Managers want all the benefits of ambitious owners’ money and all the benefits of a world seemingly immune to financial sanity. And yet the argument rages among the football association that all of that should come without the realities of the commercial world.

But ultimately, if you don’t succeed in the Premier League, you get the commercial results you get in any other business.

The problem for those who argue against this new reality is that when you bring globalization into a sport like football, you bring with it the rules of that jungle – and when you pay people huge sums of money, those rules are: you have to be successful, and fast.

So there is nothing remarkable about 55 percent of Premier League clubs changing managers this season. The inherent reaction is that this is the wrong way of thinking, but all the fans of those clubs probably wanted these results. So where is the problem and why are we still surprised by it?

I read an article by former pro Tony Cascarino suggesting that a manager should be immune from firing during the season, arguing that this firing culture is ridiculous and the trend over the past few decades is for a manager’s life in the job to be shorter is becoming. So?! Then do your job, bring about change and make things better.

The average tenure of these laid-off executives is 23 months and I can’t think of any other industry where you can continue beyond two years when the company’s position is worse, impending doom awaits or downright disrespect to your employers is tolerated.

Being a manager is a wonderful profession. If you are a football person, this is the next best thing to being a player. And if you are good at your job, what a wonderful space it is. You get adoration, recognition, reward and even if you fall short you still get paid and then another job somewhere else. No other industry offers that opportunity as often as this one.

But you wouldn’t want an average surgeon operating on you who’s been losing more and more patients for two years, so why would you want an average manager running your club?

Of course, owners must take responsibility. I always did. If one of my managers at Palace failed, I felt it was my fault. I had failed to get what I thought I could out of them. My consequences were fan unrest, a bill for the outgoing outage and new costs for the replacement.

But if we’re talking about managers getting the boot, why not suggest that these people aren’t doing their job very well? Why don’t we admit that some of these executives, like Potter, just became multimillionaires because they are mediocre? They are rewarded for failure.

A similar number of Premier League clubs may change managers again next season. It’s not trigger-happy, it’s the reality of where we are.

So if you are a new manager you will have to be effective from the start. You can’t rely on the old football adage that you get time and if you don’t get it, it’s unfair. It’s 2023 and the football world, rightly so, doesn’t work that way anymore.

Boxing just isn’t serious about drugs

After another fighter, Amir Khan, failed a drug test, it is worth noting that cycling has four times as many out-of-competition drug tests as boxing.

Just think about that and wonder if you’ve ever heard anything so ridiculous. Boxing, a sport where people punch each other in the face and can actually kill people compared to a sport where you can damage your knee if you fall off your bike.

The government-backed UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) is supposed to drive doping out of the sport, but boxing undergoes a fraction of the testing compared to other sports.

Doping is a scourge of all sports and yet our testing agency, UKAD, shows unprofessional behavior here. Are they serious about this problem or not? Because fighters aren’t tested from one year to the next, the evidence suggests they aren’t.

Hearn manipulates the truth

On Saturday night in a packed O2 arena, during a much-hyped boxing event, an interesting dichotomy manifested itself.

Two much-discussed and currently maligned low-cost fighters – for different reasons – took center stage.

Conor Benn and Anthony Joshua are two sides of the same coin and potentially opposites of the brilliant, noble sport that is boxing.

One is a growling, glowing, bitter ball of rage, enraged at the world, erupting at broadcasters and knocking microphones out of the hands of reporters for blaming them for his travail. The other is a former two-time heavyweight champion of the world, seemingly bereft of the fury and fury he actually needs as he goes through the motions in the ring.

All of the above is ignited by a Colonel Tom Parker-esque figure in Eddie Hearn.

Like Elvis Presley’s infamous manager, Hearn manipulates the truth, manipulates people, manipulates his allegations, and none of it seemingly for the good of the sport or the individuals involved. Convincing one protagonist to continue doing something he clearly seems incapable of doing anymore and not convincing the other to do something he clearly should, which clears his name.

Perhaps a little better from the 2022 Promoter of the Year is in order.