Shock, relief and ‘smelling’ the sack: What it’s like to be fired as a manager

When Gus Poyet arrived to work as a BBC Sport pundit for a 2013 Confederations Cup match between Spain and Nigeria, he was still the manager of Brighton & Hove Albion.

The Uruguayan had been suspended by the club the previous month following their Championship play-off semi-final defeat by Crystal Palace but there had been no further news about his position.

“The commentary was starting at 7.30pm, so I switched my phone off at 7.20pm, when we did the last touches of our make-up,” Poyet tells The Athletic. “There was nothing to indicate that I was going to be sacked. So I switched off my phone without any fears. We did the pre-match analysis, then when the match started at 8pm, they said, ‘Now you can relax’.”

Poyet was expecting to have some dinner in the studio during the first half, but then noticed the programme’s host, Mark Chapman, touching his earpiece and looking at him.

“He said, ‘You know you’ve just been sacked?’ We weren’t live on air, it was two minutes after the game had started at 8pm. I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘Yes, it’s on the Brighton website’. So then I asked (production) staff if I could get a copy. I then asked permission to get out of the studio to call my lawyer and he told me.”

There followed a surreal half-time chat between Chapman and Poyet about his dismissal, with the game relegated to a sideshow, as fellow pundit Efan Ekoku shifted awkwardly in his seat.

“The BBC thought it was perfect!” Poyet laughs. “We didn’t commentate one bit about the game at half-time, it was all about my sacking. I remember saying to the BBC, ‘Oh, you’re lucky! This will never happen again!’”

Poyet’s Brighton experience may be extreme, but every manager knows that their tenure is very likely to end in the sack. It is just a matter of how the message is conveyed, and how they react to it.

According to the League Managers Association, the body that represents managers in English football, the average tenure for its members across the top four leagues of the men’s game is 1.4 years. In the Championship, where the pressure is arguably greatest given the potential riches offered by promotion, it is just 0.8 years.

The latest Premier League manager to be sacked, Ivan Juric, did not even last that long. The Croatian’s unhappy 108-day stint at Southampton was ended by the club yesterday, less than 24 hours after relegation to the Championship was confirmed.

But how does the process of a sacking play out in an age when social media ensures that conjecture over a manager’s position has never felt more frenzied?

The Athletic spoke to a range of managers, past and present, about their experiences of being fired — and the right, and wrong, way to go about it.

---

In general, according to Sam Allardyce, managers can “smell” the sack long before it comes.

History is littered with examples of coaches who enter a match knowing that it is almost certainly going to their last. Martin Jol knew he had been sacked by Tottenham Hotspur before taking charge of a UEFA Cup tie against Getafe in 2007; Mark Hughes did likewise at Manchester City, with his successor Roberto Mancini, watching the Welshman’s last game against Sunderland from the stands at the Etihad Stadium in 2009.

Poyet, too, knows the feeling only too well. At Sunderland, where he moved after being sacked at Brighton, a promising start in keeping the club in the Premier League in 2013-14 disintegrated as the manager complained about recruitment and personnel.

As results tailed off after Christmas 2014, with Poyet’s side winning just once in 12 league matches, his sacking began to feel inevitable.

“We were training on the Monday and they came to tell me I had a phone call from the owner, from America,” Poyet recalls. “Before answering the phone, I knew. We’d had a few bad, bad results (including a 4-0 home defeat by Aston Villa on the Saturday) and the owner Ellis Short, was very professional, he was a gentleman, he explained it perfectly. He said, ‘I will never forget what happened last year’.”

Allardyce, whose long career has spanned 13 clubs and a brief spell with England, had a similar feeling of gloomy inevitability at Everton ahead of his firing in 2018.

“You could smell it, because of the silence from everybody above (in the boardroom),” he said. “There’s no doubt the players knew that was happening. Yeah, you carry on, but you know full well… I mean, for goodness sake, we finished eighth. If I deserved to be kept on anywhere, I deserved to be kept on there, but it wasn’t to be.”

That feeling of foreboding is no less pronounced further down the football food chain.

Matt Taylor, who guided Exeter City to League One in his first managerial job, was poached by Championship side Rotherham United in 2022. After keeping them up in his first season, finishing 19th, he felt the expectations shift in his second.

A 2-0 local derby defeat by rivals Sheffield Wednesday at the end of October 2023 put Taylor under pressure, which intensified after two draws against Queens Park Rangers and Ipswich Town. Then came November’s 5-0 thrashing by Watford.

“I got a phone call around 11am the next day asking me to meet the chairman (Tony Stewart),” Taylor recalls. “We’d never met on a Sunday previously, so you just know what’s coming, especially after a defeat like that. The message was, ‘Come and meet me at this time, at so and so place’. And that was that. You then go and pick up your bits and pieces from the office.”

Taylor remembered feeling flat leaving Rotherham. His sacking came just before an international break, so the club’s training ground was virtually deserted. Rather than doing it in person, he said goodbye to his players in a series of phone calls.

He also acknowledges he perhaps jumped back in too quickly, as he was appointed Bristol Rovers manager just two weeks later, where he replaced the controversial Joey Barton.

“I was keen to get back to work straight away, without really knowing the toll of what was then five years of management would have had on me,” he said.

After taking the Rovers job, Taylor moved into a hotel in Bristol for a week, during which time he had to find a suitable house to rent for his family. His son had just turned one, while his wife was pregnant with their second child.

“I was taking training, then going back to the hotel and going on Rightmove to try and find property — it’s stressful,” he said.

His reign began promisingly, as he led Rovers to a 15th-place finish, but the next season was less successful. Things reached a head just before Christmas, when Taylor had to take a 10-day leave of absence just before Christmas following the tragic death of his niece.

When he returned to the club, Taylor felt the mood had changed.

“That last week at Bristol Rovers was brutal, it was absolutely brutal,” he recalled. “The atmosphere, the sense from the players, the staff, the uncertainty.

“I went back two days before the Bolton game, but that got called off. So my last game was Birmingham away but everyone knew that if we got beat, and it’s a tough old task, Birmingham away, it was going to be my last game.”

Rovers lost 2-0 and, the following morning, Taylor was sacked.

---

There is no one set response to being fired.

For many, the emotion can be overwhelming: Kyle Walker revealed that Andre Villas-Boas broke down in tears when addressing Tottenham’s squad following his sacking in 2013. For others, it can be a cause for celebration: Tony Pulis admitted to drinking champagne following his dismissal by Gillingham in 1999.

That sense of relief is surprisingly common. “It’s not that you’re happy,” Garry Monk told The Athletic in a previous interview in 2021, shortly after losing his job at Sheffield Wednesday. “But it’s like the relief of… ‘I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and go and try to convince 50-60 people that working hard is the best thing that they should be doing’.”

Indeed, Paul Lambert said he felt positively excited when Aston Villa finally called time on his sorry spell in 2015, during a turbulent time when owner Randy Lerner was trying to sell the club.

“Honestly, I had a unicycle and everything, f***ing going about the place and juggling, I was delighted,” he told the Undr the Cosh podcast last year. “I couldn’t wait to get out because I knew what was happening, I knew there was no help forthcoming and you’re taking it.”

Yet a more common reaction is shock. For Allardyce, the sensation of being fired at Blackpool, his first managerial job, was devastating.

“It’s a devastating blow,” he says. “You think, ‘What am I going to do next and how am I going to get my next job?’ That is the most traumatic time for managers I think, when you get the first job and then lose it,” he told The Athletic. “You then just have to keep your face in the know wherever you can and wait and hope that another job comes along.”

For Poyet, being fired by Sunderland simply left him feeling cast adrift.

“The first reaction is, ‘What do I now? Do I go back to training, or do I have a shower and go home?’ You don’t really know what to do,” he recalls. “So you sit there for a few minutes thinking. You take it. I called my staff and I gave them the bad news. I said, ‘Let’s pack everything and say goodbye to everyone at the offices’.

“It’s quite a strange atmosphere because you’re at the training ground and people don’t know what to say. So they gave us a few bags to collect all our things and then we left. The next day, I left Sunderland forever and went back home to London (which has been home since he was a player at Chelsea).”

---

Yet the sacking of a football manager is a legal process, as well as a human experience.

For the public announcement, there tends to be a social media post issued by the club — usually illustrated with a generic picture of one of the stadium’s corner flags — and often a follow-up conciliatory statement issued on the manager’s behalf by the LMA where players and fans are thanked and regrets expressed at being unable to see the job through.

Behind the scenes, however, negotiations can often be complex and fraught.

Ray Wann, a partner and head of employment at Sheridans law firm who has represented both sides in severance negotiations, says that, based on his experience, clubs that sack a manager towards the end of their contract are more likely to pay out the full amount. However, talks become tougher when a manager is fired with a long time left on his deal.

“Then you’re basically ending up with a negotiation between manager and club to determine what the actual appropriate compensation would be,” Wann told The Athletic.

Another aspect to consider in discussions was what Wann termed ‘parachute payments’. “The idea is that if the club does let the manager go early, it might be built into the contract that where there’s maybe more two or three years still to run on a deal, that the maximum amount of compensation will only be, for example, 18 months or two years (which tends to be at the top end). So, it is going to depend upon what’s been negotiated at the outset.”

These sums, among the elite clubs, can be eye-wateringly large. Erik ten Hag and his staff were paid £10.4million when they were dismissed in November; sacking Antonio Conte and his coaches in 2018 cost Chelsea over £26m; while Jose Mourinho had banked more than £50m in compensation payments alone by 2021 — a sum that will be worth more now.

How amicable are these types of conversations?

“You do tend to find the clubs are pretty commercially savvy and will be fully expecting that they’re going to have to pay for that kind of contract buyout,” Wann replied. “So that part of it isn’t generally that acrimonious.

“Where it becomes tricky is, for example, where someone is employed on a five or six-year deal and they only last nine months. In that instance, the club might be on the back foot trying to cut costs or save money, whereas the manager’s saying, ‘Well, this is your decision – you’ve gone early — therefore, you’re going to have to pay me out in full – or at least close to full’. So, the examples where it’s a bit more thorny are where it’s a big old contract and the individual only lasts a short period of time.”

In Wann’s experience, once the deal has been agreed, attention then shifts to negotiating how the statement or message is to be relayed, or communicated externally, with the timing often an important factor – particularly in terms of the manager’s reputation and career trajectory.

---

After losing their job, the first thing managers often do is book a holiday, to switch off, relax and unwind.

“I always disappear,” Poyet said. “I don’t fancy being in public with people asking you, so most of the time I took a five or seven-day holiday around the world. One day later, bang, see you later, disappear. Then after a week, nobody remembers.”

Poyet said he particularly felt the need to recharge his batteries after his Sunderland stint.

“I lost five years of my life in one year and a half,” he said. “That was tough. The demands in the Premier League are tremendous. Especially how I am. When I go to a club, apart from my family and friends, my club is everything. Don’t touch it because I kill you. I defend my club to the end, and when you get that involved, everything that is around the club affects you, because I’m like that, when I’m in, I’m in. At Sunderland, it was a nightmare. I went through so many different things, they make you crazy.”

Following his Rotherham sacking, Taylor had a pre-booked trip planned to Scotland with his family, that he still decided to go on.

“The messages you get, it’s almost like there’s been a death,” he said. “That’s such a poor way for me to describe it, but people are so sorry, really concerned about your welfare. I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt but there are bigger things than football and my mindset was: ‘Family first and foremost’. Then I’ll get a chance to assess what I’ve been through and what’s to come.”

After some downtime, what often follows is a period of self-reflection.

“First I analyse myself, whether I picked the right team, the tactics, the things that we planned and whether they worked,” said Poyet, now managing K League 1 club Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors in South Korea. “What I said at half-time, how we started the second half, did I make good changes?

“After I’ve analysed myself, then I analyse the games and the players, so here it’s a bit bigger because it’s maybe one, two, or three seasons. It’s important to ask when I went to the club, ‘What was the situation, how were the players, what was the objective, what did they ask me to do?’ And then, depending on the consequences, you can say ‘OK, maybe I didn’t do this right, or that confrontation or that communication’ and you learn from that. It’s very important to analyse yourself.”

Allardyce agrees. “Away from all the hype, you can then reflect on would you have done differently, could you have done anything better?” he said. “That obviously reflects on what happens when you’re at the next club. I never managed a club the same way. I tried that when I went from Blackpool to Notts County and it failed miserably at (the start at) Notts County.”

For managers, the transition of going from a full-throttle and all-consuming job to unemployed is often a tricky adjustment.

“Being out of work as a manager isn’t an easy process and it can be lonely at times,” former Luton Town, Portsmouth and West Ham United midfielder Matty Taylor told The Athletic in a previous article. “You go from overseeing training and your phone is constantly going… to go from that to nothing can be tough.”

When out of work, managers regularly take the opportunity to learn from other coaches, or hear from leaders working in other professions.

They can do this through the LMA, which also offers support to sacked managers, via its team of mentors, sports psychiatrists and/or psychologists and legal experts. The LMA also now helps managers cope with anxiety and depression and offers advice if they want to try and work abroad, or even retrain in another profession.

“In addition to the obviously practical aspects of employment termination (i.e. salary, location, job function) being sacked can impact a manager’s self-esteem and self-confidence, negatively impacting those around them, sometimes creating a strong sense of loss of purpose and direction,” Richard Bevan, chief executive at the LMA, told The Athletic via email.

“Whilst to some, ending their employment may provide a sense of relief, for most there is a sense that they, and their staff, couldn’t finish the work they had started.”

---

Having to work in such a brutal and unforgiving industry with few little job security, begs the obvious question: why?

“Something deep inside you drags you back,” Monk, who was sacked by League One Cambridge United in February, previously told The Athletic. “I think you just want to prove a point. How much do you pursue that? Football is in the blood and I love it. It’s been my whole life.

“But how much of a price do you put on that?”

Ultimately, many feel that the price is worth paying. For all its precariousness as an industry, few jobs can offer the same adrenaline rush — not to mention relative financial rewards, certainly at the higher levels.

It is why there will be no shortage of candidates ready to succeed Juric at Southampton, despite the club still facing the possibility of ending the season with the lowest points total in Premier League history.

As Allardyce puts it, “When you’re out of work, you get withdrawal symptoms. If you don’t like it, you don’t go back into the kitchen.”

(Top photo: Ivan Juric; Bradley Collyer/PA Images via Getty Images)

This post was originally published on this site