The football manager gig enters its glorified receptionist era

Challenging times for our cherished image of the elite-level football manager – the knight in winter-weight training gear, folding his arms in the Sky Sports idents. We are all deeply invested in those characters and what they bring to the narrative. These leaders and sages, going head to head – chess masters, wranglers of men, possessors of almost mystical powers, their reading of the game cured over several years like pricey Spanish ham.

And then along comes Calum McFarlane who, two days after his emergency insertion into the hotseat at Chelsea, gets a point from one of the season’s toughest games, at Manchester City, on the back of six months’ experience with the Under-21s and while closely resembling (as Charlie Brooker once unforgettably described the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock) “your sister’s first boyfriend with a car”.

OK, things were less impressive in the second and final game of McFarlane’s interlude, a 2-1 midweek defeat at Fulham. But even there, standards were upheld. A red card, three bookings for petulance, a set of puzzlingly counterintuitive substitutions, and then eventually a booking for the manager himself. That was a typical Wednesday night under the former incumbent.

Same for Darren Fletcher, another youth coach undergoing emergency escalation, with his draw for Manchester United at Burnley. No reason to think that the freshly deposed Ruben Amorim – or Ruben Interim as some United fans had always darkly known him – would have done any better. Fletcher, we understand, is merely an interim interim at United before a less interim interim comes in for the rest of the season, after which an entirely non-interim interim will be appointed.

But where now, you might reasonably wonder, does interim end and permanent begin? Interestingly, the bookies set the bar for managerial permanence at 10 matches. Technically, then, Wilfried Nancy (eight games in charge) was never the permanent manager at Celtic, despite having been announced as such, while Martin O’Neill will shortly achieve permanent Celtic manager status mathematically, despite overtly occupying the job temporarily as (in his own analogy) “a supply teacher”.

But then, in the wake of this current cold snap and its casualties, probably pretty much everything we thought we knew about football management is going to have to be revised. For instance, Liam Rosenior is Chelsea’s latest appointment and some people who perhaps haven’t noticed where this is heading (or have noticed and prefer to be in denial about it) are complaining on the grounds of his record. He was sacked by Hull! He’s never managed in the Champions League! Strasbourg have lost seven times in Ligue 1 this season!

Irrelevant, of course. These days at the big franchises the job of the manager is to be the sole public-­facing member of a shadowy committee of random Brads, Nasirs, Pauls and Jasons from whom we rarely or never hear, and, indeed, to whom many fans who regard themselves as close to their clubs would struggle to put a name if shown photographs.

It dies hard, the old idea of the manager as the omniscient core of everything – those days when you could confidently cry out for someone “who truly understands the DNA of this club” without sounding like Gary Neville waving a shredded flag in a hurricane. But die it must.

And yes, something foundational in us crumbles without those big figures around. But I guess nobody ponying up $4bn was ever going to want to bet it all on one solo-flying maverick who has been round the block a few times and formed his own ideas. They are going to find someone more compliant, and surround him with directors of football and heads of recruitment and seat him for protection in a posse of puffer coats.

And so dawns the era of the football manager as, essentially, a glorified receptionist. And maybe Sky Sports need to reflect this in those idents. Less arm-folding and more sitting behind a branded desk and saying: “Hello, and who are you here to see?” It’s going to take some adjusting to, that’s for sure, but I don’t see how we have a choice. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Calum or Darren, Arne or Liam: they’re all basically temping now.

Photograph by H Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images