Scott Parker Suffers the Yo-yo Curse of British Manager at Next Stop Burnley

Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
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Scott Parker Suffers the Yo-yo Curse of British Manager at Next Stop Burnley

Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images

The pattern is familiar. The promising young manager gets his chance with a Championship club. He leads them to promotion. He talks a good game of pressing and position, shape and transition, passing and control. And then the financial reality of the Premier League strikes. The manager is reluctant to adapt his philosophy, perhaps doesn’t know how to; that is his style, the way he will make it to the top.

They perhaps achieve a couple of notable results. Maybe, people think, this young manager is the real deal. But they play against an elite side and lose. The cumulative effect of playing against high-class opponents every week takes its toll. The players who swaggered through the Championship become error-prone and, in the Premier League, those mistakes are punished. Confidence dwindles. Form deteriorates. Results go against them. There is a cycle of decline.

The manager, realising his attempts to play out from the back, to dominate the ball, are leading to possession being squandered in dangerous areas, changes approach. He goes more direct. His squad isn’t really set up to play like that. Results don’t improve. Relegation follows. Perhaps the manager is sacked; his time in the Premier League is over. At some point he will be given the chance with another Championship club. Sisyphus goes again.

Into which role steps Scott Parker. His feels like almost the archetypal English managerial career. He is personable and articulate, albeit speaking almost entirely in soporific modern manager babble that pours from his mouth like a mountain stream, sweeping training cones, flip charts and columns of data down into the valley.

He looks like a manager, sounds like a manager. Even as a player he gave the impression of command, of knowing what was going on. It should work.

Parker replaced Claudio Ranieri at Craven Cottage at the end of February 2019 with Fulham second bottom of the table, 10 points from safety. Few managers get a job, especially not a first job, in auspicious circumstances. They did win three of those remaining games but lost the rest, and went down: the first relegation on his record.

Fulham were promoted the following season but didn’t win in the Premier League until November: his second relegation. The cycle turned again: he left the club that summer.

Appointed manager of Bournemouth, he led them to automatic promotion, two points behind Fulham.

They beat Aston Villa on the first day of the following season, 2022-23, but conceded 16 without reply in successive league games against Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. Parker spoke of the squad being “unequipped” for the Premier League. Three days later, he left the club.

Scott Parker lasted 67 days at Club Brugge.

To an extent, he was done by the calendar, which served up a brutal start. But Parker was also the victim of experience; he knew how hard it is to keep going week after week against better-resourced, compromising principles to try to scrape a few points.

His fault was to acknowledge that in public: the job of a manager is to a large degree a confidence trick, to instil in the players a sense of their own greatness so they achieve heights in excess of their ability.

His appeal to realism was not helped when Gary O’Neil took over and hauled Bournemouth to 15th – not that that was enough for O’Neil to keep the job; he too had to find another struggling club and start again. But that’s how it tends to be.

It’s very hard to break into the top half of the Premier League, so few British managers have that experience and clubs with aspirations to be in the top half tend not to appoint them, preferring those who have shown promise in arguably less taxing leagues abroad.

There is an obvious solution for British managers: go abroad. Parker did that, joining the Belgian champions Club Brugge in December 2022.

He lasted 67 days, winning just two of 12 games. The Dutch winger Noa Lang, one of Brugge’s stars, did seem to enjoy how Parker worked, and a congested fixture list meant there was little time to instil his ideas, but equally Parker never seemed to have a grasp of the league, tweaked the team constantly, played players out of position and seemed to resent the chief executive’s well-known desire to be involved in tactics and team selection.
To an extent that period in Belgium can be ignored. It is relatively common for perfectly decent managers go to a new country and fail to fit in, but those 67 days may make other foreign clubs less likely to employ him. And so Parker is back pushing his boulder up the Championship again, this time with Burnley.

Like Fulham and Bournemouth, they are a mezzanine club, seemingly too good for the Championship but never comfortable in the Premier League.

Burnley themselves are perhaps slightly stung that, having remained loyal to Vincent Kompany as they slid to relegation, he became a target for Bayern Munich, an offer that couldn’t be refused. It is probably significant that Parker has been named as head coach rather than manager, as Kompany was, indicating both that his role will be less wide-ranging than the Belgian’s and that the club is keen to establish a framework based on principles rather than the identity of an individual manager.

The retention of Kompany’s first-team coach, Mike Jackson, and the appointment of the assistant coach Henrik Jensen, which was planned before Kompany’s departure, are part of the process of establishing a structure around the head coach.

Five players have left and more outgoings are probable, but Burnley should still have one of the stronger squads in the division, which is why they are second favourites behind Leeds for promotion.

Parker is used to that: every time he’s taken over a club in the Championship, it’s been one that has recently suffered relegation, still receiving parachute payments. Promotion has always been expected.

Just as the tendency is to sympathise when a manager takes one of the mezzanine clubs down, so there must be a degree of scepticism when he takes one of them up. And that is the curse of the English manager.

What he achieved at Fulham and Bournemouth demonstrates Parker is not a bad manager. It’s far harder to say if he’s actually good or whether he’s just riding the yo-yo.

The Guardian Sport



Brazil Signs Real Madrid Coach Carlo Ancelotti 1 Year Ahead of 2026 World Cup

Real Madrid's Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti lifts the trophy to celebrate the victory at the end of the UEFA Champions League final football match between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid, at Wembley stadium, in London, on June 1, 2024. (AFP)
Real Madrid's Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti lifts the trophy to celebrate the victory at the end of the UEFA Champions League final football match between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid, at Wembley stadium, in London, on June 1, 2024. (AFP)
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Brazil Signs Real Madrid Coach Carlo Ancelotti 1 Year Ahead of 2026 World Cup

Real Madrid's Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti lifts the trophy to celebrate the victory at the end of the UEFA Champions League final football match between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid, at Wembley stadium, in London, on June 1, 2024. (AFP)
Real Madrid's Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti lifts the trophy to celebrate the victory at the end of the UEFA Champions League final football match between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid, at Wembley stadium, in London, on June 1, 2024. (AFP)

Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti will leave the Spanish club and take over as coach of Brazil’s national team, the Brazilian soccer federation said Monday.

The 65-year-old Ancelotti, who will be Brazil's first full-time foreign coach in a century, is still under contract with Madrid. The last round of the Spanish league will be on May 25 and the CBF said in a statement that he will officially take over Brazil the following day.

“Bringing Carlo Ancelotti to coach Brazil is more than a strategic movement. It is a statement to the world that we are determined to recover the top of the podium,” CBF President Ednaldo Rodrigues said in a statement. “He is the greatest coach in history and, now, he will be with the greatest national team on the planet. Together, we will write new glorious chapters of Brazilian soccer.”

Rodrigues said Ancelotti will take charge of Brazil’s next two fixtures in South American World Cup qualifying, with his debut at Ecuador on June 5th and five days later in front of home fans against Paraguay in Sao Paulo.

Ancelotti's contract with Madrid ends next year but is expected to be terminated early.

He will replace Dorival Júnior, who held the job for 14 months and was fired in March after a 4-1 defeat at Argentina. Brazil lags in 4th position in World Cup qualifying after 14 matches and has its 33-year-old star Neymar still in difficulties to return to top form after an ACL injury in 2023. The top six teams will secure direct spots in next year’s tournament.

Ancelotti leaves Madrid after a frustrating season in which the team did not defend its European title and saw rival Barcelona win the Copa del Rey and get close to securing the league title after a 4-3 victory over Madrid on Sunday.

The Italian coach and Real Madrid are yet to comment on CBF's announcement.

BRAZIL'S WAIT

Ancelotti's signing ends a turbulent time on Brazil’s bench since Tite left after the 2022 World Cup quarterfinals elimination against Croatia. Under-20 coach Ramon Menezes and Fluminense coach Fernando Diniz took charge for several matches as Rodriguez sought Ancelotti to become coach.

Menezes and Diniz both fared poorly, and Ancelotti extended his deal with Madrid during that span. Dorival Júnior was then chosen in 2024 to take the team to the World Cup, but he was also fired after the same lack of success and unimpressive performances.

Al-Hilal coach Jorge Jesus, a 70-year-old Portuguese who won several titles with Brazil’s Flamengo in 2019, was the favorite to take the Brazil job until Madrid was knocked out of the Champions League by Arsenal earlier in April.

Brazil will be Ancelotti’s first international experience as full-time coach. He was an assistant to Arrigo Sacchi in the 1994 World Cup as Italy lost to Brazil in the final on penalties.

That ended a 24-year World Cup title drought for Brazil, the same time frame it will face next year in the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Ancelotti, who won Serie A titles as a player with Roma and AC Milan plus two European titles with the latter as a creative midfielder, started his full-time coaching career in 1995 at Italy's Reggiana.

He's also coached Parma, Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Napoli and Everton, winning titles in Italy, England, Spain, France and Germany.

He twice won the Champions League with Milan 2003 and 2007, and added three more titles with Real Madrid in 2014, 2022 and last year.

Ancelotti will be only the second foreign coach to take Brazil into an international tournament.

The first was Uruguayan Ramón Platero, who coached Brazil in the 1925 South American championship, the predecessor of the current Copa America. He was on the job for 19 days and four matches of a round-robin competition with Paraguay and Argentina, with two wins, one loss and one draw in the final with Argentina, who lifted the title.

Portuguese coach Jorge Gomes de Lima, known as Joreca, shared Brazil’s coach position with local Flavio Costa in two friendly victories over Uruguay in 1944.

And in 1965 Argentine coach Filpo Nuñez coached Brazil for one day. Nuñez was Palmeiras’ coach, and Brazil’s soccer body chose the Sao Paulo-based club to play with national team shirts in a friendly against Uruguay in the opening of the Mineirao Stadium in Belo Horizonte. The hosts won 3-0.

MADRID'S FUTURE

The announcement of Ancelotti’s departure came a day after Madrid lost its fourth straight match to Barcelona this season, falling seven points behind the Catalan rival with three rounds remaining.

Former player Xabi Alonso is widely expected to take over the club’s helm after he confirmed his departure from Bayer Leverkusen.

Alonso led Leverkusen to an unprecedented German league and cup double last year in his first full season after taking over the team when it was in the Bundesliga’s relegation zone the season before. He starred as a player as Madrid won a Spanish league title in 2012 and the 2014 Champions League before leaving for three Bundesliga titles with Bayern Munich.

Madrid still has to play in the upcoming Club World Cup beginning next month.