EPL TALK: Rodgers, Potter sackings show league’s ugliest side

IT’S getting silly now. The English Premier League shot Bambi and ransacked Cinderella’s home on the same weekend. The Disney-fication of the cartoonish game is just about complete, but only the villains survive.

After the sacking of Brendan Rodgers and Graham Potter, where does the EPL go from here? Kidnap all small children on matchdays and lead them to the river? Punch the mascots? Chop off Jack Grealish’s hair? Nothing is off the table at this point.

The Premier League’s commitment to obscene capitalism has long been a car crash. We know it’s wrong to look. We know someone is suffering for our horrific amusement, but the macabre scene is too damn compelling. Like a live feeding session, please continue to throw managerial morsels like Rodgers and Potter at the sharks for our entertainment.

Not that either manager was entirely blameless. Of course not. Online impressionists will forever return to the well of Rodgers, the source of endless positivity. Every Rodgers signing was a special signing. Every Rodgers player was a special person. Every Rodgers match was a special performance, even last-minute defeats against Crystal Palace. He loved all his boys, even when they were playing truant at Selhurst Park.

Rodgers was a very special manager at a very special club with a very special history, until chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha swept past the 2016 EPL trophy in the cabinet, checked the current league standings and sacked his very special manager. Fairy tales are fun. But the bottom line is real. The Foxes cannot afford to be relegated.

Six defeats in seven games doesn’t spare anyone in a relegation battle.

More than £30 million was spent on three players in January alone, but £30 million barely covers half a James Maddison, who will leave as soon as the clock strikes midnight and join one of those magic kingdoms either occupied by a foreign nation with a dubious human rights record or fronted by American caricatures who are just dubious.

In the current market, £30 million doesn’t even buy one Graham Potter. Chelsea’s seven-month lab experiment in hiring Bambi will cost the club at least £50 million. That was £13 million to get rid of Thomas Tuchel and his pesky Champions League winners’ medal. Plus another £21 million to Brighton for the services of the world’s nicest, trophy-less manager. And the remainder will take care of Potter’s payout.

Even then, it feels like an injustice to refer to the Potter era as a lab experiment, when it was more like that weird bully in school, the one who had a disturbing fetish for tearing the wings and legs from a fly’s trapped body, just to see what happened next.

Todd Boehly is straight out of central casting. In fact, if he showed up for the villain’s audition of a kids TV show on Disney Plus, he’d be shown the door. He’s too obvious. The Chelsea co-owner has fired two managers in seven months. He dispatched his imperial probes to the far-flung corners of the football galaxy to capture foreign resources for his fledgling empire. He’s stepping over expiring minions like a Sith lord, leaving nothing behind but a pithy quip and a large clean-up bill.

Chelsea’s Death Star will be operational at some point, whatever the cost.

No room for 'craftsmen' managers?

The dark project cost eight players in the January transfer window alone, adding to an already bloated squad. Potter reportedly muttered something about too many signings, an imbalanced squad and a tactics board that looked like a paint splatter, but Boehly raised his hand and Potter suddenly felt his vocal cords tighten.

But it’s all right. Chelsea have installed Bruno Saltor, who was a member of Potter’s backroom staff. He’ll be in charge for next week’s Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid. Saltor is 42 years old and has no managerial experience. You can almost hear the raising of Carlo Ancelotti’s eyebrow.

Why do the filthy rich continue to assume that success in one industry is automatically guaranteed in another? Presumably, Boehly read his latest bank statement, watched a couple of Ted Lasso’s folksy speeches and wondered what all the fuss was about.

Well, to kick things off, there is a reason why the global success of Ted Lasso hasn’t quite been replicated in the UK. Skillsets aren’t transferable and the suspension of disbelief is a little too wide for British audiences. Yes, it’s a fictional TV show, but have you seen the dysfunctional mess at Chelsea? That’s why Ted Lasso isn’t a pop culture sensation in England.

Second, Potter was always the wrong man for the wrong club. English football must continue to nurture their own and Potter enjoyed success at every level, building slowly, patiently and quietly. Such talents work well at the lower end of the pyramid but not so much with megalomaniacs recreating the final days of the Roman Empire. Time waits for no multi-billionaire, especially one who assumes Ted Lasso is an aspirational documentary.

Potter went from organising English cream teas at Brighton to running a Gordon Ramsay kitchen, filled with too many cooks and the wrong ingredients and still being screamed at for not making a decent dish out of Trevoh Chalobah and Benoît Badiashile.

The centre-backs were on the bench against Aston Villa. Potter picked full-backs Reece James and Marc Cucurella in Chelsea’s back three. Cucurella’s mistake led to Villa’s opening goal. Potter’s tactics were – and have been – all over the place. But he never stood a chance at a club with an insatiable appetite for destruction.

The Premier League is running out of room for dignified craftsmen like Potter and Rodgers. Thirteen managers have been sacked so far this season, an inevitable consequence of a capitalist model committed to crushing any whimsical notions of romance and fair play.

Increasingly, there are three types of owners for managers to work for. There are nation states with literal cash pipelines. There are American consortiums with impressive cash pipelines. And there are run-of-the-mill billionaires like Leicester’s Aiyawatt.

The nation states can anoint the chosen ones, the rarest of talents capable of building dynasties across generations. They are given time. Sort of.

The American consortiums can only choose from those not handpicked by the nation states. These managers are expected to close the gap immediately and are not given time.

And run-of-the-mill billionaires like Aiyawatt heroically write off £194 million to leave their beloved Foxes debt-free, but sack their manager anyway because relegation can drop a run-of-the-mill billionaire into the poor house.

There are no Cinderella stories left. In the end, the Beautiful Game must them all into ugly sisters.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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