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The modern football manager might wear classic Reeboks, or knackered Converse, or trackie bottoms tucked in socks but, to continue paraphrasing the Arctic Monkeys song, there ain’t no romance in our game no more. Nothing endures. The average managerial tenure tends to last between 18 months and two years. For Ole Gunnar Solskjær at Besiktas, it was a little more than seven months; José Mourinho got 14 at Fenerbahce. And so the pair, intrinsically linked by their sequential spells at Manchester United, find themselves on similar paths again, their sackings from Turkish nearly-clubs coming within hours of each other this week. Both have been caught in the meat grinder of Uefa’s endless European qualifiers. Solskjær’s brave Besiktas boys were downed by Ineos-owned Lausanne in the Tin Pot playoffs on Thursday night. A day earlier, Mourinho’s men were ousted by Benfica in the Bigger Cup equivalent.
It feels rather timely that these two former United bosses should be chucked through the door marked Do One just as the latest man to suffer the Old Trafford meme factory is put to his limits. Ruben Amorim will rue the day he popped into Sports Direct to buy that magnetic tactics board, for it was instantly imbibed into the internet’s collection of looped two-second videos for merciless and eternal social media use. Amorim, the sweet-talking dogmatist whose principled management was the exact reason for his appointment at United, is now being viewed with ridicule and derision, just as Solskjær and Mourinho were before him. It comes for everyone. Solskjær was a club legend who ended his reign by crying on MUTV; Mourinho was the managerial great living miserably in a hotel room after alienating his squad. The scythe’s swing is remorseless.
