Managers rise and managers fall and often there isn’t much reason for it. It was only a year ago that Gary O’Neil seemed one of the brightest young managers in the Premier League, but by December it was over. This is how football is: when a blip becomes a slump becomes a spiral, the only solution is the sacrifice of the manager. It often works: Wolves have improved dramatically under Vítor Pereira and, while they may not yet be mathematically safe from relegation, they surely soon will be.
The life of man, the folk carol reminds us, is but a span; the life of a manager is even shorter (but a spanager?). O’Neil had replaced Scott Parker at Bournemouth four games into 2022-23, after their 9-0 defeat by Liverpool, and had kept them up comfortably, only to be jettisoned for Andoni Iraola. He took over Wolves less than a week before last season began and had them in the top half in March.
But form collapsed last season after an FA Cup quarter-final defeat by Coventry and they finished 14th. When O’Neil was dismissed in December, Wolves lay second-bottom, five points from the last safe spot, having won three of his final 26 league games.
He had begun almost visibly to unravel, the intense gaze developing an unnerving wildness as he discussed another video assistant referee outrage. There was a period when it felt the main justification for keeping VAR was as a morally dubious psychological experiment in just how far one man could be pushed, O’Neil as a modern-day Job but with poverty and boils replaced by Howard Webb and inconsistent interpretations of what it is to be interfering.
How could he pick up 1.24 points per game in the first 62 Premier League games of his managerial career and then crash to 0.54 points per game in their next 26? It’s not just O’Neil; plenty of other managers have followed a similar trajectory. Is it just regression to the mean, as those who deny the phenomenon of the new-manager bounce would claim?
Can it really just be confidence, that once opposing sides start to work a manager out and results begin to falter, players lose faith and need a new messiah? This is such a familiar phenomenon, it’s perhaps overlooked how strange it is, the way it’s almost accepted in the lower reaches of the Premier League that after 18 months or so a manager’s usefulness is somehow spent and he must be replaced. Perhaps it is even true. Perhaps there is a limit to how many defeats, how much pressure, any one manager can take. Perhaps players need the change to break the routine.
For Wolves, replacing O’Neil was the only realistic step after losing at home to Ipswich in a game when their players lost all discipline, with Rayan Aït-Nouri sent off during a post-match confrontation when Matheus Cunha stole a pair of glasses from a member of the opposing staff.
As Southampton and Leicester have shown, while it may be straightforward enough to work out when a manager has to be jettisoned, finding the right replacement is far harder. While the huge gulf that exists between the Premier League and the Championship is clearly a major factor, none of what has happened in the past four months has been inevitable.
In fairness, Ivan Juric, appointed four days after Pereira, had an almost impossible task, one he took on with an admirably sanguine attitude. As he gave detailed instructions to his substitutes at Tottenham last Sunday with his side 2-0 down and about to be relegated, it was possible to believe he had somehow managed to miss Southampton’s results for the previous months. But fair play for the seriousness with which he took the task of trying to avert the earliest relegation in Premier League history.
Leicester’s decision to turn to Ruud van Nistelrooy at the end of November, though, looks deeply flawed. However unpopular Steve Cooper was, with his Nottingham Forest connections and the perception he played negative football, under him Leicester were not losing eight successive home games without scoring; the last time they scored a home goal O’Neil was still manager of Wolves and Russell Martin was still at Southampton.
Wolves, though, do seem to have found the right man in Pereira. They go into Sunday’s game at home to Tottenham having taken 23 points from 15 games under him. They began the weekend 12 points clear of the drop zone, having gained 20 on Leicester, 18 on Southampton and 15 on Ipswich in just over three months.
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Pereira’s first task, after that volcanic ending against Ipswich, was to restore calm. It helps that there is a worldliness to him, having coached in eight countries, and that he has historically been the volatile one. This was not the earnest O’Neil with his neat haircut appealing for order, it was somebody familiar with chaos, somebody who has at times been its agent. When you have returned to Fenerbahce after taking them to court, or used your mother‑in‑law’s health as an excuse to quit Corinthians only to take over at Flamengo a month later, some post‑match argy-bargy and spectacle theft probably does not feel that significant.
He has been very astute in getting fans on board, not just in what he has said, his talk of the great Wolves family, but in visiting pubs, drinking pints and eating pies. At the same time, Wolves look better organised and are conceding fewer. Cunha has scored some vital goals and in his absence Jørgen Strand Larsen, a very different type of forward, has stepped up with four goals in three games.
But those are details. The most important aspect is the mood Pereira has created, partly through his personality, partly through well-chosen gimmicks and partly through his organisational capacity. That will change at some point, perhaps in a few months, perhaps in a few years. He will be ousted, and the next messiah will come in.
That is how football is. The life of managers is as grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.