Pardew takes Premier League one step close to the managerial twilight zone
West Brom’s appointment of Alan Pardew takes us one step closer to a disturbing future of Premier League management.
If West Brom hope to do anything this season, or next, or, for that matter, the one after that, other than the exact thing they’ve been doing for the past seven years, perhaps they shouldn’t have hired Alan Pardew, who has a long history of getting hired, briefly making things better and then protractedly making them much, much worse.
As pointless as this move is, it would be unfair to single out West Brom, who are but one in a long line of Premier League clubs to trade out one mediocre manager for another, slightly different mediocre manager. Pardew at West Brom, Sam Allardyce at Everton, David Moyes at West Ham, Roy Hodgson at Crystal Palace, the list will soon go on.
Swansea appear primed to call on Tony Pulis at any moment. Stoke have been kept off this managerial merry-go-round from — not hell, because hell is too distinctive — only by Peter Coates’ frankly extraordinary patience with Mark Hughes. Burnley will surely hop on the moment Sean Dyche leaves for something bigger, as will Newcastle when Rafa Benitez finally loses his mind.
By season’s end, almost half the Premier League could be managed by variations of the same cliche. Moyes is the Chosen One. Hodgson the Old One. Pulis the Set Piece One. Allardyce the Entrapped One. Claude Puel may very soon be the French One. Dyche is only one bad move away from becoming the Ginger One. Pardew, of course, is the one you hope falls down a well on the way to his introductory press conference.
The problem isn’t really that these managers keep getting hired — they, or at least some of them, serve a valuable, if uninspiring purpose — it’s that, increasingly, they’re getting hired to replace each other. Hate begets hate, violence begets violence, mid-table specialist begets mid-table specialist (begets, apparently, whatever Alan Pardew is). But if the value of the stability these managers supposedly bring isn’t the opportunity to start building toward something more, what’s the point?
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Perhaps this is unfair. After all, the current makeup of the Premier League, which contains six teams capable of winning the title and 14 capable of getting relegated, nudges clubs toward low-risk managerial appointments. And so while it’s true that the West Broms and West Hams of the world appear to lack ambition, it might also be true that whatever ambition they once had has been torn away from them, slowly but surely, by a system whose reward for overachievement pales in comparison to its punishment for underperformance.
If this explanation is accurate, it certainly isn’t reassuring. For we are heading toward a bizarre, twilight zone of a future in which two thirds of the Premier League exchange the same 14 managers once a season, at which point we are forced to ask, once again, whether these clubs are earnestly attempting to get better — to be good, even — or whether this is simply the laziest possible way to trick us all into thinking something has changed.