This season hasn’t started in a fashion that Manuel Pellegrini would have hoped for, or indeed expected. This has led to some fans calling for his head, or some debating whether City are about to cut their losses on the Chilean and move on to the next manager. To me, the very suggestion of this is ridiculous. He’s only been here a year and a bit, and look what he’s done for the club. That doesn’t automatically become irrelevant just because of a bad couple of months.
Let’s start off on a statistical note and compare this season’s start with last season’s. As we well know, last year didn’t really start off too well away from home; it took us until October to win away in the league. At this point last season, City had lost three of their nine league games, all away from home (Cardiff, Aston Villa and Chelsea) and won five of the other six. That left them on 16 points from nine games. This year? 17 points from the same number of games. Looking at the teams we’ve played so far – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Spurs – one could probably say it’s been a tougher start for The Blues, yet they have more points. In theory, it only gets easier from here too.
I feel if we did end up sacking Pellegrini, we’d struggle to find a replacement now that could stand in for a long period of time. Managers like Guardiola who most of us would want us to aim for are taken and happy, whilst the more hipster choices probably don’t want to leave their jobs in October to take this one. The summer is the time for that. We’d end up with one of two scenarios – we’d have a caretaker manger (probably Cousillas, who stood in for Pellegrini when he was banished to the stands in a couple of our Champions League games) or we’d end up with a permanent manager who isn’t good enough and would end up being sacked in the summer due to underperformance. So much for job security.
Bringing in a new manager two months from the start of the season is likely to affect the squad on a deeper level than a possible change in the way we play; suddenly there’s an atmosphere of uncertainty around the club that hasn’t been there since the final season under Mancini and probably wasn’t there before then either. That could easily affect the performances of the players and in turn put an obstacle in the way of any success City would hope to have under a new manager.
A lot of the time when we criticise certain aspects of club other than our own on social media, words like ‘obsessed’ get bandied around unnecessarily. However in this case I think I’ll take the risk and say that if we were to sack Manuel Pellegrini after two or three months of the season we’re becoming a bit like Chelsea in some respects. They went through a lot of managers in the first decade or so of Abramovich’s reign at the club (they’re currently on their eleventh, but Mourinho has had two spells, meaning only ten different managers have been in charge, and some were caretaker spells, such as in the case of Ray Wilkins who only took charge of one game). On the contrary, I’m quite proud that we’re only on our third permanent manager since the 2008 takeover, with Brian Kidd’s spell as caretaker manager making it 4 managers. However if we were to sack Manuel Pellegrini that feeling of stability that I think the managers always have unless something goes drastically wrong, is gone forever. We don’t want and can’t afford that.
From what I can tell, the majority of people calling for Pellegrini’s head have very high expectations of this City squad; and rightly so. But I think some of us (including myself at times) need to rein in those expectations. A few weeks ago I saw an interesting stat that says it took Chelsea and Manchester United a number of years from winning their first Premier League title to winning their first Champions League title (United took six, 1993-1999, whilst Chelsea needed eight, 2004-2012). I used this stat in an article a while ago, and it still stands true. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but did they sack the man in charge if he didn’t get it done quickly enough? Of course not.
Do Pellegrini’s achievements at the club make him impossible to sack? Not even remotely. He did the club a great service last season with that domestic double, but that doesn’t make him untouchable. But is it meaningless? Definitely not. He’s shown that he can succeed at this club and with this squad, so we need to give him time to achieve his goals. He was targeted to get five trophies in five seasons, and as far as I’m concerned he’s on track.
