Big, hard Sam will be in tears over this
IN almost every respect, Sam Allardyce was – and is – a thoroughly-modern football manager.
But in the end, it was the one area in which he remained stubbornly “old-school” that proved his undoing.
Let’s be honest – cash is the major motivating factor in day-to-day life for the vast majority of us.
It’s the reason we get out of bed every morning and go to work. It’s the reason we do almost everything we do. Big Sam is no different. But I still can’t get my head around why, having just accepted his dream job, he agreed to meet complete strangers and talk so unguardedly about things he should not have been talking about at all.
Why on earth would he engage in a discussion about how to get around the ban on third-party player ownership put in place by the FA – his employer, remember – back in 2008?! dream come true, the absolute pinnacle of everything he spent his career working towards.
It’s all gone now, just like that, and I guarantee you that, despite his reputation as a tough guy, Big Sam will be in tears about the whole thing.
He jetted off to his villa in Spain after the story broke. But he won’t be doing any relaxing, won’t be catching any rays.
He’ll be going over and over it in his head, playing through all the ‘what if’ scenarios, wishing he could turn the clock back and turn down those meetings.
But the truth is, it’s too late for that. The damage is done.
I think this affair, and some of the other stuff a newspaper investigation has revealed, will be a turning point for English football and how it does its business.
The days of the “old-school” manager running a club from top to bottom – training players, setting out his team on a Saturday, dealing with contracts, buying and selling – are over.
Clubs and managers need to wise up. Then if they’re doing what they shouldn’t be doing, they need to clean up.
That it has needed an England manager to lose his job to get us to this point is sad, but I hope this is a low point we never reach again. Sam will hope the same thing. Ultimately, he has got no one to blame but himself, and he will know that.
I bet that is what will hurt the most.