Ken Early: Sherwood just another Villa manager who couldn’t make it to Moscow

Taking the Aston Villa job has in recent years become the Premier League managerial equivalent of marching on Moscow. History tells us it usually doesn't end well.

In February, Tim Sherwood arrived at Villa Park ablaze with can-do spirit. On Saturday, he told reporters who had been asking if he was worried about getting the sack: "It's out of my control. I can only control what I control. On Monday I'll be back working as hard as I've done since I've come to this football club."

Sherwood was sacked before he ever made it back in for work today. It was fitting that his last comments as Villa manager touched on the issue of control. Control, it seems, had become central to the tension that eventually snapped the relationship between Sherwood and the Villa hierarchy.

When Tim Sherwood signed his contract with Villa he knew he would not have full control of signings. He would share responsibility with a group including the owner, Randy Lerner, who would have ultimate control over all decisions; the chief executive, Tom Fox; the director of scouting and recruitment, Paddy Riley; and, since July, the sporting director, Hendrik Almstadt.

Lack of faith

Lerner had been scarred by his experience under previous managers when Villa habitually signed older players on the back nine of their careers on the sort of wages that made it difficult to move them on.

Together they signed 13 players during the summer, at a combined outlay of around £50 million. Most of them were in their early 20s, with the 33-year-old Joleon Lescott the only veteran in the group. As Villa took a disastrous four points from 10 games, Sherwood found it increasingly difficult to conceal his lack of faith in the players who arrived.

“We can’t do any more as coaches and managers,” he said on Saturday, “we’re working as hard as we can. We’re in a position where every single one of our players has to play well for us to get anything out of any football match . . . There’s a lack of quality . . . [the players] can only give us what they can give us, we can’t turn them into superstars.”

Just as Villa's committee set-up obviously resembles the transfer committee which has attracted a lot of negative comment at Liverpool, Sherwood's line was reminiscent of Brendan Rodgers's remark, delivered in the aftermath of a nervy 3-2 win over Sherwood's Villa: "If you give me the tools, I will do the work."

That comment, with its obvious implication that Rodgers was doing the best that could possibly be done with the duff hand he’d been dealt, did not play well with the club, and soon afterwards Rodgers was relieved of his duties.

Sherwood was saying that his players simply weren’t good enough and if he was therefore effectively telling Villa’s board that he couldn’t win matches in the Premier League with this squad, then they had little choice but to fire him and try to find a manager who thought he could.

The new manager will have to be comfortable with a couple of concepts Sherwood and Rodgers sometimes seemed to struggle with.

First of all, reacting to defeats by dropping a series of heavy hints that you would rather not have signed these particular guys is not the behaviour of a team player, and is likely to result in the sack. Second, managers have to accept that control of transfers will be shared with others. This is a perfectly reasonable consequence of the fact that Premier League clubs are now shopping for players in a global marketplace. It’s impossible for managers to keep up with the global transfer market in addition to all the other work they have to do. They have to work with other people who help with that task.

Accepting this as a fact shouldn’t really be too difficult for managers of Sherwood’s and Rodgers’s generation, who have never known any other environment. They came into the industry long after the days when managerial business was conducted at motorway service stations.

This is not to say that the advent of the recruitment support structure has made the manager’s job any easier – quite the contrary. Traditionally, the ultimate source of a manager’s authority was that the players knew he controlled whether they played and whether they had a future at the club.

Political conflicts

The responsibility for signing players, and the power that goes with it, has been diffused. If a sporting director takes the initiative in signing a couple of players who end up rotting in the reserves, the sporting director looks bad. That creates scope for political conflicts that never existed before. Everything has become more complicated.

But this is a reflection of the increasing complexity of the world in which these clubs have to operate. They are up against competitors who are using every new informational tool to monitor tens of thousands of players in countries all around the world. If they don’t do it too, they will fall behind. The job is simply too big for one man. You have to have a group.

So the transfer committee model, while far from perfect, is still less risky than the alternative of placing all the power in the hands of your manager and hoping he is not incompetent.