Tipping Point: Nigel Pearson’s isolation speaks volumes about modern soccer

It seems part of the redemptive narrative surrounding Leicester City's throwback season that their former manager, Nigel Pearson, remains unemployed while his successor, Claudio Ranieri, is at the helm of one of the most unlikely success stories the English game has ever seen.

And it is a wonderful story. Only the contrary cannot rally to the idea of top-level football not being entirely reduced to a competition between the biggest chequebooks: it strikes to the heart of why people love the game.

That it is Ranieri who is in charge of Leicester adds charm to the story: it is very hard not to warm to a man so obviously capable of keeping the game’s absurdities in healthy perspective.

If that quality has been elevated to near-saintliness by an adoring commentariat, it is hardly the Italian’s fault. Such has been the turbulent nature of Ranieri’s long career, though, that he is unlikely to fall for it either.

This after all is Chelsea’s former ‘Tinkerman’, its lovable but ultimately dispensable ex-manager whose long career around Europe had him safely consigned to a box reserved for those characters rated shy of the very top jobs.

Such a reputation was firmly in place when taking over from Pearson last summer, a move not greeted euphorically by Leicester fans at the time, but one now acclaimed as genius since success can both alter and forgive any reputation.

Reputation change requires opportunity, however, and the one nagging piece of grit in the big Leicester picture remains Pearson.

He fundamentally built this miracle, assembled the squad that earned promotion, then unlikely Premiership survival, lost his job through nothing he directly did, yet remains conspicuously jobless, seemingly on the basis of a reputation that surely says a lot more about football than it does him.

If Ranieri is famously nice, Pearson has found himself filed under ‘controversial’, a conveniently loaded shorthand phrase for anyone prepared to drift even slightly outside the vast sea of carefully anodyne, hash-tagged corporate-speak rubbish football floats in these days.

And there’s little doubt Pearson is partial to a pose, fond of portraying himself as a hard man, including a wonderful story of once fighting off wild dogs in the Carpathian mountains while on a walking holiday.

Pearson has famously made football headlines by holding down Crystal Palace’s James McArthur on the sideline, an incident hysterically condemned as thuggish rather than plain juvenile.

He also told a fan to “f**k off and die” after presumably that fan wished him felicitous good wishes. And he christened one  reporter a “p***k” and called another an “ostrich” in press conferences.

News agenda

It isn’t so long since none of this would have even made the news agenda and the public agenda wouldn’t have fallen apart in the process either. However, for the insatiable 24/7 news cycle, Pearson’s behaviour has been more than enough to earn the dreaded controversial tag. And it has clearly cost him.

So what if he gave a fan a taste of his own foul-mouthed medicine? Presumably the game suddenly got so delicate at the same time players and managers stopped squaring up and journalists decided blunt straight-forwardness didn’t make better copy than interminable waffle.

The Leicester owners didn’t bullet Pearson after any of those incidents but it was hardly surprising they did last summer when three Leicester players, including Pearson’s son, filmed a sex video in Thailand.

Their racial abuse of the women involved was ethically dreadful. Since the Leicester owners are Thai, it was also politically moronic. Pearson’s familial defence was as predictable as his inevitable dismissal for doing so.

It’s baffling though that this litany of “controversy” is enough to make potential employers wary of employing someone so obviously able at his job, however personally prickly he might be.

Nothing in that list of supposed shame even approaches the depths to which José Mourinho, for instance, has sunk in the last decade. Mourinho, however, carefully picks his fights, so it’s perhaps little surprise he’s waiting on Manchester United while Pearson can’t even get Sunderland.

Moral and bright

It would be too glib to portray Pearson in too bluff terms. Those who know him, and significantly this still includes the Leicester players, paint a picture of a highly moral and bright individual in possession of a low bullshit threshold which occasionally leads him to extend to people the courtesy of speaking his mind.

This clearly has the potential to make life uncomfortable for those in charge of football clubs but in what is famously a results business it is remarkable that Pearson’s pedigree seems too inadequate to overcome such a cartoon reputation.

The team he built is a throwback to the days when Brian Clough could win the league with other middle-rank midlands teams, Derby County and Nottingham Forest.

Clough was an uncomfortable fit for owners too, someone who spoke bluntly rather than spouting mountains of platitudinous waffle. Sometimes it got Clough into trouble but not so much that it kept him unemployed. Football was able to accommodate someone a little different.

Now it seems difference has to be more homogenised, a certain, PG-rated, cosy kind of difference, or of devious variety favoured by operators like Mourinho.

Pearson’s employment status ultimately speaks volumes about football’s inability or unwillingness to accommodate someone unable to play the bullshit game very well. It also says a lot about how important the bullshit game has become.

In contrast, his ability to get the job done in the game that actually counts is written all over Leicester’s remarkable season.

It doesn’t do to get too Pete Best about this but if the team Pearson built are a throwback, their former manager’s fate is a very modern example of how the old game really has irrevocably changed.