Good post. As long as we have a new manager (and his backroom staff) in place by the time the players report back to pre-season training it's no big deal.
As a side note I heard an interesting story yesterday from someone who is related to a current Premiership Manager through marriage (not the wife), and this manager is good mates with Redknapp. It's no secret that Levy and Redknapp haven't got on for years and Levy wanted Redknapp out ages ago. Redknapp has been a dead man walking ever since saving us from relegation and even in footballing circles people are very surprised what he managed to do with us. Most people didn't think he was capable, even his friends in the football community.
He said that Levy's offering of Redknapp a contract earlier this year was complete flimflam. It was no more than a token offer, and the reason it was offered was in an attempt to force the FA's hand to come in and make a bid to buy Harry out of his contract. I countered this saying why was Harry backed during the court case if the club wanted him out so badly, and the reply I got was that Levy knew if Harry got sent down he'd get zero compensation and that the club would rather he be found innocent. AVB was struggling at Chelsea at the time and the general feeling was that Chelsea may make a move to acquire Redknapp. Then Capello got fired and it threw everything up in the air.
The FA never approached Spurs about hiring Redknapp BUT he was a popular choice. The reason they never approached him, was because they didn't want to deal with Spurs over buying him out his contract. It simply wasn't cost efficient as they'd just spunked loads of money paying Capello off. They would then have to pay Spurs a load of money to take Redknapp AND then pay Redknapp a steep salary too.
Because Redknapp clearly wanted the England job, Chelsea never bothered approaching and made RDM their caretaker manager whilst they re-evaluated their options. Bit like Redknapp with us, RDM was never meant to be a long term option but winning the Champions League threw another spanner in the works for Spurs in more ways than the obvious.
After Hodgson was announced as England Manager, the assumption was that Redknapp would see the season out with Spurs and then we'd make money on him when Chelsea poached him in the Summer. We would have fired him the day after the final day of the season, but with the possibility of Chelsea compensation money Levy wanted to hold out and see who Chelsea appointed as their new Manager. When it became clear that RDM was going to be offered the job, it was clear we weren't going to get any compensation for him and decided to offer him mutual termination instead. Redknapp was tipped off by a sympathetic board member that this was going to happen and was advised to hire an agent to negiotiate a settlement fee.
As for our replacement Manager, not much known there. Everton were informally approached about Moyes earlier this year when Redknapp was first linked with the England job (prompting Everton to unofficially sound out other Managers also) but that's gone quiet and he looks like he is staying put. General feeling is that we'll try and get someone already out of contract so we don't have to pay any sort of compensation package.
