Each manager Levy has hired has had a better winning percentage than his predecessor. That shows to me that he's getting it exactly right, gradually building up squad quality year on year and sacking the manager as soon as they show signs of running out of steam.
The club, Levy and the DOF (to a lesser extent) are the backdrop to the 'project'. The manager is like the players, here while they can make a positive contribution, out when there's a profit to be made that can go back into the club, or when an upgrade is available
Yes and the head coach is a kind of expendable position for us really. Any "project" is being run by the club/transfer committee/technical directors with input from the coaching staff only.
In business as well, regular changes of the managerial structure are seen as healthy.
Most of the successful clubs in Europe change managers regularly. Ferguson was one of the few exceptions, but that was because, IMO, he was someone willing to change himself and his own style and build remarkably different teams with different styles over the years. He was also someone that regularly changed his No 2 and coaching staff to shake things up a bit.
You look at Wenger at Arsenal and the way they've went from a progressive, dominating force ahead of their time, to stagnation and then reversal of fortunes to see what can happen when the same guy keeps the top job for too long.
You can actually see with us this season that we've been so poorly managed, but the quality in the squad has prevented us from falling too far down the table and points wise, we're pretty much where we have been for the last few seasons, if not better PPG wise. We can still match our record ever Premiership points tally can't we?
The performance of the first team therefore isn't even necessarily dependent on who the head coach is. The club is so structurally sound that even having written off the coaching team midway through the season and installed a temporary fix, we have maintained a very consistent performance level which is basically beat everyone below 4th place, lose to everyone 4th and above.
The season might be seen as a dissaster due to heavy defeats against the clubs that occupy the top three positions, but considering we've bought 7 overseas players and sold our best player, we've maintained what was probably an expected performance level.
Infact, looking at people's predictions before the season, many on here were claiming 7th or 8th due to the loss of Bale and high turnover of playing staff.
In this disaster of a season we've guaranteed a top 7 position, with likely 6th place finish minimum. We've taken 4 points off Everton, 4 points off United, 6 points off Southampton, 3 off Saudi Sportswashing Machine (and dominated the game we lost against them at home, but lost because Krul turned into a magic octopus on the day), pretty much spannered the rest of the league comfortably, especially since Sherwood took over.
We're also likely to finish with one of our highest ever Premiership points hauls.
Levy has the club extremely stable performance-wise.
I'm pretty sure with a more settled squad with a few key additions in the summer, our performance against the top 3 will improve and we'll maintain a consistent performance against the rest of the division.
