The pattern is familiar. The promising young manager gets his chance with a Championship club. He leads them to promotion. He talks a good game of pressing and position, shape and transition, passing and control. And then the financial reality of the Premier League strikes. The manager is reluctant to adapt his philosophy, perhaps doesn’t know how to; that is his style, the way he will make it to the top.
They perhaps achieve a couple of notable results. Maybe, people think, this young manager is the real deal. But they play against an elite side and lose. The cumulative effect of playing against high-class opponents every week takes its toll. The players who swaggered through the Championship become error-prone and, in the Premier League, those mistakes are punished. Confidence dwindles. Form deteriorates. Results go against them. There is a cycle of decline.
The manager, realising his attempts to play out from the back, to dominate the ball, are leading to possession being squandered in dangerous areas, changes approach. He goes more direct. His squad isn’t really set up to play like that. Results don’t improve. Relegation follows. Perhaps the manager is sacked; his time in the Premier League is over. At some point he will be given the chance with another Championship club. Sisyphus goes again.
Into which role steps Scott Parker. His feels like almost the archetypal English managerial career. He is personable and articulate, albeit speaking almost entirely in soporific modern manager babble that pours from his mouth like a mountain stream, sweeping training cones, flip charts and columns of data down into the valley.
He looks like a manager, sounds like a manager. Even as a player he gave the impression of command, of knowing what was going on. It should work.
Parker replaced Claudio Ranieri at Craven Cottage at the end of February 2019 with Fulham second bottom of the table, 10 points from safety. Few managers get a job, especially not a first job, in auspicious circumstances. They did win three of those remaining games but lost the rest, and went down: the first relegation on his record.
Fulham were promoted the following season but didn’t win in the Premier League until November: his second relegation. The cycle turned again: he left the club that summer.
Appointed manager of Bournemouth, he led them to automatic promotion, two points behind Fulham.
They beat Aston Villa on the first day of the following season, 2022-23, but conceded 16 without reply in successive league games against Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. Parker spoke of the squad being “unequipped” for the Premier League. Three days later, he left the club.
To an extent, he was done by the calendar, which served up a brutal start. But Parker was also the victim of experience; he knew how hard it is to keep going week after week against better-resourced, compromising principles to try to scrape a few points.
His fault was to acknowledge that in public: the job of a manager is to a large degree a confidence trick, to instil in the players a sense of their own greatness so they achieve heights in excess of their ability.
His appeal to realism was not helped when Gary O’Neil took over and hauled Bournemouth to 15th – not that that was enough for O’Neil to keep the job; he too had to find another struggling club and start again. But that’s how it tends to be.
It’s very hard to break into the top half of the Premier League, so few British managers have that experience and clubs with aspirations to be in the top half tend not to appoint them, preferring those who have shown promise in arguably less taxing leagues abroad.
There is an obvious solution for British managers: go abroad. Parker did that, joining the Belgian champions Club Brugge in December 2022.
He lasted 67 days, winning just two of 12 games. The Dutch winger Noa Lang, one of Brugge’s stars, did seem to enjoy how Parker worked, and a congested fixture list meant there was little time to instil his ideas, but equally Parker never seemed to have a grasp of the league, tweaked the team constantly, played players out of position and seemed to resent the chief executive’s well-known desire to be involved in tactics and team selection.
To an extent that period in Belgium can be ignored. It is relatively common for perfectly decent managers go to a new country and fail to fit in, but those 67 days may make other foreign clubs less likely to employ him. And so Parker is back pushing his boulder up the Championship again, this time with Burnley.
Like Fulham and Bournemouth, they are a mezzanine club, seemingly too good for the Championship but never comfortable in the Premier League.
Burnley themselves are perhaps slightly stung that, having remained loyal to Vincent Kompany as they slid to relegation, he became a target for Bayern Munich, an offer that couldn’t be refused. It is probably significant that Parker has been named as head coach rather than manager, as Kompany was, indicating both that his role will be less wide-ranging than the Belgian’s and that the club is keen to establish a framework based on principles rather than the identity of an individual manager.
The retention of Kompany’s first-team coach, Mike Jackson, and the appointment of the assistant coach Henrik Jensen, which was planned before Kompany’s departure, are part of the process of establishing a structure around the head coach.
Five players have left and more outgoings are probable, but Burnley should still have one of the stronger squads in the division, which is why they are second favourites behind Leeds for promotion.
Parker is used to that: every time he’s taken over a club in the Championship, it’s been one that has recently suffered relegation, still receiving parachute payments. Promotion has always been expected.
Just as the tendency is to sympathise when a manager takes one of the mezzanine clubs down, so there must be a degree of scepticism when he takes one of them up. And that is the curse of the English manager.
What he achieved at Fulham and Bournemouth demonstrates Parker is not a bad manager. It’s far harder to say if he’s actually good or whether he’s just riding the yo-yo.
