This is probably an overstated phenomenon. Specifically the ongoing failure of the Golden Generation crop of players to succeed in management. Rooney’s failure to make a mark as a head coach, while continuing to find work as a head coach, is in keeping with a more localised culture of entitlement and celebrity fawning. Not that English football should start feeling too good about any of this. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. The culture is more robust than this, as various hedge-fund gunslingers have already discovered at Premier League level. The Rooney interlude is in its own way a tick for the Championship, for its status as a hard-edged sporting competition. English football can still revolt against this kind of thing. Empty glitz, corporate disruptor-chat, Tom Brady presented as a kind of shiny celebrity trinket to dazzle the fawning locals. Where Eustace had excelled at working with a relatively limited squad (net transfer spend in the last three years: £1m) Rooney came with no experience of success on a shoestring.Īnd there will, of course, be a degree of told-you-so at this outcome, even something oddly reassuring. What happened here, exactly? There has been a suggestion from journalists close to the club of a mismatch of method and reality, of players weighed down by an excess of information and tactical blueprints. It is rare to have such an instant impact on any team, and even rarer for that impact to be so profoundly negative, to the extent it is hard to think of many more obvious acts of mid-season self-harm by any club board. Rooney’s Blues won two of them, failed to score on six occasions and went from sixth to 20th in the table. Those 15 games in charge were desperate stuff. Rooney sacked: a look back at his 83 days at Birmingham – video report Except of course razzmatazz in the manager’s seat is generally asking for trouble.įast forward once again to Monday afternoon and Rooney was reduced to talking about Jimmy Savile chants and pleading with his own board – so often the managerial death rasp – for new players, before the inevitable reckoning up on Tuesday morning. His appointment was also undeniably in keeping with that stated culture of razzmatazz. Rooney is a popular figure, deeply committed to succeeding as a coach. Knighthead’s co-founder Tom Wagner, the kind of magnetic, bald, middle-aged financier who talks a lot about “dynamic scenarios”, could be seen celebrating wildly in the directors’ box as Lukas Jutkiewicz scored a 91st-minute winner.įast forward to 9 October and John Eustace was fired as manager, a move justified with some blather about the need for “a culture of ambition” and “a no-fear playing style”, both of which were apparently present most obviously in the form of Rooney, whose previous managerial career offered zero hard evidence of either of these things.Īs a neutral, it was hard not to want it to work. Rewind to 12 August and the first home game under the ownership of Knighthead Capital was also against Leeds, a high-energy occasion gingered up by a razzmatazz of music and fireworks. His final act as manager was a bruising 3-0 defeat at Elland Road on New Year’s Day. But the enablers of Wayne are still very much in the house.įootball loves a circular morality tale, and the story of Rooney and the Blues is at least one of these.

For the club’s supporters this will be the real significance of a second managerial sacking in three months under the new ownership. Although in the case of Birmingham, there were a fair few giveaways from the start.

Understandably, Wayne has yet to take this self-limiting principle on board. Any club that can weigh up all the facts and still conclude that Rooney is the answer: this is exactly the kind of club Rooney should avoid like the plague.

This is the basic paradox here, the Wayne-as-Groucho scenario.

Barney exe