Top flight clubs fearful of appointing rookie managers

According to ESPN Mauricio Pochettino has said Frank de Boer’s sacking by Crystal Palace could further dissuade top-flight clubs from appointing young bosses.

Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew returned to the game at Everton and West Brom respectively this week, while West Ham turned to David Moyes and Palace replaced De Boer with 70-year-old Roy Hodgson adding that very few clubs are willing to risk appointing young, inexperienced managers, just as Southampton did with
Pochettino in January 2013.

However the article adds that Pochettino and Watford’s Marco Silva have bucked that trend and excelled in English football and their teams meet at Vicarage Road on Saturday.

Ahead of the game the article says Pochettino was asked whether more clubs should take a risk on younger and less experiences bosses, and Poch said: “Look at the criticism of Crystal Palace because they signed De Boer, and after a few weeks he was sacked.
“The problem was he didn’t have experience in the Premier League. It depends on results. If you sign an experienced manager and you don’t achieve what you want, then why not sign a young manager with different ideas and different energy?”

Pochettino added that he could see similarities between himself and Silva but he is also sympathetic to the pressures faced by risk-averse owners and chairmen when it comes to managerial appointments. “It’s not my responsibility,” he said. “Of course, young managers will always appear with different ideas, but I am not in a position to talk too much because I don’t have experience of running clubs.

Pochettino added “That depends on the owners and sporting directors, who take the decisions on whether they want to risk a young manager or not.
“It’s so difficult because we’re always going to give our opinion after the results, after the decisions. It is so difficult if you are in the position of taking the decisions.
“If you play PlayStation and take decisions — sign players, change the bench, new system — you feel what it means to take the decisions and it has a massive effect in a negative way or in a positive way.

Pochettino also stressed: “As a manager you need to be calm in your mind for taking decisions. Then the board is completely different. They work on a different level, have different pressures.
“They need to take decisions about not only what happens in the changing rooms or with the results but about the dynamic.
“They care for many things, not only football, in a club. That is why it is so complicated, so difficult to manage a football club like Tottenham or another club in the Premier League.”