On Sean Dyche, Loyalty
I know it’s not necessarily interesting to have a discussion about football, but I promise that I’ll make this post as enjoyable as possible to provide quality entertainment even for those not disposed to the joys and frustrations of professional football.
Sean Dyche was the manager of Burnley. He’s arguably their most successful manager, taking a small, regional club all the way to European competition. By all accounts, he had to work on relatively insignificant budgets and was the definition of ‘punching above one’s weight’.
Of course, in the comings and goings of a footballing career you would tend to be linked to different teams, and it is rare for a manager to stay in place for a long period of time. Either they get sacked when the going gets tough, or they move on to a larger club. Such is the industry.
Dyche was an outlier here, as he decided to stay with Burnley for many, many years. At the peak of his success, he was being linked with higher profile jobs and handled himself with perfect dignity, never bringing his club into disrepute.
Of course, Burnley are now doing quite poorly, and with a few weeks of the season remaining, Dyche has been sacked.
I’ll get the football analysis out of the way – Dyche was sacked as he was probably asked to make Burnley’s ‘style’ more ‘attractive’. So he managed to bring in a couple of flashy players to do some tricks on the wing under the banner of, I’m speculating, getting Burnley better advertising revenue. Of course, this messed with the tried and tested formula of, to paraphrase, muscular Northern football, and now Dyche has had to pay the price.
What has got me thinking here, is the concept of loyalty.
It goes without saying that Dyche did a good job for Burnley. But more importantly, he stuck with Burnley through thick and thin, all the while being linked to higher profile jobs. It goes without saying that Dyche’s nationality and lack of high profile playing career probably counted against him as clubs tend to book managers from abroad these days, or heroic ex-players like Frank Lampard, but in spite of that, the rumours were there and his track record indicates that he will land himself a decent job at the next opportunity.
I am left wondering, that for all his loyalty to his employers, at the first sign of danger, all of that loyalty has counted for nothing.
I can speculate that if Burnley did get relegated, he would likely have stuck around and worked hard to get them back up again. The fans were on his side, for all intents and purposes, he was Burnley. Now Burnley fans will console themselves that their board will go and hire some other sacked manager in the deluded hopes that this guy will perform a miracle.
It leaves a sour taste in the mouth because it sets the precedent that if you do a good job, are loyal to your employer and do you level best working with the constraints set, that it all counts for nothing.
You could make an argument that the money was important here, but the way Burnley have been set up and maintained, through good management, is to be able to sustainably survive a relegation style event. The wages are not too high, and there is certainly a lucrative market for their players. So the money is a moot point. Perhaps the board wanted a change, and I suppose it’s in their rights to pursue that change.
Presumably this all ends up with Burnley being demoted, and Dyche perhaps managing Everton. I don’t think Sean Dyche ever wanted to manage Everton, though, and was quite happy where he was, relishing the challenge.
But he can’t do that now, because apparently the culture we inhabit is so impatient that finishing 17th in one league is preferable to finishing 1st in a lower one. Or that there exists a managerial class in the UK (and I would wager internationally) who are so incompetent that they don’t know a good thing when it’s staring them in the face.
The board of Burnley have no idea that any of their players are any good, outside of playing within Dyche’s system. Perhaps they’re all terrible and were being held together by the system. Perhaps not. Now they exist in the unknown, which is not a good place to be in terms of operating a business.
I wish Sean Dyche well, and hope that he lands on his feet once he has gotten over the absurdity of his situation. I hope that his enthusiasm for football management hasn’t been dampened by his situation. I hope that one day we can live in a world where loyalty is rewarded, and support is offered even when the current context appears terrifically difficult.
I know that it’s tough to do your best, do good work and still feel like everyone else in the world is being placed ahead of you in the pecking order.
The only thing to do is pick yourself up, and, using the old footballing adage, go again.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I value loyalty highly , in relationships, in work, in communities- it results in a sense of security in which people can grow and start to stretch their wings and start to realise their potential.
Where there is insecurity all kinds of dysfunctional behaviour start to appear. The history of all successful football clubs point to a period when they had a highly committed father’ figure at the helm for several years eg Billy Nicholson at Spurs, Bobby Robson at Ipswich, Ferguson at Man Utd, Clough at Derby .
Football clubs are like families – good fathers produce good families.