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What price Neil Lennon football manager?

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Neil Lennon Scottish CupDown Chelsea way they are all getting excited about the new Jose Mourinho, Andres Villas-Boas, the 31-year-old who has replaced Carlo Ancelotti as manager at Stamford Bridge.

With a buy out clause of £13m in his contract from Porto  and the Europa League on his cv Villas-Boas is very much the new kid on the block with managers dominating the Premiership headlines as much as player transfers.

Alex McLeish’s remarkable move across Birmingham has the city in a froth with the Championship club demanding compensation despite their former manager’s ‘resignation’.

A transfer market looks close to developing for manager’s- who could put a price on the job that Neil Lennon did last season after two season’s of destructive management at Celtic Park?

Howard Hockin of Football Fancast takes a look at the process leading to the management market on Football Fancast

Twitter is full of information, and some of it is quite useful. Last week I learnt that the £13.3m due to Porto to trigger the release clause for the new 33-year-old manager, Andrés Villas-Boas, took the amount spent on hiring and compensating managers and coaching staff alone at Stamford Bridge to an estimated £69m since Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003 (or to put it another way, £1 for each time Villas-Boas has been compared to Jose Mourinho in a tabloid).

Shock, horror. All that wasted money, spent on people that don’t even contribute on the pitch, oodles of cash that could have been spent on another preening narcissistic galacticos or two.

Or is it a waste?

What does £13.3m get you nowadays? Not Phil Jones, not close to Jordan Henderson. Just over half a Joleon Lescott, a quarter of Fernando Torres, or ¾ of Ashley Young with a year left on his contract. A new roof on the main stand perhaps, maybe a whole new identikit stand, or you could build 1/70th of Wembley, or even better, purchase three chicken burger meals there. The alternative is you could get one of the most highly-rated young managers in the world. It’s a no-brainer really.

For a couple of million Wigan got a manager who kept the club in the Premiership on a shoestring. Bargain. Harry Redknapp cost £5m to buy-out, and got them in the Champions League. As Henry Winter wrote in the Telegraph over two years ago: “it is surely time that managers, a club’s most significant recruit, started moving for compensation more commensurate with their impact.”

When you think about it, that amount spent on managerial and staffing changes by Abramovich is not that severe for an 8-year period when the success of the club depends on the choices. It’s fair enough to criticise the choices he has made, by not giving managers a chance to succeed, but the spending on off-field staff is not that illogical. A bit more patience and he could have saved a lot of money. But let’s not forget that during that time he has pumped £739m into the club in total.

The fact is that the manager of a club, any manager, is always more important than any individual player at his club. His influence shapes results more than anything else. Why wouldn’t he command a fee? If a club wants a player contracted to another club, they must agree a fee to buy out that contract – it seems logical the same rules apply if trying to poach an in-work manager.

Another plus for managers is that their shelf life too is potentially better. Alex Ferguson has had 25 years at Manchester United alone now (and counting), longer than the whole of a footballer’s career. That shelf life may be about to increase too, as a trend is emerging for younger managers. Roberto Martinez and Boas are signs of this, though Boas has always intimated that he doesn’t see himself managing to a ripe old age, due to the pressures of the job.

It is not quite that simple though. There is one big difference – when a club wants to get rid of a manager under contract, they have to pay him off – if they want to get rid of a player, they’ll get a transfer fee. Contracts for players are there to protect an asset, so that should they leave recompense is received. Managers on the other hand can resign from a contract, walk away and take another job.

It is no wonder that Birminghamare furious at Alex McLeish joining Aston Villa, and want compensation. There seems little doubt he quit knowing he was a shoe-in for the job at Villa Park. But when a manager leaves a club to which he was still contracted for another club, he will be deemed to have terminated his contract early (a breach of the contract) meaning that the club will need to be compensated for this loss.

For those reasons, it would be ludicrous to suggest that managers’ fees should be higher than players. Players are tied to contracts far more securely, and this partly explains the sort of fees being bandied about at the moment for their services. But it is perfectly sane to expect managers to cost clubs too. It is the single most important signing a club can make.

And thus, transfer fees for managers may soon become the norm. Perhaps Chelsea will themselves have put a release fee into Villas-Boas’s contract. Perhaps soon we’ll be discussing the market values for managers like we do with players – their age, loyalty, track-record, wages or injury record (less likely).

If that does happen, it won’t be long before we’ll see the first £20m manager and soon they’ll be having strops at not earning as much as those they manage. I’ve even seen it suggested online that managers, like players, should have transfer windows, and they would not be permitted to move outside these periods. It seems football is about to get even more expensive.

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  • bhoylondon67 says:

    I know this is the wrong place to comment but rumours are Hearts and Dundee Utd are seeing next season as a fantastic opposition opportunity to take 2nd place in the league behind the hoops and are extremely reluctant to do any business with Rangers.

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