Titus Bramble

It's not just me!

Sacking Your Manager

I sympathise, I really do Blackburn Rovers fans and Bolton Wanderers fans. Your teams are rubbish, and who can you have a go at?

1. The manager.
2. The board of directors.

The trouble is that both Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers are in financial trouble - nothing too major you understand, just a few tens of millions worth of debt (!). Sacking the manager, however bad they are, is an expensive business. Their contract needs to be paid up in full, and I believe that both men have a while to run on their individual deals. Not to mention their backroom staff. The costs mount!

Even if you can afford to sack the manager and pay him off, the new manager will demand a transfer kitty for January's transfer window in a desperate bid to stave off relegation, and if you struggled to pay off the last incumbent, where is the money going to come from for fresh transfer funds?

So you could get rid of the board of directors. These directors need to be quite well off as they will foot the bill if the club goes under, so Joe Average from 27 Acacia Road can't just turn up at the ground and demand a seat on the board, he'd need to buy his way in. And what with the current economic climate, the number of people who can afford to do this is getting increasingly smaller. Not just in Britain, but worldwide.

I'm sure that both will eventually be handed their P45s at some point this season, but don't be surprised if it's a last resort affair.

Wolverhampton Wanderers: you have no excuse with Mick McCarthy as you could well afford to get rid of him!

Manchesters United and City Out Of Champions League

Is this really a disaster for English football?

It's certainly a disaster for each club's accountant(s), with millions of pounds in revenue disappearing in 90 minutes. It's great for London with Arsenal and Chelsea having made it through, but ironically it will be the Manchester clubs battling it out for the Premier league title in April/May.

Personally I think that the two Manchester clubs' elimination from the Champions League is a good thing for English football - maybe the game wise up up and get over itself a little. Football in this country has got far to big for its boots in my opinion ans something like this could actually be of benefit in the long run. Less revenue could mean that young English players are preferred to expensive foreign imports as the money won't be there to pay for them, and they will get the opportunity to play alongside the quality of player already here.

I have to say that other than the financial benefits of the Champions League that are an attractive prospect to any club, I can't actually stand the competition, so having less of it on TV is an added bonus for me.