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“There’s almost a little bit of hope because you think you might have hit rock bottom,” says Adam Drury on the excellent From The Rookery End, a Watford podcast that rarely runs short of material. Watford have just lost 1-0 at Millwall. “It can’t possibly be worse than last Saturday.”
Those eight words roughly encapsulate all of English football matchday culture: it can’t possibly be worse than last Saturday. Hope is too often sold as the inevitable prelude to failure and, although that’s often accurate, it’s not why we do it. Instead, hope is the response to failure. It’s not the desperate belief that our football clubs will always be good, but that they won’t always be quite this bad.
A week after that defeat at the New Den, Watford sacked manager Valerien Ismael. Cue the great Watford cliche, their USP in English football, viral tweets about how many managers have called Vicarage Road their temporary home.
So as not to disappoint, you understand: 19 full-time managers in the 11 years of Pozzo family ownership, 13 in five years (they’re speeding up) and only one of the last 18 reaching 50 matches in charge. Ismael fell agonisingly short of that with 41.
Before the inevitable scorn, we must point out that all this – the hiring and firing culture, the rampant short-termism, the use of the club network for transfer activity – did work for a long while, even when many were crying foul about its nonsense.
It did go against the grain, did rail against assumed logic and financial sense and clearly was expensive to sack a manager every nine months, but Watford coped.
Then, sacking a manager was not proof of a failed strategy, but was the strategy itself.
In 2014-15, Watford got promoted because they changed manager mid-season. In 2020-21, they proved that it wasn’t a fluke by repeating the trick. They changed managers immediately after promotion and finished 13th.
They enjoyed the longest run of top-flight seasons since the 1980s and had seven managers in five years. Not every supporter liked it and fewer thought it was ultimately sustainable but, for a while, life was good.
That mood has shifted, gradually and then hurtling towards outright resentment. It started with their pathetic 2021-22 Premier League season, in which the club’s decision-makers seemed to prove only an incapability to learn from mistakes.
During the previous relegation, Watford had sacked a manager in September, had another in charge for only three months and finished 19th with the third, an experienced Englishman. This time: sacked a manager in October, had another in charge for only three months and finished 19th with the third, an even more experienced Englishman.
After Roy Hodgson left, Watford appointed something, and someone, different. Rob Edwards was the first British manager aged under 40 of the Pozzo era. I was at his first league match in charge, a home win over Sheffield United. After full-time, Edwards did a lap of the pitch to urge supporters to go with him on the journey. More of a short walk, actually; Edwards was sacked after nine more league games.
Edwards could have succeeded anywhere, but Luton Town hurt Watford supporters most. In the same season that Edwards started managing their club, he ended it with Luton above Watford for the first time since 1997 and, most frustratingly, promoted to the Premier League.
Watford fans never hid from their truth, but Edwards’ promotion caused a spike of angry concern. This was proof that the environment in which a manager operates is as important – if not more – as the identity of the manager himself. Occasionally, a coach may enjoy circumstances that postpone reality: right players, right style, right motivational ability, right twists of fate at the right time. But the environment will almost always win in the end.
Watford are not alone in that club, either in their own league or those directly above and below. They are merely an extreme case. But the same principle applies and it is making life harder.
You can change managers regularly and occasionally enjoy a short-term lift, the dopamine hit of the honeymoon period. But can you build anything permanent? Increasingly, clubs outside the financial elite must build their way to progress.
Interestingly, the same is true of supporters. Watford supporters do not hate every minute, or even every match. At Birmingham City last weekend, under another caretaker head coach, they staved off fears of relegation to League One with a gutsy 1-0 win, only their second in 13 matches.
In those moments of heady celebration, you can focus on the minutiae and bask in its glow. It wasn’t worse than last Saturday.
But longer term, those same supporters don’t really know what to believe in. Watford have sold so many key players over the last two years. Because they were relegated after a single Premier League season, their parachute payments stop this year. The squad is small. Watford have used fewer players than any other Championship club this season. The high-value, saleable assets are running out.
And then what? If you build a club behind a vision, an overarching, underpinning plan that perseveres through everything else, that becomes your crutch when everything else wavers.
If you build a club with an anti-vision, a determination to keep changing the actors until you find your perfect play, nothing exists when it stops working. That is the Pozzo purgatory, a grand football club left wondering what it really stands for and how it might ever change with this family calling the shots.
