Short-term Palace are so depressing

WHEN Antonio Conte leaves Tottenham he will become the 10th Premier League sacking of the season. One more and that will be a record. So we really need David Moyes and Brendan Rodgers to hang on.

We know why clubs do it. It’s the money. Back at the start of the Premier League three decades ago, the financial gap between our top two leagues was not as vast. So in the 1992-93 season only two men lost their jobs. In 1995-96 only one. This is not a coincidence. Nowadays nobody thinks they can afford to get relegated. They can but that’s another conversation. Meanwhile everybody in the Championship thinks they can’t afford not to get promoted. So there have been 15 sackings there, too. The statistics don’t really support the methods. Of the 39 sackings made from March onwards in Premier League history, only seven have led to an improvement in League position. So sacking managers is not only expensive and painful, it usually does no good at all. Which brings us to Crystal Palace and Roy Hodgson. Palace, who are 12th in the League, replaced Hodgson with Patrick Vieira in 2021 because they wanted a different direction. They wanted to play better football with younger and, if possible, homegrown players. They told us they wished to build a different kind of future.

But less than two years on, at the first hint of trouble, Palace have abandoned all that. Vieira is gone and Hodgson, 75, is back. Like a dog chasing its tail, Palace have shown themselves to be as desperately short-termist as everybody else. How depressing that feels.