Crafty Canaries gain from the long game

ONLY five sides in Premier League history have collected fewer points than Norwich managed last season.

- Chris Dunlavy

By any measure, Daniel Farke’s men endured a woeful campaign. But does that represent a failure? Certainly not.

A toddler who tumbles to earth whilst attempting those first faltering steps would not be considered a failure by any reasonable person.

Nor the maths student who fluffs an equation or the trainee programmer who botches a line of code.

We’d call that learning - and we’d be right. Yet very few of those who run football clubs apply that same basic logic to their own business. Why?

Grumbling supporters. Financial pressures. An unrealistic view on the likelihood of achieving promotion or avoiding relegation.

Pressures

Several factors play their part in the sort of hair-trigger reactions that this week saw Shrewsbury’s Sam Ricketts become the eighth managerial casualty of 2020-21. But the inescapable fact is that they are all misguided.

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that changes of management make no difference to the performance of a team.

Dr Bas ter Weel, a Dutch economist, conducted one such study in which he analysed every dismissal in the Eredivisie from 1988 to 2004.