Whether you think Mark Hughes was saved from the sack by the late strike on Saturday by Jamie Walker in the dying embers of injury time to a team in Harrogate Town that in reality we shouldn’t even be playing, or you think he should be given more time, sometimes life serves up an opportunity that changes all of that. My personal opinion about Mark Hughes hasn’t changed since the moment we hired him, unlike the growing number of voices among fans who are currently re-writing history (again) and blaming Ryan Sparks for his decision to bring in a manager that has turned out to be a dud, when the fact is that given the same choice to do it all again, they’d have done exactly the same thing. I say again because what is happening right now is a carbon copy of what happened in the run up to the sacking of Derek Adams, when if you were to read Twitter (Now X) you’d not be blamed for thinking large swathes of Bradford City fans had been busy deleting their histories, because when he was given the job by Ryan Sparks, it was also universally popular except for a tiny number of people (myself NOT included this time) who were being run out of town and being called all of the names under the sun, followed by the usual “negative” accusation that is often used when anyone doesn’t just blindly follow along with what the majority is saying.
My personal stance, as it was when people were calling for the head of Derek Adams was that sacking the manager was not going to change the problems Bradford City have, in his case I believed we should have allowed him to get to the summer transfer window when a lot of the surplus to requirements players would be at the end of their contracts and let him start the rebuild from there. I suspect, unlike Hughes, he had already thought ahead when he was signing players on short term contracts in the time he was at Valley Parade, and Mark Hughes became the first manager in a long time, thanks to Adams’s short term thinking and I suspect, long term strategy, to benefit from having a sizeable pot to play with in rebuilding the Bradford City squad. Unfortunately, something we all missed at the time was that Mark Hughes had a bad habit, most notably as manager of Queens Park Rangers of offering contracts to players that was way in excess of their value. And from looking at the wage bill and the number of three year contracts he has handed out like confetti, it is fairly safe to say that, even though he’s getting absolutely no credit from Bradford City supporters for doing so, the hole Adams dug us out of that was created by Edin Rahic, has now been repeated by Hughes. Only this time instead of the incoming manager having to wait a year for some of the contracts to expire, they have to wait two years.
With all of this in mind, I still wasn’t in the “Hughes Out” camp. But I am also a realist who will move with the times, and there has been a major development that if I was the Bradford City CEO, would make me immediately have picked up the phone to Mark Hughes and called him in for a meeting, first seeing if we could get rid of him by “mutual consent” and if that was a no go, immediately sacking him. In reality from a sacking stand point, a last minute draw shouldn’t have any impact on whether he would have been sacked today had the score remained 1-0 on Saturday. It feels like it should, but a good business person will not just leave it until the next defeat. If Saturday’s performance was a sacking moment, the fact got a lucky draw, shouldn’t impact on that decision making, because if the time is right, it is right.
But it was the breaking news I saw about Neil Warnock leaving Huddersfield Town after their Wednesday night fixture with Stoke City that has changed everything for me. I know many people will not see the same urgency as me about this, and I can also say that I have never before looked upon him as an option to be the manager of Bradford City before. But he is the right man for the club right now, forget Steve Evans because if he fails at Bradford City, which he probably will, just like every other manager, it will be because something else is fundamentally wrong at the club, not the fault of the manager. And, in fairness, this is probably what will put off Ryan Sparks from picking up the phone to him and doing everything possible to get him here, like he should.
The timing is perfect, if he takes the role of Bradford City, it won’t be for the money, which is probably going to be a stumbling block when people bang on about Darren Moore. He would have been a manager plying his trade in the Championship had he chosen to accept the contract offered to him to stay at Sheffield Wednesday, so I’d say the prospects of League Two football and a significantly lower wage than he was getting at Sheffield Wednesday in the first place is most certainly going to make it safe to say, he won’t be the next Bradford City manager. For any good manager, they will also be able to sniff out the things at the club that are setting them up to fail, and Darren Moore will be keen to protect the reputation he has gained as a manager, not walk into the manager meat grinder that is Bradford City.
Neil Warnock however is a completely different beast all together. At 72 years of age he is probably looking at either calling it a day, or having one last challenge. And what makes him special is his love of football, because with my hand on heart, unlike the vast majority of managers out there, his motive for becoming Bradford City manager would be to challenge him one last time. It is a project he could get his teeth into and it wouldn’t be about the money, in a similar way to how we could afford Mark Hughes, except Warnock would be looking for a last challenge, whereas Hughes wanted a slightly easier way of getting back to managing at the top.
The appointment can’t be seen as a quick fix either, this isn’t about Warnock turning things around and us pushing into the top three of League Two, it would require a top to bottom changing of mentality, which simply cannot be done, because for that to happen you have to have an owner and CEO who are open to criticism and not get defensive when someone says something you don’t want to hear. Fans have talked about the pro’s and con’s of hiring Steve Evans, but even though Evans probably has some of the toxic personality traits that would see him fit right in, inevitably this would end in tears, because just like Warnock, there will come a point when he sees what a growing number of fans are seeing and feed that back to Sparks and Rupp. Mark Hughes came to Valley Parade clearly thinking that if he applies a Premier League mentality to Bradford City it would bring success, but for the CEO and owner, he is a big name, a season-ticket seller, a headline maker. And this is part of what will make firing him so tricky, albeit inevitable, because Ryan Sparks will argue that all of the Bradford City fans agreed with him when he hired him. Well not all of us, some of us just had to keep a low profile due to the backlash for daring ton point out the glaring problems that not only made him unsuitable for specifically the Bradford City job, but ones that would ensure that when he does leave, he will in reality leave us in a bigger hole than we were in before he arrived. But of course, people can still argue he got us to the play-off’s, and I will argue that Derek Adams would have done the same had he been able to spend the money he freed up in the budget the season before. In reality we will never know, but one thing I can say with certainty is that reaching the play-off’s and failing to get promoted leaves us in the same position we were before, which is League Two. Dress it up all you want, the last time we got to the Play-Off Final, it didn’t prevent us from being in League One again and subsequently going down.
Neil Warnock understands the Premier League, and he also knows all of the different levels in the football pyramid. He know’s you can’t just apply one principle and that will fix everything, he will come to Bradford City with a clear understanding of ANYTHING that is wrong at Bradford City that needs to be fixed in order to get us out of this long term mess we have been in. He will tell it how it is and use his experience to go about fixing it. The fans in reality might not like the look of it, because I suspect it might look something like Derek Adams to begin with, but there’s a reason it will never happen anyway, and it is precisely the reasons I’ve outlined. The owner and CEO will not listen, they don’t want a manager to tell them how to fix things at the club, they want a manager that will not offend them by saying what they don’t want to hear.
Warnock isn’t the type of manager who will accept the status quo and work in an environment that he feels is unsuitable to success, he will not just see the bigger picture holding the club back and accept it as part of the job. He will most certainly say a lot of things that Sparks and Rupp will most certainly not tolerate hearing. And this culture within the club is the reason that any temporary success will be inevitably followed by a much bigger failure. In the world of Ryan Sparks and Stefan Rupp words speak louder than actions, the situation at Bradford City is a state of denial and an unwillingness to accept any accountability for the failures the inevitably lead to failure on the pitch. Every manager that gets sacked, gets blamed for suddenly being a poor manager, and at every turn is a deflection away from the people who hired them.
I said when we hired Mark Hughes, in the midst of all of the excitement that the lucky email from him must have been a godsend for Ryan Sparks and Stefan Rupp. It was a great story, and that took everyone’s mind off of the inevitable disappointment about all of the other names being linked with the vacancy at Valley Parade at the time. It kicked the can further down the road, only this time, instead of just kicking the can further down the road, whoever manages Bradford City next will inevitably run into the same problem managers in the past have, only that bit worse. That’s because of players that are on three year deals that are on high wages that the next manager will have to wait two summer windows to be able to get rid of because nobody else can afford their wages, so they will stay until the end of their contracts which will mean a much tighter budge to play with for the next manager.
Players like Vadaine Oliver and Tyler Smith spring to mind, not to mention players we may end up having to pay off on more affordable wages like Ash Taylor. Then there is the issue of being overloaded in certain positions and light in others. What will happen if a new manager plays a different system, as is so often the case when we hire new managers? There is the risk we may have to see valued players leaving the club just to free up the wage budget for those players that are surplus to requirements that we cannot get rid of, in order to bring in new faces that perhaps won’t be up to the quality they might have been if we hadn’t signed so many players on three year deals.
So I doubt Ryan Sparks is in any real rush to sack Mark Hughes, unless of course Mark Hughes does a Derek Adams and points the finger back at him, which with every interview seems more likely to happen, even if, like with Adams, Hughes doesn’t actually name him. Because when Mark Hughes is inevitably sacked, which is more likely to be sooner rather than later if history is anything to go by. It will put Ryan Sparks in exactly the same position he was in at the time he sacked Derek Adams, where no decent managers want the job, and the names being connected with the vacant managers job are massively underwhelming and the finger once again is understandably being pointed at Ryan Sparks and Stefan Rupp.
Naturally since Ryan Sparks has been CEO we will hear words, but as usual they are unlikely to marry up with that seems to be happening in reality. One thing is for sure, when Mark Hughes does get the sack, the search for a new manager will be a fascinating event for all of the wrong reasons, with the CEO firmly aware that the fan base is watching closely to see if the club does actually have a plan.