#AgainstModernFootball - mid-season managerial appointments

Maybe Manuel Pellegrini and Guus Hiddink will meet up at the end of the season. Once all this is over the two coaches will walk into a Yates, cardboard boxes stacked with their office belongings, and console each other over a plate of loaded nachos and a pitcher of the ale of the week. Only one truly understands what the other has gone through.

Every so often a cleaner stumbles into the manager’s offices at both the Etihad Stadium and Stamford Bridge and mutters, “oh, are you still here?” Going on the performance of both teams of late, some of the players say the same thing upon pushing the door open into the dressing room.

Chelsea and Manchester City are often considered one and the same thing as the vanguard of the Premier League’s new order, and that has certainly been the case this season with their mid-season appointment of their new managers for the 2016/17 season. Their respective hiring of Antonio Conte and Pep Guardiola - and other mid-season appointments - is just another thing about modern football that must be stopped.

It’s all Guardiola’s fault. This current trend started with his decision to join Bayern Munich as manager three years ago, announced mid-way through the Bavarian club’s treble-winning season. Of course, there had been instances of mid-season appointments before that (David Moyes to Manchester United, for one), but as Guardiola so often tends to do, the zeitgeist was set by him.

Appointments made mid-way through the season are Pep’s legacy and football could do without it. The Spaniard is a master of his own hype, teasing his next destination more than LeBron James ever did. Musicians might now surprise drop their albums, but football coaches are taking their place as society’s primary bluster merchants and that says a lot about the sport’s toxic narcissism right now.

All this only serves to underline how managers have become the most public of figures in football - more so than the players actually on the pitch. What chance does the sport stand if the men in the dugout - the men setting the example to everyone else - are so self-serving and conscious of their own importance?

It’s a symptom of sheer arrogance, particularly in the case of Guardiola who has more then once shown no regard for his peers by publicly swiping their jobs before they have even had a chance to gather their belongings. One wonders what Pellegrini will leave on his desk to greet his successor. It probably won’t be a basket of fruit.

At Chelsea the situation is somewhat different, with Hiddink only an interim figurehead following Jose Mourinho’s sacking earlier in the season. But even still, was there any real need to announce Conte’s looming arrival so early before the start of the 2016/17 season? To whose benefit is such a confirmation? Not Chelsea’s, who now find themselves in awkward no man’s land between now and the end of the season, not Conte’s, who will only face questions over his next club in the run-up to the European Championships, and not the Italian national team, who will now ponder whether their head coach is fully committed to the task at hand.

Reportedly Conte is now searching for a house ahead of his summer move. Between now and the start of next season the Italian presumably will spend a lot of time in motorway service stations. He could hardly ask for a better induction into his new life - because what’s more English than popping into a Moto to use the toilet only to leave having spent £19.99 on a cooked breakfast and having joined the AA?

Hiddink was always aware that he was only keeping the Chelsea hot seat warm for someone else, but he could probably do without Conte’s impending arrival hanging over him as a constant reminder of his own mortality at the club.

As for Pellegrini, he probably feels like managing City remotely by now. He could take team talks by Skype and Snapchat instructions to the touchline during games. Nobody at the Abu Dhabi-owned club has shown him any care over the past six months - even forcing him to read out confirmation of Guardiola’s appointment at a press conference - so why should he care about their fortunes? It’s little wonder he isn’t sabotaging City’s season given how they have treated him (whisper it… maybe he is?) .

Clubs will always line up managers when they are in the market for one, and even when they aren’t. But the announcement of appointments mid-season is a manifestation of what the modern game has become - self-obsessed and vain. Conte and Guardiola will arrive at their new clubs next season with little concern for anyone but themselves, which considering how the Premier League is now is rather appropriate.