Superclubs such as Paris Saint-Germain don’t experience “now or never” moments.
There are “now or sometime later” moments for sure, but their time always comes around in the end, whatever they do. Their financial power means that they can spend all of their days hanging around winners’ circles (Champions League knockout rounds and league title races), even if they’re not all that great, and eventually they’ll win something, either by becoming great or simply by being around when no one else happens to be great.
On the other hand, the poor managers of superclubs, such as Laurent Blanc, do not have the same kind of temporal luxury. They regularly bump into “now or never moments” whereby if they don’t win now then they will not be winning ever, because they’ll have been sacked—and, specifically, Blanc faces one this Wednesday, when PSG comes up against Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea in the Champions League round of 16.
Tuesday programming alert: Watch Real Madrid vs Schalke on the four main Sportsnet channels at 3:30 pm ET and FC Porto vs Basel on Sportsnet World at 3:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet World NOW || Broadcast schedule
The context around this game and that risk is that almost two years into his managerial reign Blanc’s team is struggling to win in Ligue 1—where it is expected to win the title comfortably every season given its pick of the best personnel. What’s more, now, having drawn and conceded an away goal in the first leg against Chelsea, Blanc risks going out of Europe a round earlier than in 2014 to the same opponents as last season. So we can sum up this way: should the latter scenario be enacted it wouldn’t make him unlikely to be sacked.
At that point, the potential dilemma for us is, of course, how to feel about this sacking, and the culture of constant, ill-thought-out sackings of superclub managers as a whole. Does it make sense? What does it say about the state of the game? And so on.
Except like all of the best potential dilemmas, I am here to tell you that it is no dilemma at all. Does it make sense to sack Blanc or others like him? Very often no, it doesn’t. But for most of us that doesn’t have to matter. The sacking of the manager of a superclub is a victimless crime—also, incidentally, the best kind of crime: we get a spark of drama and no one, actually, gets hurt.
If Blanc doesn’t make it through this season then he walks away from PSG as the same man he walked in as, except several million euros richer. Having got one job at a superclub, the established pattern is that he is far more likely to get another one than anyone else. And, lacking some emotional, lifelong connection with PSG he will simply move on to another, equivalent club. There are no outstanding downsides to the manager here and as such we, the fans, should adjust our vocabulary for describing events like these to fit what is really just another part of the liberated fun of watching hyper-real sport, rather than real-real life.
There is some element of “farce” to proceedings when managers such as Blanc or Manuel Pellegrini seem to lose their jobs at the two-year mark as a matter of course, but there is no great “tragedy” behind it. There is something “silly” about it, but there is nothing “outrageous” about it. Of all the reasons to “lament” modern football, the sacking of high-paid, high-powered, over-employed managers simply doesn’t rank that highly amongst them.
Wednesday programming alert: Watch Chelsea vs Paris Saint-Germain on the four main Sportsnet channels at 3:30 pm ET and Bayern Munich vs Shakhtar Donetsk on Sportsnet World at 3:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet World NOW || Broadcast schedule
As helpless onlookers in all of this, if we can I think maybe we should let the professionals dictate our etiquette—namely, the managers involved. Carlo Ancelotti has perfected the art of being a superclub manager: he leaves when he gets a better offer (PSG to Real Madrid, AC Milan to Chelsea) and before he can be sacked, or he moves on and is successful somewhere else instead if he is sacked (Chelsea to PSG, Juventus to AC Milan). There’s no public mourning, he just takes it on the chin, however ridiculous it all is, because he surely knows that he exists in the land of the hyper-real, where millions are made from playing a game and nonsense is not the consequence of what he does but the very essence of it.
Ancelotti surely knows that he is in a position not to take it seriously and so does not. Outside of unfortunate fans of superclubs—who are unlucky enough to be the only real people whose real interests are tied up in them—we should follow Ancelotti’s lead, thankful that we’re not tied to these bizarre structures and mechanisms, which decide a manager’s worth on arbitrary terms and rich men’s whims. In the short term, all other paths lead to unease and unhappiness.
And if Blanc doesn’t make it past Chelsea in more ways than one on Wednesday, he should do the same, knowing that in all likelihood Manchester United, amongst others, will be looking for a new manager soon enough as well. For now, that is how it is.
For now, this is the business of the superclub, existing as it does outside of time and place as we know it. It doesn’t need any one person or moment, because it will always be able to pay for another. So, if you get to decide not to take it too seriously—i.e. you’re not a fan—then you’ve really got to. Perhaps starting on Wednesday.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter