Somewhere in Greater Manchester, a manager has just been sacked. You do not know his name yet because he will be replaced by Thursday, and the one after him will last until the next Wembley defeat, at which point the cycle restarts and everyone involved pretends this is normal.
Salford City has become the football equivalent of a tech startup run by people who watched “Moneyball” once and decided that coaching is a problem that can be solved by hiring a new coach every six weeks. The owners—famous, wealthy, Instagram-famous—sit in their boardroom (probably very nice, probably has good coffee) and make decisions the way you might change your Spotify playlist: with the confidence of someone who has never actually had to play the song.
The Wembley defeat that triggered the latest managerial execution was not, by any reasonable standard, a catastrophe. It was a cup game. Salford is in League Two. They are not supposed to be winning Wembley finals. But somewhere between the opening kick and the final whistle, someone in a room with a view decided that the manager had failed and must be removed, as if football is a problem with a solution rather than a sport where sometimes you lose to better teams.
This is the modern managerial carousel at its most surreal. The owners have money—real money, the kind that makes headlines—but they do not have patience, and they do not have the faintest idea what they are doing. Every defeat is treated as evidence of incompetence. Every victory is treated as vindication of the system. The system, of course, is to hire a new manager.
Listen to any post-match interview at Salford these days and you will hear a manager who knows he is three bad results away from unemployment. He cannot afford to experiment. He cannot afford to build. He cannot afford to lose a cup game at Wembley because the owners are checking Twitter at halftime and the narrative is already written: he has failed, he must go, we need someone new.
The truly comic element is that this strategy has never worked anywhere, ever. Not once in the history of professional football has constant managerial turnover led to sustained success. Yet Salford City continues to treat it as a revolutionary insight, as if they have discovered something the rest of the sport has missed. They have not. They have discovered only that rich people can afford to be wrong repeatedly without consequence.
Meanwhile, the players exist in a state of permanent uncertainty. A new manager arrives, implements his philosophy, gets sacked before the philosophy has time to take root. The next one arrives, contradicts everything the previous manager believed, gets sacked when his contradictions do not immediately produce results. By the time the fifth manager in two years arrives, the players have forgotten what actual coaching looks like. They are just trying to survive the week.
The real scandal is not that a manager was sacked after a Wembley loss. The real scandal is that this has become so routine that it barely registers as news. Salford City has transformed the manager’s chair into a revolving door, and everyone involved—the owners, the fans, the media—has accepted this as the natural state of things. It is not natural. It is absurd.
What makes it worse is that the owners are not incompetent in the way that makes for good stories. They are not bumbling idiots who wander into football by accident. They are successful people who have applied the wrong playbook to the wrong sport and then doubled down on the mistake with the kind of confidence that only wealth provides. They have enough money to keep hiring managers forever, which means they will never have to face the consequences of their strategy. They will just keep sacking, keep hiring, keep scrolling Twitter, and eventually they will stumble into a manager who wins a few games in a row and declare themselves geniuses.
Salford City is not a football club anymore. It is a case study in what happens when people with resources but no understanding of a sport decide to run it like a startup. The manager’s chair is not a position—it is a performance art piece, a revolving door where each new incumbent gets to experience the unique humiliation of being hired to fail by committee.
The next manager will arrive soon. He will have ideas. He will implement them with the knowledge that he has approximately four weeks before the next defeat triggers another boardroom meeting. By then, the owners will have moved on to something else—a new investment, a new passion project, a new Twitter argument. The manager will be gone, and the cycle will begin again.
This is not football. This is a very expensive escape room where the only way to win is to leave.