All I want for Christmas is Bruce Willis in charge of my football club

Leave a comment

December 20, 2013 by John

Premier League football on the pitch has been fabulous this season. Cracking games like the recent 6-3 between Arsenal and Man City and topsy-turvy things like Man City’s general away form and Tottenham suddenly getting hammered by everyone. Oh, and of course who could forget Sunderland’s extraordinary domination of Chelsea in the League Cup quarter final.

There have also been incredible goals from Suarez, Kasami, Borini, Ramsey, Wiltshire, Sidwell and Aguero to name but a few. It’s only December as well, we have loads more to come!

Off the pitch, this season has been just as interesting, but not in such a good way. More and more managerial sackings (the ‘We’d like to thank X for their efforts at the club and wish him well for the future’ email template has had a hammering this term), match fixing, fights and stadium collapses in Brazil ahead of the World Cup and more nonsense from oddball chairmen/club owners than you can shake a Hull City Tigers flag at. It’s only December, there’s loads more to come!

There are two club owners in particular that are the stand out mentalists so far: Assem Allam, (who I’ve already written about and can’t figure out when he needs to shut up) and the quite extraordinary Vincent Tan.

Vincent Tan’s an incredible guy. A true football fan. If you cut him, he bleeds football….

He looks like a blind man in a rugby shirt and a Simon Cowell waistline.

For those who don’t know, he bought the majority share in Cardiff, changed the kit colour of ‘The Bluebirds’ to red due to superstition, fired the head scout and replaced him with a young painter/decorator, gave some tactical advice to the team in the form of ‘you should shoot more’ and publicly called the Cardiff fans ‘ungrateful’. Top work. Now he’s told Malkay Mackay, someone who’s been so obviously important and successful for the club, that he needs to resign or be sacked.  Of course it is the Cardiff fans who are ungrateful.

Mackay surely won’t resign, so it’ll be interesting to see if he makes it to lead his team out at Liverpool this weekend. Managers are often sacked after a dodgy result against mediocre opposition, so if Cardiff, 15^th in the league, manage to turn over one of the most in-form teams in the country on their own ground and then sack their manager, that will really cement Tan’s place in the Premier League Muppet Hall of Fame.

Football club billionaire owners are getting more and more farcical and I don’t think we’re too far away from getting a celebrity in to manage a football team. Here’s a little step by step guide of my future predictions:

• More and more businessmen take over clubs because Premier League clubs are a good investment.
• Stable income is mostly based on TV rights, which is a ludicrously lucrative deal for Premier League teams. With BT becoming a bigger force, the money clubs get for being in the Champions League is simply absurd.
• As owners and chairmen continue their trigger happy ways of firing managers before they’ve had a chance to do their first team-talk, no club will actually have a decent chance of settling with a good manager.
• Clubs rely on spending billions on ‘quality players’, even if their scouts couldn’t spot Lionel Messi in a line up in Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
• Clubs continue to sack managers and fail to form a ‘team’ around one individual leader. They rely on player talent shining through and that the coaching staff can sort the tactics.

Hang on… most of that has already happened… OK, to the future!

• Eventually, with managers coming and going, the fans start to get disenfranchised and turn their back on the club.
• This reduces the money the media companies spend on the rights, as figures drop and fewer people coming to the new 90,000 seater stadium.
• Club executives see this trend and, in a desperate attempt to boost figures, get a high profile celebrity to become the manager.
• Bruce Willis takes over at Cardiff Redbirds.
• TV figures go through the roof as Bruce’s pre-game press conference alludes to his new set piece tactics such as the ‘bazooka thow-in’ and the ‘ultra-dynamo cross bow corner’.
• More people fill the stadium to see half time renditions of scenes from Die Hard and Armageddon (it’s a good job they build such a big stadium so they could fit in the asteroid the size of Texas).
• Bruce is still in the hotseat after 5 seasons. Even though he looks more like a 20-year-old prune than John McClane.
• Other clubs follow suit and soon the idea of an ex-footballer as a manager is as bizarre a concept as a female linesperson was 20 years ago.

I mean, Reagan was US President, right? It could happen.