When a Norwich City new manager search stopped at Dover…
Head of sport Chris Lakey has seen 11 Norwich City managers/head coaches come and go… here he takes a look at how football’s regular circus has evolved
When Daniel Farke took charge of Norwich City in March 2017, he ended quite a monopoly.
Until the German walked through the door, every one of his predecessors had been from the British Isles – England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or Ireland. Norwich City hadn’t looked very far and wide to fill the vacancies.
It’s not as if a foreign manager was an alien concept on these shores – Jozef Venglos was in charge of Villa in 1990 and plenty followed in the 90s, when the Premier League invented football.
For City, it all changed when then sporting director Stuart Webber unveiled Farke, a man whose history, indeed his very existence, was unknown to most, except those who professed to have followed him from the day he was born and swiftly told social media so.
Two managers later the rather better-known David Wagner took over, and we all know how that ended.
It leaves sporting director Ben Knapper looking for a replacement – and this time the list of candidates, some of which is brought to you by Norfolk Rumour Mills Ltd, proves that City are widening the net again and looking to show how multi-cultural they are.
When Nigel Worthington took over from Bryan Hamilton in December 2000, he had, apparently, been up against Joe Kinnear, Steve Bruce, Roy Evans and Dave Jones, amongst others very similar. When Worthy departed almost six years later, Ladbrokes suggested you put your money on Mark Bowen, Alan Curbishley, Worthington’s assistant Martin Hunter, Joe Royle, Bryan Robson, Gary Megson, Mike Newell, Steve Cotterill, Brian Kerr, Glenn Hoddle, Martin Allen, Lawrie Sanchez … you get the gist. The search clearly stopped at Dover.
It was a time when ‘next manager odds’ always included the usual suspects, Hoddle, George Graham and Graeme Souness must have had some very active agents. The funny thing is that those three never actually managed after 2006 anyway…
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