BfB

“Donde termina el arco iris, en tu alma o en el horizonte?” – Pablo Neruda

Chile

The Soul, Pablo Neruda writes, is earned through suffering and thought and prayer, and perhaps it is the lack of those things which made Manchester City’s title celebrations such an unwatchable affair.

There is suffering of course – Amnesty International have views on Manchester City’s owners – but not in the Nerudian sense of the word. Manchester City’s success feels like casual background lore written for a forgotten Science Fiction, or what success would look like if it were filmed as background scenes for a movie.

Football’s search for a soul has been documented best by David Conn, himself a Manchester City supporter of sorts, but in the two decades since his seminal The Beautiful Game this search seems to have failed, and failed again, leading us here.

Carlisle

Bradford City’s attempt to be promoted from League Two wilted in the heat of Carlisle. A single goal advantage earned at Valley Parade was turned around by Paul Simpson’s Cumbrians who were able to counter and nullify Mark Hughes’ side’s play.

Simpson reflected after the first leg that his side had performed well in the second half of the first leg and the learnings from that rolled into the Saturday afternoon second leg encounter. Jamie Walker was kept away from the ball with a defender dedicated to cutting off passing lanes to the playmaker. Fellow Scot Scott Banks was pushed wider and wider by a capable backline and going wider saw him further from Andy Cook. Simpson’s success – a success which has eluded many a manager this season – was knowing that to keep Cook quiet, one isolates him from his teammates.

Callum Guy, a bit part player in the recent decline of Bradford City, found positions between City’s midfielders breaking up the play in that area while the two wing backs came inside to create a structure that broke the lines between City’s players. Good football is making the other team play badly.

Scunthorpe

In contrast, Hughes’ City struggled to play in the second of the two styles adopted this season. That style, which saw Adam Clayton shielding a back four and moving the ball to two Mezzala midfielders, represented an alternative to the Double Pivot which had marked out much of the rest of the season. Neither worked, and the shortcomings of the team were exposed.

Hughes has created a squad largely from the scraps left over from previous managers. Players like Cook, and Alex Gilliead, and Liam Ridehaigh have been a part of a team which on the whole performed better than could be expected given their careers. Gilliead’s time as captain of a pathetic and moribund Scunthorpe United side did not suggest he would be a leading midfielder for a team pushing for promotion, but he was.

Simpson’s Carlisle were made of more flexible materials and that difference showed as City were exhausted of ideas but maintained a position in the game that might have given a win on penalties. It was a small return on a season, but it was better than the conclusion of most seasons.

Ultimately, the message was clear. City had lost to a better team, and nobody needed to tell Mark Hughes that. Hughes’ regime is one of competency, and in that spirit he was able to create a team which of metronomic point gathering rather than smashing opponents in single games.

London

A day later, and West Ham United seemed to all but end Leeds United’s hope of Premier League survival with a 3-1 victory at Not Upton Park. There was humour in the Leeds United support dressing as Sam Allardyce, but it was largely for others. The rivals from West Yorkshire made another desperate lunge for a manager, and that lunge obviously failed.

As retrospect dawns East of Pudsey, that failure is obvious. Leeds United were seduced into sacking Marcelo Bielsa with the temptation of extending their time in the Premier League. The mistake was made at that point, not with Large Sam, and the Faustian bargain is in the process of being paid.

There is little sympathy afforded to Leeds United from BD8, but Bielsa was an iconoclast and a far better manager than most, and to have him and lose him feels like an era defining mistake. The cost, for seven wins from thirty-seven, seems too high.

Queens

American film director Martin Scorsese describes the last scenes of his 1990 release Goodfellas as being of a man who has sold his soul and is left with the regret that there is no more soul left to sell. Football seems to be a succession of this type of auction.

Which is to say that Leeds United, in whatever way one defines that entity, sold their soul in the same way which Manchester City did albeit for a smaller price, and the same way that most clubs do and will.

Where does football earn a soul? On the Horizon, as Neruda would suggest, or in the moments when success is denied? Manchester City’s vacuous celebrations suggest that there is no soul at that horizon. That success is not a goal so much as an end of goals.

The landmarks of football are found on the roads that pass hills too low to name. The Wasteland. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Manningham

Bradford City 2023/2024 feels exciting to me, but I have long since realised that what I like and what normal football supporters seem to enjoy often do not overlap. I’m eager to see the continued development of the set of ideas which animate the club, and confident in those developing it.

Freely, I will admit that I don’t understand the agitation of many of my peers. I read that City “did not turn up”, or that “optimism is gone”, or that have spent the season in the time-honoured tradition of being a grown man bellowing at young footballers.

I have no way of relating to those thoughts. They feel like missives from people so long fighting a battle that everything resembles an enemy. They feel like the soullessness that would consume us all.

With far too few games left in the season David Hopkin wandered off into mid-distance and Bradford City started looking for a new manager.

Since the transfer window emerged in football around ten years ago new managers have become a panacea. Where as once in the days of low success supporters would have called for a “Big Signing” would now they ask for a “New Manager”. Changing managers has become the de facto response because it is one of the only responses.

That Hopkin also subscribed to that view is odd but largely because we assume that the manager is the grown up in the room and when he behaves like one of his charges and exits our view on football becomes confused.

And so the vacancy at Valley Parade is obvious. Less obvious is the remit of the job.

Bus

Aggressively obnoxious football manager Steve Evans is a big man but despite that few would compare him to an actual bus. I am going to.

Steve Evans is to the Bradford City job what this large Red Bus is to politics. He is a promise made by a group of people about another group of people where the one cannot assure the other’s compliance.

For the past few years Evans has hovered over the City job with the understanding that were he given the role he would smash backsides until the players were, well, better and would win more.

This is a persistent meme in football supporters which originates at some point in the 1970s when the Gentleman managers of Bill Nic and Shankley gave way to the new breed of Brian Clough and Alex Ferguson who saw physical and verbal aggression as tools at their disposal. Those days are gone, a point underlined to all but the more borish by the more congenial style of Gareth Southgate’s approach in the run to the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup. Nevertheless it is the more borish who perpetuate the meme and so it is pervasive.

I am wary about Faustian arrangements that suggest that one can realise a desire if only one will sell a tiny part of the soul precisely because they are Faustian.

Remit

The next Bradford City manager’s remit should not be to avoid relegation to League Two it should be to have an excellent team on the field in August 2020.

The squad which David Hopkin has left at Valley Parade, which was passed him him by a transfer committee that took over from a manager who had very little interest in building a squad in the long term is not only badly unbalanced but it is poorly prioritised.

Unbalanced in that it is festooned with attacking players which comes from poor prioritisation away from defending and, especially, defending by being able to win the ball back. There is nothing attacking about not having the ball.

It would be easy to blame this on the members of the transfer committee but the problem goes deeper. Football has forgotten this basic of the game with low rent tiki-takas and would be Sarriballers selling lower league chairmen on the idea that they will be the next Marcelo Bielsa. Occasionally they go to a club and are successful, most they are not.

Even managers think managers should leave clubs if success is not quick. The first generation of players who saw a fast turnaround of gaffers has now begun to manage. We shake our heads today but Hopkin’s time at the club as a player started when he was sounded out by Paul Jewell, played under Chris Hutchings, was injured for Stuart McCall and left under Jim Jefferies. He only played 11 games.

Hopkin, like many of his peers, has had a football career where management is entirely in the short term.

Long

To say “Bradford City need a manager who…”, and prescribe a set of features, needlessly complicates matters. All clubs need to employ people who have a stable approach to managing the resources generated.

Such a phrase goes well beyond the borders on the tedious but almost all the successful clubs in the Football League have this as a core value. In an environment where even the people who are doing the long term thinking expect to not be able to carry that thinking out there seems to be a benefit in creating an environment where all thinking is long term.

Want

At Barnsley away – because I am what is known as a “funny bugger” – when the first crack appeared in Hopkin’s revival I turned to a friend and quietly sung “We want our Edin back.”

No one feels the loss of Rahic but the loss of the things he talked about – about long term development of the team and about creating an identity around Valley Parade – are significant. Rahic’s failed to instill the values he and Stefan Rupp talked about bringing to the club but no values have replaced them.

It is not that Bradford City need a manager to have and be given time, it is that Bradford City need a manager to bring knowledge.

Question

The failure of Rahic was his inability to infuse his belief in others. Despite a turnover of staff on and off the field allow him to craft an environment he wanted no one but Rahic seemed to buy into Rahicism.

Bradford City – being Julian Rhodes and Stefan Rupp – should not pretend that they know how to make a successful football club and if they do you should not believe them.

The question the manager needs to be asked if they are being interviewed for the role is not how will they keep City in the division – those Yorkshire Puddings are already in the over, only time will tell if they will rise – but rather what City will look like in August 2020 or 2024 or 2029, and how we will get to that point.

Rhodes and Rupp need someone with domain knowledge on how to construct a successful club and they need that knowledge more than they need six wins between now and May.