Football Food For Thought / Dan Fitch / 09 September 2008 /

Dan "The Betting Man" Fitch identifies the same problem that plagued both West Ham and Newcastle and ultimately led to both their managers leaving. What works on the continent doesn't always work over here, he tells us.

Sometimes a columnist can struggle to find inspiration for their weekly 700 words. In contrast though, there are occasionally weeks when the list of possible topics is almost inexhaustible.

The last seven days or so, were the perfect example. Manchester City have gone from being so skint that they were selling players behind the back of Mark Hughes, to drawing up the sort of shopping list that would even have Roman Abramovic getting out his credit cards.

Then you have Alex Ferguson (who had spent all summer accusing Real Madrid of tapping up Ronaldo) bundling Dimitar Berbatov into the back of his car and having him take a medical. All this before Tottenham had even received a bid for Berbatov, or had consulted wikipedia to find out who Frasier Campbell was.

Just when football didn't seem like it could get any crazier, up stepped reliable old Newcastle United, who never like to be usurped from their position as the game's biggest laughing stock. Not to be outdone, West Ham decided to get in on the act and also contrived to mislay their manager.

So what to choose? Well there's nothing like killing two birds with one stone and the chaos at Newcastle and West Ham is not really two stories, but one. It's the story of an old school manager and a modern regime.

Both Alan Curbishley and Kevin Keegan got on their bikes, because of the meddling of their respective directors of football. Curbishley had spent an age ruling the roost at Charlton, where he was used to having to unearth gems from football's bargain basement. In contrast, Keegan has always had money to burn, wherever he's been. What they both had in common, was having control over which players came in and out.

But things have changed since the nineties. As more money has flooded into the Premier League, so too has a greater foreign influence. We now have foreign owners and an abundance of foreign players. As competition grew to pick up the best young foreign talent from across the globe, some clubs started to entrust recruitment to directors of football. The days of managers doing deals in lay-bys on wet Wednesday nights, armed only with a paper bag full of cash, were gone.

The argument normally wheeled out by club chairmen when appointing a director of football, is that as it's the norm on the continent, it will work in Britain. Unfortunately there are plenty of things that work fine on the continent that fail to take off over here, as the musical career of David Hasselhoff testifies.

In theory it should work. Even autocrats like Ferguson have had to dissolve power and delegate responsibility, as the pressures of football have increased and the game become truly global. There is no reason at all, why a coach shouldn't be able to work closely with a director of football to decide transfer policy. As the chairmen always say, if it works abroad...

What the chairmen always seem unable to grasp, is that it helps if the director of football and manager are actually able to work with one another. Instead, they generally seem to appoint people who have either never met before, or seem to have been mortal enemies in a past life.

How about this for an idea? Why not get the manager to appoint the director of football, or vice versa? This might then create a working environment where harmony presides, rather than the sort of in-fighting that normally only occurs within the Big Brother house.

If such a radical idea had been employed, perhaps Newcastle wouldn't now be a meagre [12.0] to be relegated, having been backed earlier this season at [38.0]. The combination of Keegan and Wise was always going to be a disaster. I had a chuckle at the weekend over the story that Keegan was told that it would now be Newcastle's policy to recruit the world's best young players, who could be sold off at a profit. Keegan's suggested purchase a couple of days later? David Beckham.

Meanwhile, West Ham are just [10.0] to be relegated and look likely to go down the Italian route which has served England so well. It might take a while for English clubs to get the hang of this director of football malarkey, but unlike Keegan and Curbishley, you can bet that it's here to stay.

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