Luck, Fairness and Decision Making

Our two recent games against City and Crystal Palace got me thinking about how luck and fairness present themselves in football. There are myriad ways in which luck can present itself. For most football fans it usually leaves a sour taste and a dose of the sulks. However, when Lady Luck smiles upon you, it can feel like all your birthdays and Christmases have come at once. With fairness, it’s usually a two headed coin. What’s fair to one set of fans is bad luck and misfortune to another. A decision can be very fair and beneficial to your club, or it can be in poor taste and a disaster.

I’ll start with the City game at the weekend. Haaland showed himself to be an amazing striker and could have easily scored a hattrick were it not for Jordan Pickford. There are stories, rumours, urban myths, call them what you like, that we could have picked him up as a teenager. We may have offered him something concrete. There may be nothing more to it than he just had a walk around the training ground, had a sandwich and a 7-up, and went home. My point is, we may have had a chance to pick Haaland up and tie him to the club. For whatever reason, we didn’t. There may well have been a very solid reason for us not signing him, he may have had no interest. Or, it could have been that Lady Luck decided to smile elsewhere. Some other club had the good fortune to sign him and gain goals and a transfer fee from him.  

This happens to most clubs at some time or other with youth, developing and ready for the first team players. You make a call on a player, sometimes you get it very right, sometimes you get it very wrong. But it does feel like there is an element of luck. Both initially in getting to sign the player, and through whether or not he turns out to be the right fit. At times, it can be a case of the right player, wrong time. For example, we didn’t have the time to keep Moise Kean at the club. Given our financial and league position at the time, it made sense to sell him and look for a better alternative. Time has shown that we were right about there being a decent striker in him, given his goal output in Italy.

Other times, there is stability and a lack of pressure on a club that allows young players to develop in spades and make to most of their talent. The most famous example is the class of 92 at Utd. With Everton, we had Tony Hibbert and Leon Osman come through.

The Palace game was an interesting one in terms of luck, fairness and decision making, Like most Everton fans at the final whistle, my initial reaction was that we had just conducted daylight robbery. We had been dreadful for big chunks of the game, our tactics and game plan in the first half were poor, and Palace should have been out of sight before we scored our equaliser. A last gasp winner in ways just didn’t feel right. For Palace fans, the loss must have felt grossly unfair. Yet, when you analyse the game, we did in ways deserve to win and it felt like a fair result. True, our first half performance was poor, and we did ride our luck. But our manager was proactive and decided to make changes at half time. This helped us to play much better in the second half and make our own luck.

The penalty we received and scored from, while part of us being more proactive, is also a discussion piece in itself around luck and fairness. Some penalties are stonewall ones, very clear and obvious fouls which are easy decisions for the referee to make. Many, if not most, fall or are pushed into that grey area that fans like to immerse themselves in, usually out of self-pity and a sense of injustice. The decision is usually unfair, the player was unlucky, the referee, the league, UEFA, anyone and everyone has a bias against the club.

I could also go on about VAR decisions, but all I would be doing is retyping the paragraph above with VAR decision replacing the word penalty.

Also, the fact that we scored the winner in the fourth minute of injury time meant that we had played to the final whistle. We looked to win the game, right to the very end. We were delighted with it as we were creating our own luck and deserving of winning the game. Yet, think about how Liverpool are lauded by pundits and the media alike for late winners, but by rival fans, it’s a sign of unfairness and a bias in Liverpool’s favour. Go figure.

Back to Palace for my next point. Since the game against us, the international break had presented another example of the debate around fairness and luck in football. New contract negotiations between Glasner, their current manager, and the club have been reported recently. Palace fans currently have the fear of will he, won’t he sign. He may just sign a new and extended contract and tell everyone who will listen that he is delighted to be at Palace. Job done, nothing to see here. Then again, he may refuse to sign a new deal and spout the usual about wanting to see what happens at the end of his current contract. Either way, Palace fans will have that niggle that the best manager they have had in years may soon be gone.

And this is one of those things in football for mid-table and lower-table clubs like ours and Palace. Sooner rather than later, unless your club makes a very unexpected quantum leap forward, you are going to lose your better players and coaches. Does it feel fair, of course not. Does being a victim of your own success, and making your own luck, feel like a kick in the pants, of course it does. But that’s football. Decision making will also play a huge part in this. Does the club decide to make an even better offer to the manager to try and persuade him? If he goes, will the club’s decision making on his replacement continue their current progress or derail it?

And then on to the circus that is Forest at the moment. For me, this highlights a number of things in football that are hugely important in terms of fairness, decision making and making your own luck. These are the decisions being made in the boardroom and the relationship between the chairman and the manager. For most of last season, Forest fans must have felt that things had finally clicked for them. They had shaken off the previous season’s PSR nonsense, had had a decent summer window, and had pushed hard for a CL place. The fact that they had qualified for Europe at all, given they had gone through what Everton fans still have nightmares about, must have felt wonderful. For Forest fans, this must have felt like they were finally getting their share of fair play and good fortune. Their board, and their chairman were finally making really good decisions, ones that were paying off for them. Then, the relationship between chairman and manager broke down, and the fans were back to what must feel like square one. The chairman and the board decide to sack Nuno, a handful of games into the new season. They then seem to compound what seems like one bad decision with another. Nuno’s replacement was none other than Ange ball. And it was a disaster. Ange ball has now been sacked and the club have gone with Dyche ball instead.

The consequences of the chairman manager relationship breakdown, and subsequent decision making, must be sickening, and feel grossly unfair, for several reasons. Millions of pounds in compensation have walked out the door with two sets of coaching staff, money that was an unexpected windfall from last season’s league placing. Money that will take away from what is generated from increased revenues due to European football. Money that was going to help keep the club on a sound financial footing and PSR away from the door. The best manager they’ve had in some time, gone. And worst of all, that quantum leap forward that Palace fans are currently enjoying, gone. Forest are suddenly, only two months into the season, in a position where a Sean Dyche appointment felt necessary.

Forest now seem to have gone from working hard, making good decisions and their own luck, to making all the wrong decisions and generating awful luck. For the fans, this must feel grossly unfair as all that preseason feel good factor, which was in place just a few short months ago, has gone so abruptly. What’s twice the rub is that it is by their own hand.

For Sean Dyche, I feel that it’s not quite the easy decision that you would think for him to accept the Forest job, He gets to manage Forest, a club that must be very close to his heart given his time there as a player. He also gets a chance to manage a club playing European football. This is a huge opportunity for him to show that he has more to his skillset than saving clubs from relegation. Yet, he is going to work under a chairman who is as mad as a hatter and may not give him the time he needs. The European games may also turn out to be a disaster, and he will be forever pigeonholed as a get us out of trouble manager. Yet, in terms of making his own luck, I think he has still earned the chance to take on the opportunity.

While I can understand any club’s fear of relegation, and going for the ‘safe pair of hands', There is an aspect to it that must really annoy fans of long-term Championship clubs. I think that there is something just not right about parachute payments for clubs relegated from the Premier League. I can see the logic behind it. Clubs that are being ran on Premier League budgets get relegated and the parachute payments cushion the financial blow. Yet, it has created a group of very wealthy clubs by Championship standards, and by extension, inequality within the division. The so called yo-yo clubs, like Leicester, Burnley and Sheffield Utd tend to be able to bounce back up again within a couple of seasons of relegation. If I’m a Milwall or Q.P.R fan, who has seen my club in the upper reaches of the Championship for years, the idea of parachute payments must appear very unfair. How do Milwall or QPR hope to gain promotion when they are being outspent at every turn by the same handful of clubs, year in, year out? It must seem like it doesn’t matter how good your decision making is, how well ran you are as a club, monied clubs will always win out.

Anyway, I could go on but I won’t. With many of my articles, there are countless examples of the points I am trying to make. The last point I will make is to reference my last article about yardsticks and how Everton can measure its progress under new ownership. I think we can measure our progress under the Friedkin group in part by their decision making compared to owners like those at Forest and Palace. For now, they are the clubs that we are looking to progress beyond. You would just hope that the decision making goes hand in glove with Lady Luck.