Familiarity breeds contempt, so the saying goes. The relationship between a football club and its manager seems to prove it. The average lifespan of a manager at a championship club is currently just 10 months, as the need to match results with a form of overarching footballing philosophy becomes ever more imperative.
Gary Rowett is the latest example to prove the rule. The current campaign had not started well for his Millwall side, but they came within a single victory of finishing in the play-offs last term following three seasons of top-half finishes in a league that is dominated by sides flush with parachute payments and ambitious ownership groups.
Rowett had overseen almost 200 matches across a four-year spell when he left the club in October. Millwall were 15th in the championship at the time, a return to form from last season’s top scorer, Zian Flemming, away from another successful season. The departure was announced as a mutual decision, yet there were plenty of signs that some at the club had grown tired of an unglamorous yet effective style of football and a familiar set of players.
In a 3-1 defeat at Norwich in August, supporters at the away end sang that Rowett’s football was “shit.” The 49-year-old admitted the criticism hurt, given how long he had spent at the club, but added that the performance had been of greater concern. He won enough games to fight on for a few more months, but the relationship with fans remained uneasy.
It is hard to deem Rowett’s spell at the Den a failure; rather, the temptation to seek out something maybe not better but certainly different became too great. It was a similar case for Mark Warburton at QPR in 2022 and Tony Mowbray at Blackburn in the same summer. All of these managers have achieved their own versions of success across significant spells at their respective clubs, but the fact they had been in post so long made it seem less likely that they could cause a surprise and produce something spectacular like promotion to the Premier League.
The managers of the sides that currently occupy three of the top four places in the championship are quite different by comparison. Leicester’s Enzo Maresca, Ipswich’s Kieran McKenna, and Southampton’s Russell Martin are all under the age of 45, and between them, they have overseen fewer second-tier matches than Rowett managed in his spell at Milwall alone.
All come from a school of thought that requires them to have their own bespoke footballing ideology along with the skills to effectively communicate it to players, supporters, and journalists alike. Even if at times it can seem that they do not possess one or both of these qualities, they are still unfamiliar enough that it is possible to project the version of the manager you want them to have on them.
And now Millwall have followed suit. After a month-long recruitment process, former Chelsea youth coach Joe Edwards was selected to take over from Rowett. Edwards is just 37 years old and had never taken charge of a senior team before arriving at the Den, but a history of winning FA Youth Cups with Reece James and Mason Mount and learning from the coaching staffs of both Frank Lampard and Thomas Tuchel was enough in itself to make this an exciting appointment.
That excitement was hardly dampened by a 4-0 win at Sheffield Wednesday in his first game, and it is clear that Edwards has set about making progressive changes. He has spoken regularly of making the team better with the ball and was pleased that his entire starting XI could be found in the opposition half when George Saville scored the second goal in the victory at Hillsborough.
But his opening game at the Den ended in a 3-0 defeat to Coventry, and that was followed by a 3-1 loss at Ipswich that was more convincing than the scoreline suggests. Edwards has changed formations both within and between games, and for the game at Portman Road, he even dropped centre-back Jake Cooper to the bench to put an end to a run of 88 consecutive league starts.
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