The Sean Dyche conundrum
Contrary to Philip Neville’s incessant bleating about English coaches being “second-class citizens”, there’s one manager who has been linked to every club vacancy under the sun recently: Sean Dyche.
Since being overlooked for the Leicester City and West Ham jobs, Dyche has emerged as one of the favourites to become the next Everton manager (although news from yesterday might suggest that he’s fallen down the pecking order.) It’s unclear whether Everton’s reported interest in genuine or whether Dyche himself would even countenance leaving Burnley mid-season — with the Clarets flying high, you could argue that he’d be better off seeing through the rest of the season with them and then moving on to a bigger job in the summer, rather than throwing himself head first into a club in turmoil.
Jamie Carragher astutely made the flip side of that argument on a recent edition of Monday Night Football: “ “Sean Dyche won’t go from Burnley to a team in the Champions League in this country. Everton is the next step. One of the things you’ve got to remember as well is for a long time, Sean Dyche and Eddie Howe have been the two up and coming, young English managers who’ve come to the Premier League over the last two or three years.
Eddie Howe hasn’t been mentioned once for this Everton job — he finished ninth last season with Bournemouth. Because they’re struggling this season, he hasn’t been mentioned because it’s all about timing. Sean Dyche could easily be in that position next season.”
While Carragher makes a compelling point about making hay while the sun is shining, the question that Dyche really needs to ask himself is whether Everton would be the right move. Likewise, Everton need to ask whether Dyche would be the right fit for them.
It comes down to a question of style.
Dyche’s detractors suggest that his pragmatic, safety first football has its limitations and that any side that has aspirations of playing European football needs to do more than simply negate their opposition every week. On the other hand, advocates of the Burnley manager point out that the results speak for themselves; Burnley are currently 7th and have picked up points away at Chelsea, Spurs, and Liverpool. There’s also the arguments that Everton are currently desperately in need of defensive stability (which he would provide in bucketloads) and that Dyche’s style of football is dictated by the resources at his disposal — proponents suggest that Dyche would tailor his approach to suit a squad of more technically gifted players.
Daniel Storey of Football365 succinctly summarises this position in his article on this subject: “ Yet you can also understand the frustration of a manager who feels typecast by his methods rather than his results.”
It’s worth outlining what Dyche’s methods actually are. Simply categorising Burnley’s football as “route one” or “long ball” is reductive and probably does them a bit of a disservice. Out of possession, their system is predicated on two narrow, compact lines of four who sit deep and flood central areas to deny their opposition space in behind or in front of their back four. They generally concede possession and make very little effort to win the ball back until their opponents progress into Burnley’s defensive third. Even then regaining the ball isn’t paramount; they typically allow opposition forwards to take shots from outside the box or from wide angles, both of which they excel at blocking.
With the ball, they generally do play long passes — their goal kicks almost always go long — up to a big target man(usually Chris Wood this season). Wood then either runs into the channels to chase the ball down or he plays with his back to goal to hold the ball up. From there, he’ll pass it back to the central midfielders (most commonly Cork and Defour), who then circulate the ball between themselves and the back four as they patiently wait for an opening. The purpose of this is to coax their opponents into overcommiting to a press, which gives a Burnley player the opportunity to hit a big diagonal pass into space for a counter. Once there, they rely on crosses from their full-backs to create shooting opportunities. This system is more sophisticated than it is often credited as being, but it’s not a style of play conducive to creating many goalscoring chances — Burnley have averaged 9.5 shots per game, the 5th worst record in the league, despite playing nearly 2 hours of football against 10 men or fewer in their 11 Premier League matches.
Dyche has shown a bit of adaptability by switching to a 4–5–1 instead rigidly sticking to the 4–4–2 they used unfailingly last year, which perhaps contributed to their struggles to pick up points away from home. The main difference between last year and this year is the absence of Andre Gray. With Gray in the side, Burnley still retained the long passes to a big physical presence up front, but the ball would be flicked on to use Gray’s pace in behind. There’s still some of this with the runs of Jeff Hendrick from deep, but the target man’s role is now mostly to keep hold of the ball until the midfielders can transition up the pitch to support him.
But beyond that, there are serious questions to be asked of Dyche’s results. The first and most obvious point is that we’ve only played 11 games this season and it’s entirely plausible that Burnley are just riding a good run of form. Premier League history is littered with clubs who started a season well before fading away and Burnley did finish 16th last season, just 6 points clear of the relegation.
As Storey’s article points out, they’ve only scored more than one goal in a game once this season (although they scored all their goals against Chelsea on the opening day when the reigning champions had 10 men rather than the 9 they would finish with). Another of Burnley’s 10 goals came against 10 men, but they could only manage one to salvage a draw against West Ham despite having a numerical advantage for an hour. Against Palace they scored their only goal of the game courtesy of a horrendous back pass by Lee Chung-yong and Palace missed two gilt-edged chances at the other end. In their last match away at Southampton, Burnley scored their only shot on target — a header from the penalty spot by Sam Vokes that trickled past Fraser Forster. While they have undoubtedly done well to capitalise on these scenarios, it’s difficult to imagine this kind of good fortune sustaining itself throughout a whole season. In their 11 games so far they have accrued the poorest quality chances in the Premier League, according to their shot data.
Then there’s the broader question of whether results should be given more weight than methods.
At first glance, the current Everton squad looks like a horrible stylistic fit for Dyche’s football. At Burnley, he’s never played with a creative number 10 figure and Everton have that type of player in abundance. What would he do with Wayne Rooney? With Gylfi Sigurdsson? With Nikola Vlašić? What about forwards like Ademola Lookman, Sandro Ramírez, or Henry Onyekuru? There is also, of course, the glaring absence of a target man style striker in the squad. Everton will surely sign someone in that mould in January, but there’s 10 league games to be played between now and then. In the immediate short term, Dyche and Everton seems like a bad pairing.
To illustrate that: Everton and Burnley have each taken 32 headed shots this season, the highest number in the league. That approach has clearly been ineffective thus far for Everton and those 32 headers represent a higher proportion of Burnley’s total number of shots than it does for the Blues. Why would they seek a manager whose playing style manufactures chances they already struggle to finish? To put it another way, you could claim that Everton are already doing what Dyche would do and it’s not working.
They could always appoint Dyche and give him the opportunity to reshape the team in his own image over the next few transfer windows but Everton reinvested the entirety of the Lukaku fee and then some assembling this squad. Hiring someone who would need to dismantle it in order to be successful seems like an inefficient and highly expensive way of doing things.
None of that matters though if you’re a subscriber to the idea that Dyche would play a different style of football with better players at his disposal. There’s no guarantee of that though and this line of thinking ignores the fact that there are very few instances of coaches moving clubs and overhauling their style in any meaningful way.
What’s the point of hiring someone on the basis of their success playing one way and then expecting them to do something significantly different? You’d let a painter-decorator do your living room but you wouldn’t want them painting the Sistine Chapel.
Storey’s article reiterates a line that is frequently mentioned when discussing Dyche’s achievements at Burnley: “ He is unable to change his style given the budget at his disposal and unable to gain promotion because of his style.”
Dyche has done well with what he has at Burnley but he’s also played a large role in shaping that squad; the reason they’ve been successful is that he’s acquired players who suit his playing style rather than the other way around. Burnley unquestionably have the lowest wage bill in the league and are more constrained financially than some of their counterparts, but the idea that their transfer policy isn’t driven by the club’s footballing philosophy is a fallacy.
In the last year, Burnley have spent more money on Robbie Brady than Watford (who finished below Burnley last season) spent on Richarlison, spent twice as much on Jack Cork as Brighton spent on Pascal Groß, and paid roughly the same amount for Chris Wood as West Ham paid for Chicharito and Southampton paid for Manolo Gabbiadini. If those comparisons feel unfair, then compare the Chris Wood transfer to the fees that Middlesbrough and Aston Villa spent on Britt Assombalonga and Jonathan Kodjia in the last two seasons. Or take Huddersfield — similarly sized, similarly run club to Burnley— who spent less on Steve Mounié and Tom Ince than Burnley did on Brady and Wood and paid the same for Aaron Mooy as the Clarets spent on Cork.
The point is that there are players with different qualities out there for the fees they pay. They sign players who fit their template. The counter argument to this is that if Burnley started bringing in anyone with flair and flamboyancy then they would quickly find themselves relegated. That’s true, but not due to the quality of the flair players they could attract (as some of the examples listed above show). It would be because Dyche hasn’t shown any capacity for utilising players with flair and flamboyancy. It’s also worth mentioning that Dyche has been relegated playing his way with Burnley once already and, as previously mentioned, they only finished 6 points above the relegation zone last season.
There are off-field considerations to made about his suitability for the Everton role, too. Dyche has proven himself to be either unwilling or unable to work with players whose first language isn’t English and he has almost exclusively relied on signing players who have previously played in England — both of which would be a problem for Everton’s current squad and for their recruitment of players in the future.(This is something he has in common with Eddie Howe and it’s often overlooked in discussions about the two). It’s fair and only natural to want to work with known quantities or people you can easily communicate with, but clubs with aspirations of playing at the highest tier of football can’t limit the pool of players they draw from like that.
Other aspects regarding player recruitment could potentially be a barrier to success, too. Dyche’s role at Burnley seems to be more of a manager rather than a head coach and, as a result, he probably has quite a lot of influence over transfer policy. Everton operate with a Director of Football and it would be interesting to see how Dyche would cope if he worked under Steve Walsh and didn’t have the autonomy over signings he has at Turf Moor.
Sean Dyche is undoubtedly a talented manager and he will surely take the next step up the managerial ladder in the foreseeable future. But rather than just making a move to the biggest club that is interested in him, Dyche needs to assess his options carefully and pick the job that is the best fit for him and his approach to football if he wants to improve his chances of success. He needs to find himself not just a good job, but the right job.
