Where things went wrong for Manuel Pellegrini

After almost 18 months in charge, Manuel Pellegrini finally felt the guillotine against the back of his neck last night after his side’s meek loss at home to a Leicester side who had rotated 9 outfield players for the fixture.

Pellegrini’s departure had been inevitable for a while but he’d managed to buy himself some time with wins away at Chelsea and Southampton interspersing the otherwise miserable set of results and performances since the start of the season. That dallying from the board might end up costing them in the fight against relegation.

A change of manager was required — the team were so poorly organised and easy to play against due what appeared to be a lack of coaching — but getting rid of Pellegrini won’t solve all of the club’s issues. The Chilean bears a lot of responsibility for the failings of his tenure, but there are other factors involved.

It’s worth evaluating some of those factors in order to judge just where things went wrong for the former Premier League winning manager at West Ham:

1. Failure to address long-standing midfield issues — no combination of our current options can be played together to create a functioning central midfield, which severely limits the type of formation and style of football we can play. This has been a major cause of concern for basically a decade now and no manager has sorted it.
2. Broader recruitment problems — on top of under-investment in key areas (CM and FB), there’s been no joined-up thinking about how the players we have actually signed fit together. We’ve spent £100mil+ on Felipe Anderson, Andriy Yarmolenko, Pablo Fornals, and Sebastien Haller. All of those players are most comfortable with the ball at their feet and all want to play in front of the opposition defence. The resulting lack of movement off the ball makes our attacks stagnant and predictable. It means the inclusion of Michail Antonio is essential for the team to look dangerous and relying on him to be available is a bad position to be in because he’s guaranteed to miss 10+ games every season because of his injury issues.
3. Lack of clarity and proper coaching — After 18 months of Pellegrini’s coaching there was still no coherent idea about how this team wanted to operate without possession. There was no coherent idea about how this team was going to progress the ball up the pitch from the back. There was no coherent idea about the type of chances this team wanted to manufacture. The complete lack of structure ahead of the defence made us the easiest team to play against in the league. There were whispers of discontent about the quality of training sessions and the lack of opposition analysis that cropped up in various articles about the pressure on Pellegrini and it showed on the pitch. This was a team of individuals rather than a collective.
4. Indecision and lack of consistency in selection — if you’re going to rely on moments of individual brilliance to create chances rather than pre-determined passing patterns, it’s important for those individuals to develop on-field relationships with one another; having continuity creates understanding between players which, in turn, makes improvisation much more fluid. That didn’t happen. Instead things were chopped and changed constantly. It’s the same story at the back; we had the same central defensive options throughout Pellegrini’s entire tenure and he never figured out what his best partnership there was. The lack of continuity in selection left us disjointed.
5. Mental fragility and lack of adaptability — we won 3 of the 22 games that we went 1–0 down in under Manuel Pellegrini. This failure to salvage results after conceding the first goal hints at a frailty in belief and an inability to find solutions on the fly during games. Part of that is a lack of tactical nous and part of it is a squad-building problem; the homogeneity of playing styles in our forward options mean that it’s very difficult for the team to change how they’re playing mid-game. This will continue to be a problem for whoever inherits this squad.
6. Structural problems at the club — the shoddy squad-building can largely be attributed to West Ham’s awful implementation of the Director of Football role. Mario Husillos was appointed DoF by Manuel Pellegrini after he’d been appointed manager and Husillos has subsequently left after Pellegrini was sacked. We’ve just installed David Moyes as manager before we’ve installed another Director of Football. This is completely arse about face. The whole point of this role is to choose and shape the direction of the footballing side at the club (the hint is in the job title) but that’s not how it worked at West Ham. This is a club with no strategy, no idea of the style of football they want to play, no idea of the type of recruitment policy they want to carry about, no idea about how to achieve the long-term aims of the club. Chances are that David Sullivan will be back in charge of transfers over the next window and we’re back to square one.

By virtually any metric you can imagine, Pellegrini failed as manager of West Ham United. But his failings were a reflection of the structures he was working within as much as his own personal shortcomings.