Worst Managers ever.

Will Hersey
The Observer, Sunday May 4 2008

Bad managers are two a penny - every club in the land could muster a lengthy list all their own. For this 10, then, run-of-the-mill ineptitude wasn't enough. We needed to look beyond the obvious, one-off disasters of Les Reed at Charlton and Mike Walker at Everton, or Chris Hutchings's brief stays at Bradford and Wigan.

Those whose sustained failures came after longer spells of success - Venables, Eriksson - were also reluctantly overlooked. I'm sad to have to miss out the CVs of Billy McNeill and Dave Bassett, both in charge of two clubs relegated in one season. Instead we were looking for incompetence on a grander scale: the maverick philosophies that were always destined for disaster, the individual actions that had the most devastating effects on the clubs they managed, and the inflated reputations in need of reappraisal. In short, 10 outstanding contributions in the field of failure.

1 Graeme Souness

As a player, his name struck fear into opponents. As a manager, he has been more terrifying for his own clubs. Nearly two decades of sackings and disappointment after his success at Rangers, Souness, remarkably, still rates himself as one of the big guns. He spent nearly �50m on a relegation battle at Newcastle, and told Deco he wasn't going to cut it at Benfica - replacing him with Sheffield Wednesday's Mark Pembridge - but it's at Liverpool where the wrecking ball did most damage. Britain's most successful club are still recovering today. Souness doesn't so much lose the dressing room as rarely find it to start with.

2 Egil Olsen

Few managers can boast that they helped wipe a club off the footballing map. After 13 years in the top flight, Wimbledon were starting to hone their direct tactics into a more patient style when this long-ball obsessive and committed Marxist (nickname 'Drillo') arrived in the summer of 1999, having taken Norway to two World Cups. Strangely, his wellies, beaded glasses and zonal-marking tactic didn't win over the Crazy Gang and he was fired with relegation looming the next May, blaming the players for not embracing his system. Recently sacked as manager of Iraq.

3 Hristo Stoichkov

'I don't believe in tactics,' Stoichkov announced on taking over at Celta Vigo last summer. He wasn't lying, having started one World Cup qualifier with a 2-4-4 formation that left Bulgaria trailing Malta for half an hour. But it was in man-management that the hot-headed Stoichkov's deficiencies were most apparent. He forced three players (two of them captains) into premature retirement and, running out of people to argue with, went for an entire country - accusing Romania of fixing a qualifier. Hugely unpopular at Celta, he was sacked six weeks into this season.

4 Ossie Ardiles

Christian Gross was perhaps the most comical Tottenham manager (brandishing a Tube ticket at his first press conference), but statistically Alan Sugar's appointment of the Argentine club legend (Gross averaged 1.31 points per game, Ardiles 1.15) was worse. In 1994, his second season, Ardiles revealed his masterstroke - the one-man midfield and five-man front-line - and blindly stuck to his plan despite shipping 33 goals in 15 games. Tottenham have since become known for having decent players who never achieve anything. Thank Ossie.

5 David Platt

Well connected and with a player's worldly knowledge of the game (well, he'd been abroad), Platty seemed destined for management. His mate Luca Vialli even heralded him as the future of coaching. Sadly his actual destiny was to share studio space with Richard Keys. His short stint at Sampdoria in 1998-99 led to their relegation after 17 years in Serie A, while in a disastrous spell at Nottingham Forest he blew �12m on players such as Gianluca Petrachi and Salvatore Matrecano from Perugia, making him the most unpopular man in the city since Sir Guy of Gisbourne.

6 Glenn Roeder

The League is littered with regretful chairmen who decided to put the assistant in charge. Steve Wigley at Southampton and Les Reed at Charlton take some beating in an overcrowded field, but it requires extra-special skill to take down a squad containing David James, Joe Cole, Fredi Kanout�, Paolo Di Canio and Jermain Defoe, as Roeder did at West Ham in 2003. Then again, when you consider his 'train guard announcing planned engineering works' impression at post-match interviews, it's not so surprising that West Ham didn't win a home league game for five months.

7 Alan Ball

Lovely man, lousy manager. In fact, Ball was less a manager than a ruthlessly efficient relegation machine: five times his teams went down, even if he was only twice employed long enough to go down with the ship. Out of the six clubs he managed, only Southampton avoided the drop. His biggest blunder came on the last day of the 1995-96 season, when he told his Man City players a draw was enough for survival - they were playing keep-ball, when the substituted Niall Quinn rushed back to pitchside to inform everyone that City needed a winner. Too late.

8 The England 1986 World Cup Squad

It's as if a curse was placed on the 22 players Bobby Robson took to Mexico 86 - they could fill a book on the most dreadful management records of modern times. From Peters Shilton and Reid through Terry Fenwick to Alvin Martin and John Barnes, there are enough failed bosses to field an XI and three subs. Captain, of course, would be Marvel himself, Bryan Robson. Surely the only manager to be effectively sacked (when Terry Venables came to Middlesbrough mid-season) but still turn up for work. The phrase 'left by mutual consent' could be written on his gravestone.

9 Claude Anelka

In 2004, tired of engineering transfers for his restless brother Nicolas and fed up with 'the crazy things' he saw managers do, agent and DJ Claude Anelka decided he wanted to be a boss himself. With a 'mystery' backer, he offered �300,000 to any lower-league club who would let him be manager, and got a bite at Raith Rovers, in Scottish Division One. Citing Cruyff, Wenger and the boss of Chinawhite nightclub as influences, his philosophy and signings - some from the Paris seven-a-side leagues - brought Rovers just one point from 24 before he stepped aside.

10 Jim Fallon

Statistics are not the only way to judge a manager, but if they were, Dumbarton's Jim Fallon would have an unmovable grip on the worst manager crown. The club's 1995-96 record makes horrific reading: played 36, won three, drawn two, lost 31. Then consider that two of the wins came in the opening two games, before they appointed Fallon. A record of 0.147 points per match convinced the board he deserved another crack the following season. He's now a physio.