Who Was The Worst Manager In Top Flight Football History?
The beauty of the beautiful game is that there is a lot of strategy, skill, flair and talent that goes towards the simple premise of getting the ball into the goal, and it requires not only eleven skilled players in football team kits but a leader to guide them to victory.
This usually (although not always) takes the form of a full-time manager, who stands at the touchline and creates a set of tactics that uses the talents of the team in the best way possible to get victory.
Some managers are better than others at this, but arguably the worst in the history of top-flight English football is a manager who reached a World Cup final and won four Eredivisie titles in a row with Ajax.
After a glittering career as a player at Barcelona and both as a player and a manager at Ajax, Frank de Boer’s career as a manager spiralled rapidly downward.
He was handed the reins at Inter Milan, a tenure that lasted just 85 days before he was sacked two days after the club’s CEO Michael Bolingbroke publicly stated the club fully backed him.
He ended up at Crystal Palace before the start of the 2017-18 Premier League and lasted even less time. He was at the club for just four games and 77 days before being sacked, not seven as Jose Mourinho famously claimed.
The problem for the board was perhaps less that the struggling side lost all four of their first Premier League matches, the first side to do so in nearly a century since Preston in 1924, but that they did not score a single goal during any of their games outside of a League Cup win against Championship side Ipswich Town.
The former simply means they did not win, but the latter suggests that they could not win, as the possession-based strategy did not work at the club.
He would go on to be sacked at Atlanta United in the MLS, the Netherlands national team and UAE Pro League side Al Jazira.