DAILY RECORD 🔵 Wilfried Nancy’s Celtic axe shows sackings are ‘getting completely out of hand’ as manager chief names key issue
Wilfried Nancy and Jimmy Thelin have both lost their jobs in the last week taking the number of top flight axeings to four this season.
Much has changed in football management in the 35 years since Billy Brown and Jim Jefferies first stepped into a full-time gig at Falkirk.
Time being one. Specifically, the time afforded to get things right. Brown – who heads up the Scottish Managers and Coaches Association these days – casts his mind back to those early days of one of Scottish football’s most enduring double acts and winces at the thought of what could have been.
Their first five games in charge of the Bairns ended in four defeats and a draw. He knows that, in the modern game, the knives would be out. They’d maybe even have already been plunged into the back of the Bairns bosses.
Instead Falkirk’s board kept faith and were rewarded with a league title and promotion to the Premier League just eight months later. Jefferies and Brown, boyhood pals from their days growing up in Musselburgh, were off and running in a career that took them to Hearts, Bradford City, Kilmarnock and back to Hearts.
Ten years after their big breakthrough at Falkirk, the double act were standing down at Tynecastle and ready to take over at Bradford. That was one of just two managerial changes in the Scottish top flight that 2000-01 season along with Paul Sturrock at Dundee United. Two resignations. No sackings.
Incredibly John Barnes’ departure from Celtic in February 2000 was the only outright sacking in the top flight between the summers of 1998 and 2001. Barnes exit, of course, eventually paved the way for Martin O’Neill to ride in for his first spell as Celtic boss that summer.
Now, as the Irishman returns for a third stint at Parkhead, he finds a very different managerial landscape.
The binning of Wilfried Nancy after eight games and 33 days in charge of the Hoops was the fourth sacking of the Premiership season already. And that doesn’t include the messy resignation of Brendan Rodgers.
Jimmy Thelin’s 18 month stint at Aberdeen was brought to an end hours before Nancy got his P45 last week. Stuart Kettlewell was bagged at Kilmarnock after just 25 games last month. And Russell Martin became the shortest-serving manager in Rangers history after being binned just 17 games and 122 days into his tenure.
This season is on course to outdo the five sackings across last season. Or the six the season before that. And the six the season before that.
It doesn’t get any better dropping down to the Championship where Ross County are on their third manager of the season.
Brown can only shake his head. In his view, things have got “completely out of hand”.
He understands why Nancy has gone at Celtic. But he can’t fathom why he was given the job in the first place.
And that’s where, in Brown’s opinion, the problem lies. With the decisions makers who are handing out the contracts in the first place – then taking them away again in next to no time.
Brown said: “Clubs have got to make sure they’re getting the right person for the job – and then give them the time to prove that they are right for it.
“Managers need time to put their own ideas across and get their own players in, find out all about the ones they’re inheriting. There’s no magic wand.
“I think things are getting completely out of hand, I really do.
“Last month Celtic gave the job to a guy that didn’t know Scottish football. He had been in a league where there was no relegation and so he had never been under anything like the pressure that he was going to face at Celtic.
“Really, that was an unfair one. I don’t know how they managed to get themselves in that situation.
“Wilfried Nancy had eight games and he got the sack.
“Alright, the supporters are up in arms and everything but you certainly need more time than that.
“But he was never going to get it the way things were going.”
What’s changed since the turn of the millennium though, which has seen the average span of a manager in Scotland’s top flight cut so dramatically?
Brown continued: “Fans certainly have less patience now. But I think it’s people coming into running football clubs that don’t really know what to expect.
“You know, when Jim and I first went to Falkirk from Berwick Rangers we never won any of our first five games in the league and the cup.
“We had one point from four league games.
“If you do that now you’re in trouble. People would be starting to shout and bawl.
“But we got a chance. And we ended up winning the league.
“We didn’t start well but we got time, worked out our squad and what we needed to do.
“We got Falkirk promoted to the Premier League .
“Again when we went to Hearts in 1995 we only won one of our first seven league games. But the board, Leslie Deans and Chris Robinson at the time, stuck by us and we ended up fourth and got to the final of the Scottish Cup.
“Two years later we won the cup.
“Success takes time. Look at David Gray last season.. bottom of the league in late November and by all accounts if Hibs hadn’t equalised in the last 30 seconds against Aberdeen, he might have lost his job.
“He went on and finished third in the league because the club stuck by him
“To be fair, Aberdeen did stick by Jimmy Thelin. I don’t think you can criticise that one, it’s not that it went well this season.
“They won the cup in May but the team’s not doing as well as what they should this season.
“To be fair to David Cormack, he did stick by him.
“But to be sacking managers after a few months like we have seen this season is no time at all.”
It’s the word that keeps recurring in the conversation with Brown. Time.
And he might well feel like he’s in a warp with O’Neill returning to Parkhead at 73 – just two years younger than Brown and Jefferies.
He said: “Jim and myself faced Martin quite a lot in his first spell at Celtic.
“Martin was brilliant. Not always a gentleman in the dugout.. but neither were we right enough!
“Good on him. I just hope that it goes well for him.
“The whole thing at Celtic had gone quite toxic with Brendan Rodgers’ exit and all the rest of it.
“Martin will help calm things down a bit.”
NUMBER OF SCOTTISH TOP FLIGHT SACKINGS IN LAST 10 YEARS
2025-26 – 4 sackings, 1 resignation
2024-25 – 5 sackings, 1 resignation
2023-24 – 6 sackings, 2 resignations
2022-23 – 6 sackings, 2 by mutual consent
2021-22 – 4 sackings, 2 took over new job.
2020-21 – 2 sackings, 2 resignations, 2 by mutual consent
2019-20 – 3 sackings, 1 resignation, 1 by mutual consent
2018-19 – 3 sackings, 3 by mutual consent, 1 took new job
2017-18 – 4 sackings, 2 resignations
2016-17 – 2 sackings, 3 resignations and 2 managers took new jobs
** 2000-01 – 0 sackings, 1 resignation, 1 mutual consent