Swansea City’s Great Managerial Gamble

Editorial | Article posted on February 5th, 2025

Swansea City's Great Managerial Gamble
By Ian on Feb 5, 2025 in Latest | 1 comment

So, farewell then, Michael Laudrup. It would be easy to spin the story of his departure from the Liberty Stadium yesterday as being just another case of the insanity of the world of football management in the twenty-first century. True enough, the Swans are just two points from the relegation places in the Premier League, but the bottom half of the table is awfully congested at the moment and it is, of course, equally true to say that Swansea City will go into this weekend's Premier League matches in twelfth place in the table. It has been clear from media reports over the last couple of weeks that something hasn't been right and league form has been patchy of late, but it is a signal of how far the club has come that not only has this come to pass with the club in the Premier League – a scenario that surely would have been unthinkable a decade ago – but also with it in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup and still engaged in European competition.
Laudrup's arrival at the Liberty Stadium came at a time of some uncertainty for the club. Over the five and a half years prior to his appointment, one of the key factors behind Swansea's success had been consistently getting their managerial appointments right. From Roberto Martinez on, the club had worked the shark-infested waters of the managerial marketplace shrewdly, making the right decision time after time whilst getting into the Premier League and then stabilising in it. Yet with each new appointment comes the renewed risk of getting it wrong. There doesn't seem to be any precise science to bringing in a new manager to a football club. It certainly doesn't have the silver bullet effect that a limitless cheque book is likely to in terms of turning around a club's fortunes on the pitch. And changing manager during the middle of a season is a vastl different proposition to changing one during the summer break, when the new man has the opportunity to reshape and remould a team to his own taste.
Yet Laudrup succeeded. The points totals – and even the goals scored and conceded – were barely any different at the end of his first season in charge of the club, but the team's performance last season was enough to secure the club a ninth placed finish in last year's Premier League table, and on top of this came the icing on the cake, a League Cup win against Bradford City last year that seemed entirely apposite as the crowning glory to a remarkable period in the

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