Leicester City fired Nigel Pearson, the equal parts manager and thick-jawed Wallace & Gromit character, Tuesday. Pearson had coached the team since 2011.
Here’s a quick recap of Pearson’s last 12 months:
- He helped Leicester dominate the Championship, get 102 points, and secure promotion to the Premier League.
- His team got eight points from its first five games, including a 5-3 win over Manchester United.
- The Foxes earned only two points from their next 13 matches.
- In December, Pearson told a Leicester City fan to hashtag “f*** off and die,” which is almost as funny as the phrase “eat s*** and die” but is hilarious nonetheless.
- Pearson bizarrely choked Crystal Palace’s James McArthur during a loss, leading to reports claiming he was being fired by the club. He wasn’t, and the reports were attributed to “confusion.”
- Leicester were last in the table on March 21 after a 4-3 loss to Tottenham before saving its season with those seven late wins.
- In late May, a sex tape emerged showing three Leicester players - including Pearson’s son James - hurling racist slurs at a group of Taiwanese women. All three players were fired by the club.
That’s a clinic in how not to behave in the public spotlight. The season was tumultuous but ultimately rewarding. The club overcame massive internal and external struggle to finish 14th. Staying up helped the club earn massive TV rights money in the neighborhood of £35 million.
Pearson’s exit, though, is a style firing. Obviously his players didn’t quit on the manager when they were last in the table, or when he was kinda sorta fired, or when he critiqued that fan on his lacking the necessary quality to f*** off and die.
The club explained the firing as a deterioration of the working relationship between Pearson and the board. This reminded me of The Damned Utd, the great 2006 David Peace novel that focused on real-life English legend Brian Clough. Clough was a hothead, always clashing with players and management, but he was a hothead who cared very deeply about his club. I haven’t finished the book yet (please, no spoilers, you maniacs), but I’d guess Clough’s confrontational career at Leeds ended a bit the same as Pearson’s.
Contrast Pearson’s year with that of Sean Dyche, the recently relegated manager of Burnley. Dyche - monikered terrifically as “Ginger Mourinho” - kept a calm, pleasant demeanor every step of his team’s 19th-place finish in the Premier League. Burnley got a few good results - the 1-0 win over Manchester City was particularly fun - but were never really a threat to stay in the league. Dyche kept his job and will manage this fall in the Championship despite Burnley scoring 28 goals in 38 top-flight games.
To that dichotomy between Dyche’s fate and Pearson’s, I imagine old Brian Clough would say something like, “…disgusting.” But it’s simply not good enough anymore to achieve good form on the pitch while displaying bad form off it. Soccer - like absolutely everything in the world - is more transparent. It’s a 24-hour lifestyle. Fans see everything, and board members hear about it.
Pearson isn’t the first casualty of this era where a club can afford bad play more than it can bad press, and he won’t be the last.
