Is it all about firing a coach?

Fungai Muderere, Senior Sports Reporter

AN uncertain future seems to be a long-standing feature within soccer, where coaches work under pressure of the threat of dismissals if they fail to meet the performance targets of their employers.

Coaching in competitive sports is a profession that is rewarding from a wide range of perspectives but also a profession known for its high demands and pressures, especially at the highest level. Gaffers typically face a large number of varied demands associated with the working context of elite sports, such as: unrealistic performance demands, management, administration, inter-personal and organisational stressors. Moreover, the context is complex, dynamic, unpredictable, highly competitive, and involves extensive amounts of travel days and work hours without boundaries that may lead to work and home life interference.

According to a study titled Elite Football Coaches Experiences and Sense making about Being Fired: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, “stress has and will always be an integral part of elite sport, and key features of coaching at this level are unrealistic performance demands and job insecurity.”

A local sports scientist who declined to be named is of the view that: “This is especially relevant for bigger team sports such as football, which also involve thousands of sponsors. Indeed, high-performance coaching in general is a profession that is vulnerable to mental health problems and in particular football.”

Research has explored football coach dismissals from a variety of perspectives. Typically, from a results-based perspective with an emphasis on how the dismissal of a coach affects the results of the team.

Despite ambiguous findings, the overall and long-term findings indicate that dismissals may or may not necessarily improve team performance, either in matches won or in goals scored. Further, some studies have focused on whether there is an increasing or decreasing trend of dismissals and based on findings discussed potential explanations behind an increasing trend.

This trend could be a consequence of public justification, since coaches and the team are under constant pressure to meet high standards and high-performance expectations over time. Although this challenge is part of the context for most teams in competitive elite sport, being a coach and trying to manage unrealistic expectations over time could be considered a “mission impossible”

Question: Are football coaches given enough tools to meet their demands? Last season, in the local Castle Lager Premier Soccer Leaguer, ex-Warriors captain and coach Norman Mapeza was said to be on his way out, years after making history with his FC Platinum charges.

Mapeza won the league championship with Pure Platinum Play in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021-2022 and played Caf Champions League football.

During their over a decade years of Premiership football, FC Platinum have also amassed several trophies including the Chibuku Super Cup, the Castle Challenge Cup, the Independence Cup and the ZNA Charity Shield.

While the club hierarchy has already declared the desire to get back to dominating the local league again, one wonders why they wanted to show Mapeza the exit door. It is just unbelievable! In the 2012 and 2013 seasons Highlanders was transformed by Zambian gaffer Kelvin Kaindu but after that the God-fearing mentor was forced out of the system.

Interestingly, Kaindu bounced back to take charge of the black and white army in the 2024 season. What rapidly changed in Kaindu’s capabilities of leading a football team?

While it remains, to be seen if the likes of free-spending PSL newboys Scottland FC, Simba Bhora and MWOS will remain and compete, the answer is: “Only time will tell ahead of another tough season that saw Bulawayo Chiefs, Chegutu Pirates, Hwange and Arenel Movers being relegated in the past season.

In the past seasons, we have also observed clubs that include Ngezi Platinum Stars, Bulawayo Chiefs, Dynamos and Bulawayo City part ways with coaches that include Benjani Mwaruwari, Bongani Mafu, Thulani Sibanda, Hebert Maruwa, Tonderayi Ndiraya, Genesis “Kaka” Mangombe, Mandla “Lulu” Mpofu, Darlington Dodo and Bekithemba “Super” Ndlovu among others which one way or the other speaks to the football coaches’ experienced the process of getting fired and how they made sense of that process: “acceptance of having an insecure job”, “working for an unprofessional organisation and management” “micro-politics in the organisation”, “unrealistic and changing performance expectation”, and “emotional responses”

One South African coach once lamented the demand for results against a background where one is expected to make orange juice out of lemons. — @FungaiMuderere