Almost half a century has passed since Roy Hodgson was first appointed as caretaker manager at Bristol City, and this week saw his return to Ashton Gate to help save their season.
You might be sitting there, saying to yourself, had he not retired? Yes, well, not anymore. Hodgson, now 78, seems to be one of those men who doesn’t know what to do with himself in retirement.
He stepped away from football after leaving Crystal Palace in June 2021, only to return as Watford manager in January 2022. He left Watford five months later and announced he wouldn’t be returning to the Premier League, only to take the Palace job again in March 2023, where he stayed for almost a year before being forced to step down due to health issues.
Now, armed with a new fitness regime, one of English football’s favourite uncles is back in the dugout again aged 78. He must like to keep busy.
Clubs calling on really quite old men to come out of retirement feels like a bit of a trend.
Martin O’Neill hadn’t managed a team since Nottingham Forest in 2019 when he went back to Celtic last October. He did a good job stabilising the team before he was replaced and put back into retirement, only then to be asked to come back out of retirement again to save them again.
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Harry Redknapp was pretty much everyone’s favourite pick to halt Spurs’ slide towards relegation before the prospect of his return was ruined by Roberto de Zerbi, while Neil Warnock is caretaker manager at Torquay United 33 years after his first stint in charge.
One thing they bring is certainty – you know exactly what you’ll get with Hodgson or Warnock simply because there is a 50-year back catalogue of work to point to.
In an era where many clubs seem to be having one sort of identity crisis or another, bringing in a familiar face can have a calming effect.
It can be tempting to turn your nose up at these ‘dinosaurs’ who have potentially been left behind by modern coaching, especially due to the recent trend of appointing ‘coaches’ over ‘managers’, whose job it is to focus only on the pitch. Think Fabian Huerzler at Brighton or Keith Andrews at Brentford – both young, up and coming coaches who are cogs in well-oiled machines.
But the quantity and quality of backroom staff these days means that when things start to go wrong, all anyone wants is a manager who can make us feel something, and these old guys are masters at that.
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