Football used to be a long game played at short speed. Ninety minutes decided a match, but seasons decided legacies. Managers arrived with a philosophy, a blueprint, and the expectation that the first coat of paint would look patchy before the walls started to shine.
Now the sport behaves like it’s doom-scrolling its own existence. One bad half and the crowd wants a new manager. One awkward press conference and the forums light the torches. One run of draws and the word “project” becomes a punchline.
And it isn’t just football. It’s us.
We’re living in an age that treats time like a nuisance. Everyone wants results at the tap of a screen. Delivery by tomorrow. Answers in seconds. Success without the awkward bit where you’re bad at something before you become good at it. Gen Z have grown up in a world where speed is normal, and delay feels like disrespect. That isn’t a criticism, it’s an environment. If you’re raised in instant feedback, you start to believe the world owes you instant outcomes.
Football has swallowed that culture whole.
We even talk like speed is the point. “We need change at the speed of light,” people say, as if human beings can be rebooted like routers. But here’s the thing: even Concord, the most famous symbol of “faster than everyone else,” wasn’t moving at the speed of light. It was rare because it was expensive, loud, complicated, and only a tiny slice of the world could justify it. It crossed the Atlantic in a way no normal plane could, because it was built for a different reality.
That’s modern football in a nutshell.
Only the elite clubs can live like Concord. They can sack a manager, hire another, buy three players for him, sack him again, and keep flying at altitude. The money cushions the mistakes. The global pull covers the bruises. Their impatience is subsidised.
Everyone else? Everyone else is on a standard passenger jet. Seven to eight hours, depending on the tailwind. It takes the time it takes. You can kick the seat and scream at the air hostess, it won’t make the Atlantic smaller.
The tragedy is that mid-table and struggling clubs copy the elite’s impatience, without the elite’s safety net. They try to live at Concord speed with economy-class fuel. And then we act shocked when the engines fail.
A friend of mine said something to me off the record recently that stuck. He called it “the blood culture.” Not accountability, not standards, not ambition. Blood. The baying demand for sacrifice. Fans aren’t just unhappy, they want proof that someone is suffering for it. A sacking becomes a kind of offering to the gods, the idea that if you throw a manager into the fire, the footballing spirits will finally smile again.
But what does that actually buy you?
It buys you noise. It buys you dopamine. It buys you the feeling of control.
It rarely buys you a better team.
Stoicism understood this long before football did. Marcus Aurelius didn’t write about back fours and xG, but he did understand impatience as a form of weakness, because impatience is the refusal to endure the reality you’re in. Not forever, not blindly, but long enough to do the hard work properly. The Stoic idea isn’t “accept misery and do nothing.” It’s accept what is, then act with discipline, without theatrics, without panic.
Football is doing the opposite. It panics first and thinks later.
And that’s why recruitment is the first crime scene.
Clubs keep hiring managers like they’re ordering a takeaway. “He’s available.” “He’s a big name.” “He plays good football.” None of that is a plan. The homework should come first: what does this club actually need, structurally and culturally? What kind of football fits the squad, the academy, the budget, the league position, the owner’s tolerance for risk? What is the manager’s real track record when things go wrong, not just when the wind is behind him?
Then, and only then, once you’ve picked the right fit, you owe that person time. Not blind faith. Time. Respect. A runway long enough to build habits, not just hype.
Managers have their share of blame too. Some stroll into failing clubs and sell a fantasy in the first press conference. “We’ll be fearless.” “We’ll dominate.” “We’ll turn this around quickly.” It sounds brave. It sounds convincing. It’s often nonsense.
If you drop a CEO into a multinational where profits are down, morale is low, and systems are broken, nobody serious expects a miracle by next Tuesday. A serious turnaround works in phases, measured in fiscal cycles. Plan. Execute. Review. Adjust. Repeat. The organisation doesn’t transform because someone “wanted it more” in the first quarter.
Football is the only industry that pretends transformation should happen because the crowd got angry enough.
But football has one terrifying difference: relegation.
That trapdoor changes everything. You fall through it and sometimes you don’t bounce. You lose revenue, you lose players, you lose status, you lose the ability to recruit, you lose time itself because the club becomes a machine for survival. So yes, some knee-jerk reactions happen because fear is real.
Yet here’s the uncomfortable question: if the club goes down anyway, was the sacking actually the smart move? Or was it just the blood culture again? If you genuinely believe the manager is capable of bringing the club back up, if he’s built teams before, if his methodology aligns with what the club wants to become, then why is relegation treated as a moral failure rather than a strategic problem?
Because impatience has turned football into a courtroom instead of a workshop. Every weekend is a verdict.
And the greatest casualty is trust.
Trust is the invisible spine of every successful relationship. In marriage, in friendship, in business, trust isn’t optional, it’s oxygen. So why has football decided trust is a luxury?
The best eras are built on longevity. Longevity is just trust with time added.
Liverpool are the modern example people love to use, and for good reason. Jurgen Klopp didn’t land and immediately produce a masterpiece. He built culture first, then structure, then belief, then trophies. There were moments early on where the ideas didn’t fully gel, where the noise rose, where impatience tried to do what impatience always does: rush the ending. Time didn’t just help Klopp, time was the ingredient.
Everton are a sharper lesson, because it shows how close clubs come to sabotaging themselves. In David Moyes’ early years, there was a season where Everton finished 17th, flirting with the drop and living in that anxious fog where every result feels fatal. The very next season, the same club finished fourth. That is what patience can look like when it’s tied to belief and leadership, not sentimentality. Everton’s story also warns what happens when clubs stop learning that lesson and become addicted to the hire-fire cycle. You don’t get stability, you get permanent transition. You don’t get a “new manager bounce,” you get chronic identity loss.
And then there’s the modern fan’s favourite phrase: “Be careful what you wish for.”
West Ham are the cautionary tale written in capital letters. A manager brings stability, pulls you away from relegation chatter, turns you into a consistent top-eight contender, and then wins you a trophy. Yet the hunger doesn’t calm, it escalates. “Now we want more.” More is not always ambition. Sometimes it’s greed dressed as standards. It’s entitlement wearing a club badge. It’s the belief that satisfaction is weakness.
But football doesn’t reward greed with certainty. It punishes it with chaos.
Tottenham are often mentioned in this conversation for a reason. The club lives under the constant pressure of what it thinks it should be, rather than what it has actually built the foundations to sustain. Fans look up at the skyline and demand penthouse views without accepting you need to lay concrete first. You can’t manifest trophies. You have to manufacture them.
And here’s the dirty secret: impatience feels like ambition, but it behaves like self-harm.
Because what impatience really does is compress human development into an unrealistic timeframe, then label people “failures” when they can’t deliver miracles on demand. In any other job, that would be recognised as a toxic culture. In football, it’s treated as normal. We’ve normalised burning people as part of the entertainment.
The digital age has poured petrol on it. Everything is instant, so everything is judged instantly. The manager isn’t just managing a squad, he’s managing the internet’s mood. His job isn’t just tactics, it’s trend management. A bad substitution becomes a viral trial. A defeat becomes a week-long meme.
And owners aren’t helping, because so many of them are distant from the football itself. There’s a gulf now. PLC thinking. Corporate structures. Middlemen. Layers of “process.” The manager becomes a disposable asset inside an organisational chart instead of a leader with a shared mission. Alignment disappears, and without alignment, trust evaporates. Without trust, patience becomes impossible.
If owners and managers sat down properly, away from the noise, and spoke in depth about the real plan, the real tolerance for setbacks, the real style the club wants to embody, you’d see fewer impulsive sackings. Because you’d see fewer impulsive appointments in the first place.
That’s the heart of it: football’s patience hasn’t died. It’s been murdered by poor planning, digital noise, and a culture addicted to immediate emotional relief.
The fix isn’t to tolerate mediocrity. The fix is to stop confusing impatience with intelligence.
Pick better. Align properly. Communicate honestly. Then commit.
Because the sport doesn’t need Concord fantasies from clubs that can’t afford Concord consequences. Most clubs need the virtue of the ordinary journey, the steady flight, the long build.
Football used to understand that history takes time.
So does a rebuild.
So does a human being.
