GirlsontheBall's Sophie + Rachel record a reaction episode to the breaking news that Brighton have sacked manager Melissa Phillips after less than a year in charge. Is this the biggest shock in the WSL so far this season?
it's weird: in women's football both Brighton and Chelsea are each a mirror image of their respective men's team: short term vision vs long term vision.The only difference is that in women's football Brighton are not buying all of Chelsea's players
I don't understand who they think they're going to get in to replace her. Good managers that could do a good job in the WSL and are actually available are in short supply. The team are never going to be able to settle into a rhythm and start winning their games if they have a new manager coming in every six months
The problem now is that if Brighton have a good run of form and finish out the season well, the club will think that proves they were right to take this action. What they won’t consider is that the any future success might just be the result of the foundation laid by Mel Phillips.
Agreed but how many teams have we seen have a surprisingly good season and then come back down to earth. A tough role for a manager to take with such high expectations.
@@GirlsOnTheBall it’s so frustrating, any manager taking this job is really doing so now with the understanding that they will have to deliver short term results regardless of their long-term vision. It’s such a tough league to predict with these teams in the middle of the table and the margins are getting smaller and smaller. I completely agree that it feels like someone made this decision looking at stats and hasn’t watched the games at all.
Although I agree that this cannot seem fair to Melissa Phillips, surely this is how things will be in professional women's football if you are in the same club as men's teams where this would not be out of the ordinary. Investing money will inevitably bring pressure to produce results. I recently commented elsewhere that the "star" players from the first group of professional players can expect the same pressure from young players who have not come from amateur backgrounds. An example might be when Georgia Stanway was questioned about her knowledge of the history of Bayern Munich's women's teams and she answered she was there to make the history, or something similar. The fact that German teams are not doing as well as they were could be seen as backing up the idea of the need for not just continual improvement, but continual improvement in the rate of improvement to justify the investment, like any other business.
