Why Manuel Pellegrini can't admit he's a dead man walking

With City's exit from the Champions League, the vultures are circling over the Etihad. Yet Manuel Pellegrini believes that his job is absolutely safe. Because he has to.

It's not been a great week for Manchester City. First a loss at Burnley put them six points and a game behind Chelsea, virtually ending their hopes of defending their title and almost dragging them back down into the mess below. And then, just a few days later, elimination from the Champions League at the hands of Barcelona, in one of those games that feels plucky but in a profoundly futile way.

No trophies, most likely, and expenditure plus ambition plus no trophies equals managerial pressure. According to some outlets, Pellegrini is a dead man walking; according to others, he is at best a very unwell man thinking about a quick stroll. You'd think some fresh air might help with the health issues, but ultimately that depends on the destination.

However, according to the man himself he's in the rudest of health and won't be walking anywhere, thank you very much. In between those two defeats, Pellegrini gave a fascinating interview to the Guardian's Sid Lowe. The whole thing's worth reading, not least for the insight on how Pellegrini the hothead player became Pellegrini the exceptionally Zen-like manager, but on the question of his non-doomedness, he had this to say:

This is an absolutely solid project, carried out the right way. I've never felt that if I don't win I'm out. [...] I have no sense whatsoever [that my job's at risk].

Which sounds mighty confident. There's a man who knows what's what. There's a man who believes in himself and his bosses. There's a man who is, to be frank, absolutely flying in the face of everything we know (quite a bit) and assume (quite a lot more, albeit for good reason) about football managers and their job security.

Rare is the manager that doesn't have at one dismissal on his record, be that a formal sacking or a euphemistic severance by mutual consent, and the average tenure of a Premier League manager is generally calculated at under two years. As Barney Ronay notes in The Manager, in some ways the job itself was born from the need for somebody that could be sacked at the appropriate moment, for a figure that the club could offer to placate the crowd.

There was a sense that a buffer was needed, a dispensable layer of ballast against the ire of the masses. [...] Here we come to a central dramatic irony in the manager's story. The fact is, his first real high-profile public act was to be sacked. Getting the boot was where it all started. The manager was born to be sacked, and sacked with some sense of cathartic public ceremony. [...] He stands alone as football's kamikaze general, the puppet dictator hurled from the balcony window.

Pellegrini knows this, of course; he's not an idiot. He knows that sacking all the underperforming players would be overly complicated and prohibitively expensive; he knows that men in suits don't tend to find themselves flung to the mob. And he knows — indeed, he acknowledges in that interview — that City have slipped since last season. Yet still he believes. Still he says that he knows.

Such defiance in the face of the rules of the universe is typical of football managers. Take Ron Atkinson, whose departure from Manchester United in November 1986 was presaged, by his own account, by him offering to resign the previous spring, by the sudden, mysterious drying-up of promised transfer funds, and by an awkward meeting with his eventual replacement, Alex Ferguson, who "knew that I knew that his arrival was a pending item for the in-tray at Old Trafford". Yet, as Andy Mitten records in We're the Famous Man United, "he insists it never entered his head that he might be in any kind of jeopardy".

Admittedly, few managers can draw on such deep and rich reserves of self-confidence as Atkinson. Yet there's a definite act of cognitive dissonance there: you've told your bosses you can't do the job; you've heard they're talking to other people; promised money has dried up ... what? Dismissed? Gosh.

To a certain extent this is just normal human self-preservation and self-delusion. Julius Caesar, after the first glancing blow, turned and asked his assailant "Vile Casca, what does this mean?"; that to a man who had just tried to stab him in the neck. And Pellegrini's predecessor, Roberto Mancini, claimed shortly after his dismissal that he "never expected what happened", even though he'd stood, glowering, through an FA Cup final, listening to his own fans sing: "You can stick your Pellegrini up your arse".

But if it's difficult to do any job under the threat of dismissal, then it must surely be impossible to be manage a football team — a job that absolutely requires at all times the transmission of confidence, certainty and control — while admitting, even for a moment, one's inevitable and imminent doom. That's what made Graham Taylor's instructions to the linesman — "tell your mate he's cost me my job" — so strange, so oddly compelling. Not that he knew he was doomed. But that he'd permitted himself to admit it. The only place to go from there is resignation.

This, ultimately, is the strange and vaguely sad paradox of the dead manager walking. He absolutely knows where he's going, because all football managers are walking that same road, because he knows things aren't going to plan, and because he's not a fool. And he absolutely can't acknowledge it, even to himself. To do so would only hasten the journey's end.