Andre Villas-Boas, Tottenham Manager, 2012-2013

I'll try this without trolling Tottenham.  Judge me at the end.

All jokes about our rivals aside, I think the position that Villas-Boas was put in this summer was eventually doomed to fail.  He lost his best player - the league's best player last season - and, with that cash, was given roughly 59 new players and a shiny new Technical Director to lord over the club to oversee the transition from Pre-Bale Tottenham to Post-Bale Tottenham.  In other words, Daniel Levy appeared to be moving the club into a direction dictated by the purchase of some of the best young players in Europe first and foremost, and not necessarily one driven by the manager, his tactical philosophies and apparent final input.  Hardly a position of strength.

The firing says more about the continual dysfunction at Tottenham, more a reactionary environment than proactive.  And the more we see managers come and go under Daniel Levy, it appears that the managers themselves aren't the root cause of that club's continual shortcomings.  As much as some Arsenal fans begrudge Silent Stan and his fellow Board members insistence on taking a back seat to the club's daily workings, what we're witnessing here is one example of when the Board and its Chairman take a very hands-on approach to the club.

In the end, the man who declared Arsenal to be in a negative spiral and unable to get out of a string of bad results last March, after Tottenham's 2-1 victory and going seven points up on their rivals before squandering yet another table position, ended up being the one who couldn't get out of his own spiral of shit.  Deserved or not, Andre Villas-Boas is a man without a club today.

Here's hoping he doesn't ride his insistence on a high defensive line to his future job interviews.