Will Gareth Taylor’s Manchester City sacking turn out to be a masterstroke?

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The Guardian

·12. März 2025

Will Gareth Taylor’s Manchester City sacking turn out to be a masterstroke?

On a cold Manchester night last November, as Gareth Taylor watched his team secure a 10th straight victory of the season by beating Hammarby, the idea that he would not be in charge of Manchester City by mid-March seemed fairly far-fetched. City were on a run of 21 wins and one defeat in 23 WSL matches, meaning that across 12 months they had the best league results in the country. Yet four months and four painful league defeats later, Taylor is out.

To some, who were surprised Taylor was given a one-year contract extension in May 2023 despite City finishing fourth, his departure has been on the cards because of a relatively low trophy return – the FA Cup in 2020 and League Cup in 2022 – and City’s eliminations in the qualifying rounds of the Champions League in 2022 and 2023. To others, who see him as the coach who was within a whisker of winning the league last term, his dismissal may seem brutal.

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For the club, it is understood the sacking was based on performances, amid concern Taylor was not looking set to qualify for the Champions League by finishing in the top three. The decisive moment for the powers-that-be appears to have come last Wednesday at West Ham, when a stoppage-time equaliser from Manuela Paví meant City dropped points for the fifth time in nine WSL matches.

Some sources have suggested the damage was done a month earlier, when a 4-3 loss at home to Arsenal – City’s fourth defeat in six WSL games – badly hampered their hopes of qualifying for Europe. Either way, the downturn since mid-November has left them fourth, a point below Arsenal having played an extra game. Minds are understood to have been made up before Sunday’s Women’s FA Cup quarter-final victory at home to Aston Villa in Taylor’s final match. Taylor will surely privately bemoan the absences of England’s Lauren Hemp and Alex Greenwood through injury since that run of 21 wins in 23 WSL games ended.

Many sources with knowledge of City’s inner workings have wondered for a while whether Taylor might be at risk, largely because his strongest allies, Gavin Makel and more recently Nils Nielsen, had moved on. Makel switched from head of women’s football to working as a director in the club’s entertainment district in 2023, and Nielsen, understood to be influential in the decision to give Taylor a new three-year contract 12 months ago, left his role as the women’s director of football last summer and is in charge of the Japan women’s national team. There was always a chance that Charlotte O’Neill, who became City Women’s managing director in November 2023, and Therese Sjögran, the women’s director of football since October 2024, would have their own visions for who should coach the team.

Taylor’s reign was a mixed bag of very good streaks of form and bad drop-offs. If his tenure was defined by one sliding-doors moment, it came during four fateful minutes on 5 May last year when City conceded two late goals to Arsenal to lose 2-1 and let the title slip from their grasp. A draw would have been enough and everybody associated with the club surely still feels frustration at the game management after the equaliser on 89 minutes.

Several big-name England regulars including Georgia Stanway, Keira Walsh and Lucy Bronze left City during Taylor’s tenure, as did Scotland’s Caroline Weir. It would be wrong to suggest they departed because of Taylor, but none was so enamoured of working with him that they felt compelled to stay. Other players have expressed dissatisfaction, not least Chloe Kelly, who moved on loan to Arsenal after a public fallout with the club and wrote in January: “A key lesson I have learned in my life is that, while I can’t control someone’s negative behaviour towards me, I can control how long I am prepared to tolerate it.”

The Barcelona and England goalkeeper Ellie Roebuck, speaking to the BBC in February, described her relationship with Taylor before her departure from City as “fractured” and questioned whether the communication had been clear enough: “I think it was a badly managed situation. I’ve always been professional. I just felt like the respect wasn’t reciprocated in that same sense.” Shortly after Taylor’s departure was announced, Roebuck wrote “what goes around comes around” in a social media post that did not mention him directly.

Greenwood handled questions on Tuesday about Taylor’s exit very diplomatically and professionally, stating that she had “a lot of respect” for Taylor and was shocked by his exit but that she trusted the decision. Many sources close to the rest of the squad have told the Guardian over the past 36 hours of their surprise at the timing while expressing a sense that the decision was probably best for the club.

Another reason why City felt ready to make a change was the availability of Nick Cushing, their 2016-title-winning coach, who is in interim charge for the rest of the season. It is understood Cushing had been taking time off with his family and City were the only women’s club he would have contemplated coming back to work for, because of his emotional attachment. He stepped down in 2020, when Taylor took over, and will hope to win another trophy in his first game.

If you are hoping to trigger a “new manager bounce”, how about making a change before four consecutive matches in 13 days against Chelsea? It is bold, risky, almost unprecedentedly so in the women’s game. To many, sacking Taylor five days before Saturday’s League Cup final, is bizarre, but the most-surprised party may be Chelsea. Sonia Bompastor’s team will go into this quartet of season-defining fixtures, which also include Champions League ties either side of a WSL fixture, with a slight sense of the unknown. In a fortnight we will know whether City’s gamble backfired or was a masterstroke.