It’s nothing short of a mystery, but football clubs the length and breadth of the English pyramid seem to keep passing up on the opportunity to appoint Sol Campbell as their manager.
The former England defender, 43, recently applied for the vacant Oxford United job but it looks like the League One club are about to give the role to the similarly green Craig Bellamy.
Speaking on the Highbury & Heels podcast, this was Campbell’s typically humble response to his U’s rejection:
I did go (for the job) and they didn’t accept me. Maybe it was a lack of experience things like that, blah blah blah – but it’s a full circle.
Experience? How do I get experience when I need a job to get experience?
I don’t want to go too low that it’s a struggle and I don’t want to go too low that I’m under someone and thinking ‘what am I doing here?’
I would rather be managing a club myself.
I’m confident and it’s not like it’s rocket science to run a football club especially when you get to that level.
If you’re intelligent enough and a quick learner you will learn pretty soon within two or three games what the team needs training wise to survive in that league, to get better, to get in the play-offs or even win the league.
And then it came: the precise reason nobody is willing to touch Sol Campbell with a ten-foot barge pole:
I’m intelligent enough, it’s not like I played on a fox and dog pitch all my life.
I can’t believe some people, I’m one of the greatest minds in football and I’m wasted because of a lack of experience or maybe he talks his mind too much.
First of all, we’ve never once heard the expression “fox and dog pitch” used before and secondly, what a berk.
Has anybody ever held themselves in higher regard than our Sol? One of the greatest minds in football? Puh-lease.
Friday morning, weekend here we come! pic.twitter.com/UBI7M4xUB6
— Sol Campbell (@SolManOfficial) May 12, 2017
Were you a chairman/owner, would you let a man this deluded, this blissfully ignorant of his own disconnected weirdness anywhere near your football club?