by Anon

If you follow football, you’ll know that when a team fails to perform, they often dismiss the manager. In the 21^st century, Watford has changed its managers 24 times. Other clubs with significant managerial turnover include Chelsea and Nottingham Forest. Leeds United, Sunderland, and Crystal Palace have all experienced 20 or more permanent managerial changes since 2000. In contrast, Arsenal and Manchester City have had the fewest managerial changes.

Of course, leading a denomination is nothing like managing a football club. Yet there are some striking parallels. Supporters have expectations. Season ticket holders – or the regulars and frequent attendees – will know that the fanbase is wider than those just turning up every week in the cold for a couple of hours. Football, like religion, is an all-consuming affair. There is morale to consider. And performance on and off the field. The parallels are plain to see.

At its most basic level, psychologically, supporting an underperforming team can be a miserable and frustrating experience. Everyone on the terraces – or in the pews, for that matter – will have an opinion on who to select and play, tactics, and management. They can all do a better job than the manager.

Of course, denominations tend not to sack their managers (or “let them go”) unless they have no choice. Welby went. In Wales, Archbishop Andrew John (Anglican) and the national team parted company. In Scotland, Archbishop Keith O’Brien (Roman Catholic) also resigned. Performances and perceptions do matter.

Sarah Mullally has been managing the Church of England side for several months. So, it’s still early in her tenure. There are the coaching grounds in Canterbury, but the main stadium is at Lambeth Palace. This is a national team with a respected global pedigree and international following. Appointed in October 2025, Mullally took up the reins in March 2026. She’s the first female appointee to take the role. Like all new managers, many were ready to believe that this time it would be different (even if they could remember thinking that last time).

After all, it would be fair to say that the last half-century has been a ropey affair for managing the Church of England team. When the England football team won the World Cup in 1966, Michael Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury. Coggan and Runcie followed. In the run-up to the millennium, it was the turn of Carey, who was replaced by Williams, before being succeeded by Welby. And now Mullally. Modern Archbishops tend to average a ten-year stint.

Like her immediate predecessors, Mullally’s brief will have been to turn around the fortunes of a national denomination that is haemorrhaging support, experiencing a marked decline in prestige, unable to recover its international marque, and struggling with morale, results and overall performance. The terraces (or the proverbial pews) have levels of expectation and hope. They always do.

But the modern era for this game is tempered with realism, and the statistics are brutal. Only one in five of the population opted for a Church of England funeral in 2024; 80% chose an alternative. The figure for weddings is rapidly collapsing to one in ten of the population, with 90% choosing not to involve the Church of England.  In 2024, infant baptisms conducted by the Church of England accounted for 5% of newborns. National figures for confirmations were 22,000 in 2010, but by 2024, that figure had halved to 11,000. By any yardstick, those numbers are grim.

As a supporter or pundit following a football team, you can see how the team and the manager are performing from the statistics. The numbers don’t lie. They tell a story. Points accrued, goals scored, possession percentages, and the like all point to results. You can tell the fans as much as you like that your team played a great match and deserved something from the game, but were just unlucky this week. Or that things will be turned around next season. So, you must have the time to rebuild the squad, and the fans will just need to be patient.

The trouble is, for the Church of England, the fans have had this message from the Board of Directors for the best part of half a century. New managers come and go. Players, likewise. But the team continues to slide in national standing, and the decline internationally is even more marked and alarming. Here, parallels between the national church and the governance of England as a nation are striking. There have been seven Prime Ministers in the last ten years (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer and Burnham). Perhaps running the country might be compared to the difficulty of managing Chelsea, Watford, or Nottingham Forest? Yet with expectations running way too high (and some might say unrealistic given the global context), mediocrity and mere survival are not tolerated.

According to one recent commentator (Claire Berlinski, ‘Changing the Undertaker Won’t Halt the Decline’, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, June 24, 2026), “Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer – each in a different way was consumed by the same unresolved event…the country keeps changing the undertaker and wondering why the corpse remains dead.” The same could certainly be said of Scotland’s football efforts at the 2026 World Cup campaign. But a change of managers won’t help, as Tom English noted (c.f., ‘Scotland’s ill-fated World Cup story finally at a sorry end’, 28 June 2006: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c5yzdwz890go). There were multiple layers to Scotland’s failure. As might be said of Church of England bishops too, Scotland’s team was “a squad full of endeavour…but the collective is decidedly average at best”.

And it’s hard to argue with those numbers. In the FIFA world rankings, Scotland sit at 42, so it would be a stretch to suddenly break into the top 30 at the group stages of the World Cup. England sit in fourth place in the FIFA world rankings, which suggests a spot in the semi-finals but not beyond. That is where it ended for England. They did great, for sure, finishing third, and the nation can be proud. They really can. But what is it about the hubris of a nation that presumes it deserves to do better?  The fans may well be full of passion and optimism. But that doesn’t increase the chances of outperforming the ranking. Many views from the pews would concur. Likewise, from the voters. The football team, the country and its national church are stories of struggle (or perhaps slow decline?). We need to engage with and accept that reality, not keep denying it, pretending we can somehow cheat it.

A selection of the more memorable books from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, all suggest a catalogue of collapse – an English empire descending into decay:  Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh, 1928), The Strange Death of Liberal England (George Dangerfield, 1935), The Collapse of British Power (Correlli Barnett, 1972), Farewell the Trumpets (Jan Morris 1980), Britain in Decline (Andrew Gamble, 1994), The Abolition of Britain (Peter Hitchens, 1999), The Strange Death of English Conservatism (Sam Tanenhaus 2005), The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Piers Brendon, 2008), English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Martin Wiener, 2011), and Can We (Britain) Be Great Again? (Jeremy Hunt, 2025). These are mere samples. But no country produces a Library of Lament such as this unless despair afflicts the national psyche.

Why is England in decline? While this situation partly stems from the loss of its empire, the deeper issue lies in the nation’s inability to develop a suitable post-imperial governing identity. The country has clung to the habits, symbols, and structures of a former world power, even as its economy shrinks and industrial regions decay. This has led to a political landscape that confuses sovereignty with productivity and values nostalgia over strategic vision.

But the decline began even before the empire began to fade. England, as the first industrial nation, initially benefited from advantages that later became rigidities, such as outdated factories, management practices, class structures, educational biases, financial habits, and a political elite focused more on imperial administration than on industrial modernisation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, political theorist Tom Nairn and historian Perry Anderson formulated their theory of English decline. They argued that early English capitalist success allowed outdated institutions and class structures to endure, in contrast to continental European countries such as Germany, which modernised through efficient administrative tiers and effective education systems. For England, the triumphs of the past become the blight of the present. The grip of nostalgia on the psyche of its national church is also part of this problematic ecology.

The English are still chewing on the thick curdled whey of Empire Glory Days. That makes realities hard to stomach, and sober realism is an even harder sell. The Church of England’s national demise, to say nothing of the global Anglican Communion’s rapid dissolution and increasingly fractious divisions, is fully part of this story too. It is also hard to manage a team that doesn’t really want to be managed.

As with politics and football, so with the Church of England? In which case, Mullally is a symptom of our times, and no cause of malaise. There was a time when new leadership in the Church of England represented genuine change. So mere managerial competence will not be enough, and besides, the Church of England is already weary – some may even say cynical and suspicious – of bold new visions.

The 21^st century has seen far too much promised (mostly about growth), and far too little delivered. As with the country, the national church needs the leadership to provide a cohesive spiritual, theological, emotional, and moral account of the institution that is honest and truthful too. That is simply lacking. So, there is no credible visualisation for better days ahead.

As politicians will confirm, technocratic improvements often falter when public frustration is high. Church of England clergy and laity are disenchanted and demoralised by the clear signs of decline in the quality of episcopal oversight and support they currently receive.  Anger over the deterioration in the standard of spiritual and pastoral care at the hands of senior staff they encounter is further fuelled by bloated diocesan staffing levels and burdensome, intrusive bureaucratic processes. Clergy and laity feel that their hard work no longer matters and that their endeavours don’t even guarantee that their future ministry will be valued. They suspect, with good reason, that their leaders lack a credible plan for recovery, or possibly even for survival.

The clergy and laity need a leadership that can hear, articulate and understand their concerns and unhappiness. But instead of articulating their discontent, the Church of England’s hierarchy merely seems content to manage it.

The Church of England will not be saved by more strategies. Or worse, glossing over the ingrained depression and disenchantment with more PR. For Mullally, presenting herself as a competent Archbishop could be dangerously misleading, as it suggests that effective administration can resolve much deeper structural problems. When it doesn’t, one risks being seen as disingenuous.

Church leaders need to educate the clergy, laity, and the wider public about what truly matters in mission and ministry. But Mullally is not a teacher, so that aspect of leadership (the need to inspire through rich public theology and spiritual wisdom) is essentially out of range. Mullally may say many of the right things. But whether she can or will deliver is questionable.

For example, she recently called for clergy to be treated with more care and respect, mindful of the overwhelming evidence we have for the stress and mental health issues that clergy regularly report in surveys. Mullally seems to be (wilfully?) indifferent to the notion that the primary cause of the harm clergy experience is the diocesan hierarchy and structures of the very institution she represents. Yet Mullally addresses the abuse and harm clergy are reporting as though it were perpetrated by some vague third party. But the Memo from the employees and volunteers to HQ could hardly be plainer: “you are the problem”.

As the recent report from Veronica Hope Hailey confirms, there is ‘pervasive distrust’ in the Church of England’s leadership which can only be restored through accountability. That must begin from the top, with the Church of England’s leadership becoming accountable and transparent for their actions. Without this, they will not be trusted by clergy and laity, and nor will they deserve to be. (https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/gs-2354-trust-and-trustworthiness-within-the-church-of-england-a-preliminary-report.pdf) 

There are no quick fixes for these troubles. History teaches that we must live through long social and cultural cycles that we can neither control nor evade. Part of the cost and vocation of leadership is to make the burden of such times more bearable for everyone else, if we can. Changing Prime Ministers, Archbishops, or football team managers is unlikely to transform the ultimate destiny of a country, church, or soccer squad, magically turning them into winners overnight.

Football-wise, these decades have been tough to endure. Disenchantment still reigns. As for overseeing the Church of England, scaling back ever-increasing layers of managerialism will now be very welcome. If trust is to return, clergy and laity want leadership that is pastoral, compassionate, honest, accountable, humble, transparent, spiritually wise, and theologically rich. History will be the ultimate judge of how the Church of England was managed in our time.