PL25: How Sam Allardyce’s Bolton changed the face of the Premier League
When Sam Allardyce took over at Bolton Wanderers in 1999, football was a different place.
The North West club had been relegated from the Premier League in 1998, but had failed to bounce straight back, missing out in the play-offs at the end of their first season back in the Football League, then started the next season out of form, winning only three of their first 10 games.
A frustrated Colin Todd put that down to a lack of funds made available to him in his pursuit of promotion and he resigned in protest. If Bolton regretted the position their former manager had left them in, they had no need to worry: his unilateral decision paved the way for a modern golden era for the club as Allardyce was appointed in his stead.
Another play-off defeat was endured in Allardyce’s first campaign, but two remarkably promising cup runs would serve as an omen for what was to come. Despite being a second tier club, Bolton reached the semi-finals of both the League Cup – disappointingly losing to Tranmere Rovers over two legs – and the FA Cup – where they lost to Aston Villa – as well as making the top six in the First Division. The next year, Allardyce’s first full season as Bolton manager, was to see those near misses turned into a more tangible success: play-off success and promotion back to the Premier League.
Winning promotion as a manager is the kind of thing that can get you a reputation, especially if you do it more than once. Coaches can become typecast as promotion specialists, and Allardyce was to be enlisted by West Ham United later in his career when the Hammers found themselves relegated to the Championship.
But Allardyce’s reputation isn’t so much for getting teams into the Premier League but for keeping them there. The ‘Fireman Sam’ tag gained for his ability to come into a struggling team and stave off the drop is surely an unfair one for a man who has been at the forefront of the English managerial world since that promotion back in 2001, but there is a reason for it. It all started with Bolton.
In the glory years at what was, back then, the Reebok Stadium, people will remember long balls to Kevin Davies, Kevin Nolan getting stuck in, and Allardyce sitting in the stands with an earpiece. European football arrived at Bolton, and although the manager’s other reputation – for particularly unattractive football – was forged, it was actually his more cosmopolitan traits which brought Wanderers to such dizzy heights.
The first two seasons were struggles, though. Finishing just above the relegation zone twice, safety wasn’t always a given. Although the first season saw Bolton finish in 16th place, the second one saw them drop to 17th, despite winning more games and gaining four more points. Even if the position didn’t improve, there was definitely progress.
In the 15 years since then, English football has changed quite a bit, and quite a lot of that has to do with Allardyce’s strategy for keeping his team in the Premier League.
The first season, Bolton’s most expensive signing was Danish forward Henrik Pedersen. Bought for £650k, the Dane went on to make 143 appearances for the club in the Premier League, and it’s a similar story with other players from around Europe. Foreign imports into the Premier League were seen as exotic signs of wealth and intent, but that’s not really what Allardyce was doing.
He wasn’t spending big money, even then, but instead bringing in players he knew would add to his squad and would cost less than British players of an equivalent standard. Bruno N’Gotty, was a player who had played for some big clubs, but cost only half a million when Bolton signed him from Paris Saint-Germain. He went on to play nearly 150 Premier League games for the club, too, and it was these sorts of bargains coupled with Allardyce’s coaching prowess that would see Bolton rise up from the reaches of the relegation zone to the European places.
For all the accusations of Allardyce being a throwback to an old style of football with his teams’ directness and physicality, it was actually his modern outlook that made his sides overperform. His espousal of stats and technologies to aid his understanding of the game, not to mention his own players’ abilities, was a key factor, as was the fact that Allardyce kept abreast of the European transfer market in order to buy the best players he could within his own budget.
That didn’t just extend to relative unknowns either. Youri Djorkaeff, a French international and World Cup winner signed on a free transfer and scored 20 goals in 75 appearances for Bolton. Jay-Jay Okocha was arguably one of Africa’s greatest footballing talents arrived on a free, too, as did Real Madrid legend Fernando Hierro.
Allardyce also worked the loan market. Former Real Madrid defender Ivan Campo joined for a season before signing permanently and was possibly one of the reasons Hierro joined Bolton at all, as did Bernard Mendy from PSG. They didn’t all work out, but it was Allardyce’s willingness to look abroad for hungry players eager to make a name for themselves in the Premier League, and who didn’t cost huge fees, that helped Bolton climb into a team capable of competing in European competition.
That’s not a trait which left Allardyce when he left Bolton. His spells at Blackburn Rovers, West Ham United, Sunderland and Crystal Palace were all characterised by astute signings geared towards solving key weaknesses in his squad. And the proof was in the pudding: when Big Sam left Bolton, they pottered around midtable before finally plummeting as far as League One.
The idea isn’t that Allardyce brought top quality players to the Reebok Stadium to bring Bolton from obscurity to Europe, it’s that he bought players to plug the right of gaps in his squad. The result of that was a rise in prestige.
If football in England has changed since Sam Allardyce took over at Bolton in 1998, it’s in no small part down to the man himself.