There will never be another manager like Nuno at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

But maybe the time was right for a change?

It’s hard to roll my memory back to 2017. To imagine the time before the Nuno revolution. Such is the impact he had on the club. We are an established Premier League team. We’ve been within ten minutes of an FA Cup Final, and to the Quarter Final of a European competition. We’ve beaten Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal. We’ve had three years of João Moutinho -one of the best midfielders in the game- wearing our shirt. And arguably, but for one bizarre handball decision that derailed the club’s momentum and confidence, Wolves could have qualified for the Champions League in 2020.

And all this in four years.

Which makes it even harder to remember the before times. The season leading up to Nuno’s arrival, when the club were almost sleepwalking into another relegation to the third tier, under a manager who seemed to think mentioning that he had won the European Cup whenever a microphone was out in front of him was an adequate substitute for coaching the team. When we were a perennial second-tier team whose biggest transfer ambitions tended revolve around whether we could sign a target man from Derby County or a tricky winger from Blackpool.

It’s worth remembering, for all the good will Nuno earned, that he also came in at exactly the right time to earn it. And that’s why there will never be another manager like him. After the rollercoaster years of Steve Morgan, the nightmare of the bomb squad, the bitterness of certain departed players, the penny-pinching of Jez Moxey. At a time too when Fosun, newly minted owners of the club, were willing and able to bring in players way to good for that division. Ruben Neves, Willy Boly, and Diogo Jota in the Championship? Insanity. Filth. And most of all, a time when the club were pulled together as a family around the terrible news that our goalkeeper Carl Ikeme had been diagnosed with leukaemia. A leader was needed, and a leader was found.

Nuno walked in with something the fans hadn’t seen in a lifetime. An ethos. A philosophy. “Make our ideas bigger than theirs,” he said, as he imposed a 343 system that felt light years ahead of anything else in the division. And with the quality of players the team had, it was an exciting attacking, approach. Players like Ivan Cavaleiro, Diogo Jota and Helder Costa able to run through defences at will, and Ruben Neves given all the time and space in the world to fire thirty-yard passes around the pitch or score disgustingly great long-range goals.

Nuno had a dream, the song goes. And I had a dream, too. Football in my youth was two different things, and they never really met each other. On the one hand it was the ritual and routine of following Wolves. A local thing. Across the lower leagues. Watching cult heroes of varying ability, and the occasional stand-out baller. On the other, it was about watching the beautiful game on television. A teenager of the 90’s, I got to see Eric Cantona, Matt LeTissier, Hristo Stoichkov, Dennis Bergkamp. And a few years later, possibly my favourite of the lot, Francesco Totti. Footballers with guile, and attitude, and the magic of showmen.

I came to realise, on some level, that these two versions of football needed to remain separate, because my Wolves simply didn’t ever play that kind of football, or use that kind of footballer. We dabbled with it in the form of Robbie Keane, but were put back in our place pretty quickly when he was sold to Coventry. Coventry. I mean you no offence, Sky Blues. But when a team’s most gifted player of the last thirty years is sold to Coventry as a step up…well, there’s just no way to walk that one off and pretend not to be embarrassed.

And sure, we had some success. Dave Jones got us up. And Mick McCarthy then also got us up, with a team that were a lot of fun to watch and very easy to support. But even in this era, we had to embrace the idea that ‘putting a shift in’ was the main sign of a good team. A brand of football that was all about eleven men carrying a piano up ten flights of stairs, only for it to sit unplayed at the top, because nobody knows how and they’re all too tired to try. I loved McCarthy’s Wolves, but it was the love of someone who knew he was never going to get a better version. There were better versions out there, they just weren't meant for me.

So Nuno probably had it easy. He rocked up with his dream and his ethos, we played good football, and the neutrals started to love us. Us. Wolves. One of the least fashionable teams in the history of unfashionable teams. The ultimate “we used to be big, ask your grandad” team. We were suddenly…playing football? Like, actual football. That primal version that looks equally great when done by kids on the local park or by Barcelona at the Camp Nou, but always seems to lose some of it’s magic at any stage in-between.

It wasn’t my dream football. Not really. Because there was no magical, impish, beguiling number 10 floating into spaces and doing magic tricks. But it was still something pretty special.

And João Moutinho. Maybe this blog post just needs to be that name repeated a thousand times. João Fucking Moutinho. I swear, I don’t know what I did right in a previous life, but I must have been some kind of saint, because João Moutinho played for my team.

But it’s four years later now, and Nuno’s been sacked. Well, he left by mutual consent. Because it is technically mutual if your employer asks you to leave and you say “okay.” And I was heartbroken for a week. Angry, even. Part of me still is.

See, the one thing I will never forgive football fans for from the pandemic era is the bizarre attempt to pretend there was no pandemic. Sure, the world was on the verge of collapse, people were dying, economies were collapsing, and the mental health of just about everyone on the planet was taking a battering. But in world football, fans were determined to analyse player performances as if nothing was wrong. As if a bad run of form was actually a bad run of form, and not long-covid. As if a manager’s moody demeanour was a lack of commitment and not a clear and blatant mental health crisis. Nuno saw his wife and kids about three times between June 2020 and May 2021. The rest of the time he was either at work beside a football pitch, or locked down in a flat in Wolverhampton. The same for his staff. Their families were in another country, and travel between the two was banned. Ruben Neves missed the birth of his third child. Well, he didn’t miss it exactly. He saw the birth via a zoom call, sitting on the team coach after an away trip to Crystal Palace, when all the fans were demanding to know why he’d been left on the bench. His pregnant wife was in Portugal. He didn’t get to meet the baby for two months, because of travel bans. And during that time, he still had to turn up to work and smile and kick a ball and look fully committed to the cause, even if that cause was the reason he was stuck in a different country to his wife.

And this whole time, fans are getting angry, and questioning commitment, and turning on Nuno. Because that’s what football fans do. And whenever this is mentioned, they dismiss it as a problem. I suspect because, deep down, they know to accept the pandemic was a factor in Wolves’s bad season is also to accept they were turning on good people who needed our support. Football fans - much like people on the political right- are all about personal accountability until it comes to actually accepting any. I’ll need to see if time heals this wound, but right now I’m not sure I’ll ever like football fans the way I used to. I still love football. But want very little to do with its fans.

And yet.

When it comes to personal accountability, have I allowed my loyalty to Nuno to cloud over genuine problems? Have I allowed my anger over the fan’s approach to the pandemic distract me from other genuine concerns?

Probably.

With some dust settled and some hindsight settling in, it’s possible to view Nuno’s reign in two stages.

Stage one was all the champagne and attacking football and a team who simply never knew when to quit. A team who didn’t care if they were 2-0 down to the reigning champions because they still had three goals in their boots. A team that could go down to nine men away from home and win a crucial game. A team that could concede two penalties in stoppage time in the most important game of the season and still not concede. (Seriously, that Cardiff game is the most amazing three minutes of football drama you will ever see.)

But as these good times rolled, there were the occasional lingering questions of….why did we give that team a two goal head start? Why did we seem to look like the best team in the league for 45 minutes, rather than one of the best teams in the league for 90?

And why did we become increasingly defensive?

Looking at all the money Wolves have invested in players during Nuno’s reign, one thing is clear: They were not investing in clean sheets. Ruben Neves, Diogo Jota, Pedro Goncalves, Raul Jimenez, Rafa Mir, Patrick Cutrone, Pedro Neto, Rayan Ait-Nouri, Vitinha, Adama Traore, Daniel Podence and Fabio Silva. Added to existing attacking players such as Morgan Gibbs-White, Ivan Cavaleiro, Helder Costa and Conor Ronan. Consistently throughout Nuno’s tenure at the club, Fosun opened the purse strings to bring in attacking exciting creative players. And yet, as Nuno’s time came to a close, one if the clearest issues was a dire lack of creativity in the team.

Pedro Goncalves this season elevated Sporting to the league title in Portugal, and is being linked with a move back to England for over fifty million pounds. Not bad for a player who was sold by Wolves for a couple million when he didn’t fit into Nuno’s system. Rafa Mir has just scored 16 goals in La Liga, in a team who got relegated. Imagine what he could have done in a better team? Or…in a Wolves shirt. Diogo Jota has been ripping it up for Liverpool, when he’d fallen down to third or fourth choice at Wolves. Patrick Cutrone, one of Italy’s brightest young talents before singing for Wolves, is now a grumpy misfit wherever he goes. Costa and Cavaleiro are both long gone. Morgan Gibbs-White gets about five cameos a season. Conor Ronan was sent out on loan to Switzerland. Vitinha, one of the most promising and exciting midfielders in youth football, spent most of the season warming the bench, even while playing starring roles in international games.

Now, in each of these cases, in isolation, a case can be made for Nuno making the right decision. And I know this, because I’ve backed him through each of them. But it would be foolish to ignore the larger pattern at work. To return to an earlier metaphor -or was it a simile?- Nuno had a coach full of skilled piano players, but he kept asking them to carry the damn thing up and down stairs.

And so now I’m left with the vague and unsettling idea that maybe the club did the right thing, at the right time, but also at the wrong time. There can be no denying the effect the pandemic had on the club, the players, and the manager. Over and above any and all great things they did for us on the pitch, we must all always honour and remember them for continuing to turn up to work and try to carry our club at a time when they all had better places to be, and at a time when turning up for Wolves was actively putting their health at risk and keeping them from their loved ones. It’s always going to leave a bad taste that the era ended this way, at this time, off the back of this pandemic. I’m always going to feel like Nuno deserved better.

But putting all of that aside, would things have gone radically different without the pandemic? I’m leaning towards the idea that it hurried up a process that was always going to take place. I strongly feel Wolves would have finished either fifth or fourth in 2020 without the pandemic. Before the lockdowns kicked in, all of our rivals in the league were out of form with key players injured. When football resumed three months later, all those players were back fit and Wolves had a team starting to badly miss their families. I also think we would have made the Europa League final if the season had continued on it’s original path. And so, this season would have been another European adventure, building on yet another improvement in the league positions. Our profile would have been higher. Perhaps an elite club may have come sniffing for our manager.

But after all that, in the next season or the one after, I think we would have reached a point where the honeymoon was over, where we finally started to question why so much had been invested in attacking players who never got to attack, and where we would all have been asking whether a change was needed in order to reach the next level.

Jeff Shi has asked the question much sooner than that. Whether it’s the right or wrong call is something we won’t know for several months, as we begin to see where the coming season takes us. And I’m left thinking again of my own footballing dream. Those magic, bewitching players. Maybe I could actually get to see that happen for Wolves in the near future? Imagine that.

Nuno had a dream. Now it will forever be had, in the past tense. And it was a pretty special dream. For a time, his ideas were bigger than theirs, and he lifted the club higher than I ever really thought we could go. But the cost of that success is that he’s now enabled the rest of us to dream, too. And we’re dreaming of something more exciting, more enthralling.

We’ll see.

And hopefully we’ll see him again, too. Bringing another team to Molineux, and getting a great reception from the crowd he missed so much in that final year.