Eyebrows were certainly raised when Yokohama F. Marinos made the left field decision to hire Steve Holland as its new manager ahead of the 2025 J. League season, but few expected the Englishman to be gone before Golden Week.

Despite securing progression to the quarterfinals of the Asian Champions League Elite — where Marinos will take on Cristiano Ronaldo's Al-Nassr in Saudi Arabia this weekend — results proved harder to come by in the league, and the 54-year-old coach was dismissed on April 18 with the club languishing in the lower reaches of the J1 table after managing just one win in its opening 11 games.

Holland arrived in Japan having spent the previous eight years as Gareth Southgate’s assistant with the England national team, and while untested as a head coach in his own right, he had built up an impressive resume after helping lead the Three Lions to back-to-back European Championship finals and a World Cup semifinal.

Those credentials were bolstered by prior success working alongside the likes of Jose Mourinho, Guus Hiddink and Antonio Conte at Premier League giant Chelsea, and the hope at Marinos was clearly that Holland’s experience would help the Kanagawa club challenge for glory again after a stodgy mid-table finish in 2024.

That wasn’t to be, though, and after his team surrendered the lead to lose for the second game in a row on April 16 — going down 3-2 at home against Shimizu S-Pulse after leading 2-0 — Holland looked aghast as he stared in disbelief across the Nissan Stadium field, perhaps already seeing the writing on the wall.

While the results and performances clearly weren’t good enough, there were some extenuating circumstances to Marinos’ travails, and Holland might feel a little hard done by not to have been given more time to turn the ship around.

During his unveiling in January, for instance, he spoke of the need to improve the team defensively after it finished the previous season with a goal difference of -1 despite scoring the same number of times (61) as champion Vissel Kobe. At least initially, he saw some success in that area.

Marinos conceded just six times in its opening eight league games, laying a solid defensive foundation, but after Colombian center back Jeisson Quinones was forced off after four minutes against Kawasaki Frontale on April 9, the backline was thrown into disarray and surrendered eight goals across the next three matches.

Fitness issues also meant captain Takuya Kida was only able to complete one full league game for Holland, hindering the team’s ability to strike a balance between parsimony at the back and the attacking style that Marinos had become known for.

Without Kida’s ability to anchor the midfield, the team often appeared more concerned with not conceding than trying to threaten going forward. The situation improved at the back, but Marinos scored just four times in its first eight J1 outings.

This lack of attacking ideas and intent proved to be an issue with another key player. Anderson Lopes finished as the J. League’s top scorer in each of the last two seasons (jointly with Yuya Osako in 2023), finding the net 24 and 22 times. The Brazilian, however, registered just once in the league under Holland, from a penalty on the opening day of the season.

Lopes missed three of Holland’s last four games, partly on account of illness, and since the coach’s departure, the 31-year-old has suggested he wasn’t a fan of the team’s shift to a more defensive setup.

Turning a previously guaranteed source of goals into a disgruntled employee clearly wasn’t ideal, but setting a defensive framework before moving the focus onto attacking patterns is a common approach when building a team, and Lopes’ qualms could perhaps have been assuaged in due course.

Unfortunately for Holland, Marinos’ hectic schedule meant he wasn’t afforded much time to tweak things.

His 15 games at the helm all came in the space of 63 days, and with one arriving just over every four days on average, the coach referred to the need to be “creative” with his training sessions between fixtures, as he looked to manage players’ recovery and work on tactical instruction.

Such mitigation should certainly be taken into account, but Holland knew that when it came to arresting the team’s decline, the buck stopped with him. As Marinos spiraled downward, the players’ confidence dwindled, disappearing almost completely in the humiliating turnaround against Shimizu last week.

Individual errors allowed Shimizu back into that game, and once the visitors went level, it looked like a matter of when and not if they would complete the comeback. Takashi Inui duly delivered the killer blow in the 82nd minute — not just to Marinos in the match, but also to its coach.

Holland will leave Japan with regrets and recriminations, but he knows as well as anyone that soccer is a results business, stating after the 0-0 draw with Tokyo Verdy on April 5 that, “we mustn’t cry, we have to get on with it and win some games.” Ultimately, Yokohama was not able to do that, sending Holland on his way and the Marinos front office back to the drawing board.