His time at Middlesbrough ended differently. After the last game of the 2018-19 season he was exhausted and frustrated that the side had missed the Championship play-offs. His contract was up. Discussions were honest, and both sides agreed it was a good time to leave on good terms.
Pulis said that, when it happened to him, he had heard of the club’s intentions from people in the media at an early stage and had worked out where the new manager would come from. He and his staff were under contract, so they had to carry on and bite their lip.
He said a parting of the ways is usually reported as a sacking or a resignation, but those are not the only exits. Management, he wrote, is precarious enough that every manager has to be ready for the end.
One of the most damaging periods, he said, is when speculation is already rife about an imminent sacking and about who will replace the man still in the job. For the manager whose stress is already high, that wait is devastating.
He said he has known people who put their names forward for a job before the sitting manager is even sacked. Clubs, he added, often sound managers out before an appointment and drop names to the press to test how supporters react.
He has also seen managers told they are out by phone, by text or by word of mouth. Treated that way, he said, managers can hardly be blamed for wanting to make a rude gesture at the people in charge.
Not every exit he described was his own. One manager he knows was put on gardening leave while the club looked for a way to release him for good. Still being paid, the man took his family on holiday somewhere hot.
Most managers, he added, do not get even that small satisfaction. Often they do not get a chance to say a proper goodbye to players and staff they have worked with for months or years.
His own first spell at Stoke ended in the summer of 2005 while he was driving up the motorway from his home in Bournemouth for the first day of pre-season. He was told he was no longer the manager and could not enter the stadium at any cost.
He soon understood the urgency: the new manager had already arrived. That kind of thing, he said, can happen to any manager, and you learn to be ready for it.
He has not always left on bad terms. When he parted company with a club in 2013, he said, it was done properly. Peter, and John, Peter’s son and now chairman, were straight with him about wanting a different direction and turned a difficult moment into a respectful parting.
As well as owning Stoke City, he said, they are a successful group who have not lost a human touch. His view, he wrote, has always been that if they do not want him, they do not want him. They were nice people.
He was lucky enough to get another chance in management. Not every young manager does, he said.
His wife had just picked him up in Bournemouth, just after 8am, when Steve rang to ask if he was down for breakfast yet. Steve did not believe him when he said he was already home. They arranged breakfast the next morning, but Pulis, an early riser, was up by 6am and on his way to the station.
He called Steve a class act and said he holds Boro up as a club that deserves success because of the attitude, commitment and honesty of the people he met there.
He also recalled Frank, who died in 2021, as a wonderful man and a superb old-school manager who was happy to advise younger coaches and share what he had lived through.
A box, Pulis wrote, has travelled the football world with him. Every manager has to think about that box, he said, even if it is not sitting next to the desk. And every time he loses a job — because that time always comes — he can sweep it into the box and go again.