Revelation on Mike Williamson’s future puts Carlisle United in some uncertainty: View | OneFootball

The new head coach isn't guaranteed to be with the club for a long time.

The type of contract that Mike Williamson agreed with Carlisle United to become their new head coach wasn't what many people expected it to be.

Six league games after leading MK Dons to a fourth-place finish and the League Two play-off semi-finals, Williamson left his managerial position in Milton Keynes to jump ship and join newly relegated Carlisle.

The Blues had parted ways with legendary boss Paul Simpson after their poor start to the season, losing three of their first four matches, including one against Williamson's MK side.

It took a few weeks for the appointment to be made, but they eventually brought in what club chairman Tom Piatak described as the club's "number one target."

The Williamson era at Brunton Park hasn't started perfectly, with a win and two losses on his record so far, leaving the Blues just outside the relegation zone.

There have been signs of improvement, even in the short time that he has been at the helm, but there are definitely things that need to be improved upon as well.

At the time of the former Newcastle United player's arrival, there was no mention of what length of contract he had agreed to. That fact has since been revealed.

Key detail in Mike Williamson's Carlisle United contract

Carlisle confirmed to the News & Star that Williamson is on a rolling contract, as opposed to the more traditional option of a deal with a specific number of years attached to it; something that is fairly rarely done with football managers.

It doesn't give Williamson and his team the long-term financial security that a multi-year deal does, but there also might be benefits for them, such as conditions which may make it easier for them to leave if another club comes after him in the way that United did. Those details will probably only be revealed if something like that were to happen.

It's a type of deal that certainly has its benefits for the club, but it could leave them in a slightly vulnerable state as well.

Mike Williamson's Carlisle United contract could put the club in a precarious position

After announcing the 40-year-old as the new boss, Piatak further stated that Williamson had "a clear vision for the future."

That, and the compensation fee that Carlisle were reported by Alan Nixon to have paid MK in order to pluck their manager from them, would certainly suggest that this move was done as part of a long-term plan. You don't pay £200,000 for someone at this level if you think they could be gone in less than a year.

The nature of the deal struck between the head coach and the club does potentially leave them open to that vulnerability, though.

One of the plus sides of a rolling contract is that if they decide that things aren't working with Williamson, they don't have to pay multiple years worth of wages to get rid of him. When Carlisle sacked Paul Simpson, he was in the final year of his deal, and the same would go for Williamson were he to be binned off before the start of the next campaign.

But if you're going to commit yourself to revolutionising your team on the pitch, as is the plan with the new coaching setup and the way they want the team to play, why not also commit to a multi-year deal with the person you have put in charge of effecting that change? Because that's how long it may take for this process to fully play out.

The Piatak family have presented themselves as nothing less than smart business people since they took over the club last November. And, in all fairness, they may have positioned themselves brilliantly in this deal if Williamson and his team don't have any easy get-out clauses. But then the question of why he would join would have to be asked if that's not the case.

There's just a lot of uncertainty around it, and Carlisle supporters just have to trust in the owners that they haven't left themselves open to anything on this one.