Chris Kinnear has left his position of manager of Dover Athletic with the club sitting second to bottom in the National League.

A statement on the club’s official website reads:

3 weeks ago at a meeting between the board and the Manager, Chris was asked to produce a written plan of what steps he would be taking and what support he needed from the board to rectifying our current situation, sadly this did not materialise in a satisfactory form and results have not improved.

As a consequence, Chairman Jim Parmenter today relieved Chris of his position.

Parmenter said “This has been a really tough decision to take, I have worked with Chris for a long time, he has been highly successful with us, but football is changing. There has clearly been some poor player recruitment decisions taken during closed season, which is something we will be addressing. There are also a number of issues around training and our ways of working, which we will be looking at.”

“We have a good setup at the club, a decent playing budget and supporters who want to be proud of their team. We need to move forward in a manner that gives us the best opportunity to progress – that means avoiding relegation as a minimum and ideally pushing on towards the other end of the table”.

Assistant Manager, Jake Leberl will take charge for Saturday’s home game against league leaders, Salford City.

Kinnear was in charge of Dover for a second spell, having first taken over at the club in 1985, staying on for ten years.

He returned to Crabble in 2013 following Nicky Forster’s departure and enjoyed relative success in the past five years.

The club are now expected to spend the next few weeks looking at Kinnear’s long term replacement with the likes of Jay Saunders and Adrian Pennock already linked with the job.