In ‘normal’ business, a wannabe chief executive writes a business plan, gives a presentation and undergoes several interviews. In football, a club rings an agent and offers the job.
For over a century, it was unthinkable that the manager be a woman, as stupid fans and players would object. Only in 2014 did Clermont in France’s Ligue 2 finally break that taboo, appointing Corinne Diacre. ‘Hiring a woman as a coach has not changed my daily life,’ Clermont’s president Claude Michy told Ben Lyttleton years later. ‘The sun still rises in the east. I don’t feel like I’m an innovator, just because I hired someone with the competence and the skills to do a job.’ In 2015 France Football magazine voted Diacre best coach in Ligue 2. In her first three seasons the team always finished higher in the table than its budget would have predicted. In August 2017 she was named coach of France’s women’s team.
But that was partly because no other team in male football – which, after all, is where the money is – seemed to want her. Almost all the world’s men’s football clubs still discriminate illegally against women.
In these clubs, the new manager is not only invariably male, but also almost always white, with a conservative haircut, aged between thirty-five and sixty, and a former professional player. Clubs know that if they choose someone with that profile, then even if the appointment turns out to be terrible they won’t be blamed too much, because at least they will have failed in the traditional way. As the old business saying went, ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.’
The idea is that there is something mystical about managing a team, something that only former players can truly understand. Naturally, former players like this idea. Once in the 1980s, when Kenny Dalglish was in his first spell managing Liverpool, a journalist at a press conference questioned one of his tactical decisions. Dalglish deadpanned, in his almost impenetrable Scots accent, ‘Who did you play for, then?’ The whole room laughed. Dalglish had come up with the killer retort: if you didn’t play, you couldn’t know.
A former chairman of a Premier League club told us that the managers he employed would often make that argument. The chairman (a rich businessman who hadn’t played) never knew how to respond. He hadn’t played, so if there really was some kind of mystical knowledge you gained from playing, he wouldn’t know. Usually he would back down.
‘Who did you play for, then?’ is best understood as a job protection scheme. Ex-players have used it to corner the market in managerial jobs.
But in truth, their argument never made sense. There is no evidence that having been a good player (or being white and of conservative appearance) is an advantage for a football manager. Way back in 1995 Stefan did a study of 209 managers in English football from 1974 to 1994, looking at which ones consistently finished higher in the league than their teams’ wage bills predicted. He reported:
I looked at each manager’s football career, first as a player (including number of games played, goals scored, position on the field, international appearances, number of clubs played for) and then as a manager (years of experience, number of clubs played for, and age while in management). Playing history provides almost no guide, except that defenders and goalkeepers in particular do not do well (most managers were midfielders, forwards are slightly more successful than average).
Dalglish finished at the top of Stefan’s sample of 209 managers, just ahead of John Duncan, Bob Paisley, George Curtis, Ken Furphy and Bill Shankly. (Clough wasn’t in the sample because no good financial data existed for his clubs, Derby County and Nottingham Forest, or else he’d have surely won. Stefan recently updated his study, and we’ll say more about his new findings in Chapter 8.)
Dalglish was a great player and an overperforming manager. However, Bobby Moore, another great player, was 193rd on the managers’ list. Taken overall, a good career as a player predicted neither success nor failure as a manager. The two jobs just didn’t seem to have much to do with each other. As Arrigo Sacchi, a terrible player turned great manager of Milan, phrased it, ‘You don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey.’
A horse’s knowledge doesn’t help a jockey. Here is one player-turned-manager testifying anonymously in Football Management, an insightful book by Sue Bridgewater of Warwick Business School:
I got the job and on the first day I showed up and the secretary let me into my office, the manager’s office with a phone in, and I didn’t know where I was supposed to start. I knew about football, I could do the on-pitch things, but I had never worked in an office and I just sat there and I waited for something to happen but no one came in, so after a while I picked up the phone and rang my mum.
Even this man’s claim that ‘I knew about football, I could do the on-pitch things’ is dubious. Does Diego Maradona know more about the game than José Mourinho? Did Roy Keane’s knack for geeing up teammates on the field translate once he had become a jockey?
Playing and coaching are different skill sets. Mourinho, who barely ever kicked a ball for money, is match for match among the most successful coaches in football’s history. When Milan’s then coach Carlo Ancelotti noted his almost non-existent record as a player, the Portuguese replied, ‘I don’t see the connection. My dentist is the best in the world, and yet he’s never had a particularly bad toothache.’ Asked why failed players often become good coaches, Mourinho said, ‘More time to study.’ They also have to have provided some evidence that they are good coaches, because nobody is going to hire them based on their playing careers.
The problem with ex-pros may be precisely their experience. Having been steeped in the game for decades, they just know what to do: how to train, who to buy, how to talk to their players. They don’t need to investigate whether these inherited prejudices are in fact correct. Rare is the ex-pro who realizes, like Billy Beane at the Oakland A’s, that he needs to jettison what he learned along the way. Michael Lewis writes in Moneyball, ‘Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well. “A reformed alcoholic,” is how he described himself.’ Even Ancelotti seems to have changed his mind about the usefulness of a playing career. Once a canny midfielder with Milan, and now a longstanding A-list coach, he told us in 2013: ‘Experience as a player can help you just in one situation: I can understand what the players are thinking. But the job is different. You have to study to be a manager.’
In the world’s most innovative football country, Germany, ex-players have now lost their monopoly on managerial jobs. On the German football federation’s annual training course to certify professional coaches, an average of 16 of the 24 places are reserved for people who didn’t play professionally. The head of the course, Frank Wormuth, told the Dutch online newspaper De Correspondent that although it helps to know ‘the smell of the stables’ in professional football, ‘that’s only one aspect of being a coach. How are you pedagogically, analytically, communicatively? Ex-pros often have less of an eye for that.’
Successful German coaches of recent times include Thomas Tuchel, who played eight games in the Second Bundesliga, Roger Schmidt, who was a manager in a car factory, and Julian Nagelsmann, who didn’t play a single professional game before becoming the successful coach of Hoffenheim aged twenty-eight. Nagelsmann’s career would have been unthinkable in all other major football countries. It’s their loss.
But even outside Germany, former great players like Roy Keane, Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Tony Adams and Diego Maradona are no longer in demand as managers of serious clubs. This looks like another indication that football is becoming less stupid.
The new manager is appointed either because he is able to start work immediately (often as a result of having just been sacked), or because he has achieved good results over his career,