The football manager as a human sacrifice

It's not often that the editorial in the Financial Times is about football, but their editorial today is well worth reproducing.

For all that they say, for fans the manager remains of central and possibly exaggerated importance,   Look at the jeopardy facing Thomas Frank after today's home defeat to West Ham and the boos of fans.  Or consider the article in today's Times in which a Crystal Palace fan effectively blames the board for losing their 'best ever' manager.

The Pink 'Un states: 'Since New Year, three of the world’s most famous football clubs — Chelsea, Manchester United and Real Madrid — have sacked their head coach. This is normal for the industry: the average tenure of head coaches across Europe is now about 1.2 years, with most serving less than a season.

The sackings illustrate football’s dysfunctionality. They also highlight the passing of football’s “big man” era. If clubs, fans and coaches themselves can adjust to this shift, that may be no bad thing. The football manager was once a giant figure. He — and so far, it is always a he in the top leagues — used to run the entire club, overseeing everything from selection to transfers. 

Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger at Arsenal were the last omnipotent total managers. Today, no major club has one. As football’s revenues have soared from the 1990s onwards, clubs’ organisations mushroomed. Now power is shared among multiple executives. 

The “manager”, as he’s still often called, has shrunk into a head coach, who only oversees the first team. At big clubs, the head coach supervises a vast staff of video and data analysts, set-piece coaches, psychologists and others, whose contributions are often crucial yet unseen by outsiders. 

The head coach still creates the illusion of all-powerful master of the show, since he is the club’s figurehead, and its face at press conferences. In fact, to use a corporate analogy, he is more departmental head than chief executive. And most head coaches are only as good as their material. Usually, the team with the best players wins. 

This is why, measured over a period of about 10 years, the correlation between players’ salaries and a club’s league position in England is about 90 per cent. Even many coaches themselves have not grasped how their role has shrunk. Ruben Amorim complained just before his sacking: “I came here to be the manager of Manchester United, not to be the coach.” Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Xabi Alonso at Madrid seem similarly to have overestimated their status. 

England’s former manager Gareth Southgate commented this week: “Power struggles either with club executives (Amorim), club employees (Maresca) or players (Alonso) were ultimately the root cause of the end of each tenure.” 

Since most fans also overrate the head coach’s powers, they often call for his sacking when the team is losing. The club’s C-suite happily obliges, because it benefits from scapegoating the coach for what might be its own mistakes. He becomes football’s version of a human sacrifice. 

Clubs would do better to operate expert-led, long-term decision-making structures that outlive each head coach. If they must keep sacking coaches, at least don’t let these transient employees lead recruitment and then bequeath unwanted squads to their successors, as Erik ten Hag did for Amorim at Manchester United. 

Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, football’s most admired currently active coach, said: “The most important department is the scouting department, much more than manager and players. When [they] choose well, 80 per cent is done.” Poor recruitment rather than bad coaching explains part of United’s and Chelsea’s failings. Well-run clubs like Brighton, Brentford and Liverpool give head coaches little say over transfers. These clubs assess players using data and the wisdom of crowds, as in Liverpool’s “transfer committee”. 

Some clubs, such as Barcelona, keep a fixed, long-term playing style that no head coach can change. The coach is simply handed a squad and tasked with maximising its performance without fighting turf wars. If this model spreads, coaching tenures might even lengthen.'

To return to Spurs, the club's problems are surely more fundamental than the latest manager.  Do their fans have a lack of patience that makes it hard for any manager to succeed?