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Ex-pros or teachers: Who has the edge?
Simon Kuper
August 04, 2011
In spring 2005, Jose Mourinho's Chelsea met Frank Rijkaard's Barcelona in the Champions League. It was a bad-tempered affair. Chelsea accused Rijkaard of cheating, Barcelona fans jeered Mourinho as The Translator (his initial job during his years at the Nou Camp), and things deteriorated from there. Mourinho admitted that if you compared himself and Rijkaard as footballers, his history is fantastic, mine is zero. But as managers, added Mourinho, He has zero titles and I have a lot of them. He just can't be compared to me.
Indeed, over the two legs Mourinho outthought Rijkaard, and Chelsea knocked out Barca. After victory was sealed at Stamford Bridge, a member of Mourinho's staff, another Portuguese non-footballer, at 27 years old even younger than his boss, swaggered up to Barcelona's bench and taunted Rijkaard. The young man whose name, though hardly anyone knew it, was Andre Villas Boas ended up squabbling with Barcelona's striker Samuel Etoo.
There are two types of manager: ex-players like Rijkaard, who learned football mostly on the field, and schoolteachers like Mourinho, who learned it on coaching courses. As the Premier League approaches kickoff, the schoolteachers are on the rise. Today Villas Boas manages Chelsea. Another non-player on Mourinho's staff that night in 2005, Chelsea's then youth team coach Brendan Rodgers, now coaches newly promoted Swansea. The schoolteachers' revolution is the latest sign that the Premier League is becoming clever.
For decades, it was an article of faith that only someone who had played professional football himself knew how to manage a team. Players who had been leaders on the field were particularly favoured. When the great England captain Bryan Robson turned manager in the mid-1990s, Middlesbrough immediately handed him a fortune to spend on transfers.
Roy Keane was similarly fast-tracked, and after Glenn Hoddle got off to a good start as manager, he was appointed England manager aged only 38. Abroad, the same principle applied: the untried coaches Marco van Basten, Steve Staunton, Jรผrgen Klinsmann and Diego Maradona were put in charge of their national teams.
The idea was that there was something mystical about managing a team, something that schoolteachers and the rest of us mortals could not grasp. The great former players liked to make that point. 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 Scot's 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 can't know.
A former chairman of a Premier League club told me that the managers he employed would often make that argument. Sometimes the chairman, a rich businessman who hadn't played would think a manager's decision looked a bit odd. But his managers (one of whom had played many times for England) would just reply that you could only understand if you had played.
The chairman never knew what to say to that. He hadn't played, so if there really was some kind of mystical knowledge you gained from playing, he wouldn't know. Usually, he'd back down.
Who did you play for then? is best understood as an old-fashioned job protection scheme. Ex-players used it to corner the market in managerial jobs. Their main rivals, of course, were the schoolteachers and anyone else who had studied anything. The typical manager had left school at sixteen to become a player. He himself had almost no education, and so, in order to protect his job, he had to argue that education was no use in understanding football.
We've seen that in the recent nerds versus jocks battle over the use of statistics in football. In the last decade or so, most Premier League clubs have acquired data departments to analyse match data - stats like tackles, sprints, or completed passes. A few managers, like Arsene Wenger and Sam Allardyce, take these stats very seriously. Most managers don't.
The data department at one big English club recently went to the club's manager and said it had analysed over 400 corners in different leagues. The conclusion: the most dangerous corner, the one most likely to produce goals, was the inswinger to the near post. The manager (a famous ex-player) listened. Then he said, I played football for many years, and I know that the most dangerous corner is the outswinger. He was arguing that his gut knew more than their brains. That was how football had always worked.
But in truth, that argument had never made sense. It seems that ex-players really don't know more about football than we do; they just played it better. Way back in 1995 the British sports economist Stefan Szymanski studied 209 managers of English clubs from 1974 to 1994. 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 worked for and age while in management).
Playing history provides almost no guide, except that defenders and goalkeepers in particular do not do well (forwards are slightly more successful than average).
Dalglish was the most overachieving manager on Szymanski's list back then, edging out John Duncan, Bob Paisley and George Curtis. Dalglish was a great footballer. But so was Bobby Moore, who finished 193rd on the managers' list. Playing success had nothing to do with managerial success. 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. Sue Bridgewater, a professor at Warwick Business School in the UK, recently published the excellent book Football Management. It contains this telling testimony from one anonymous manager: 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 Rijkaard, or Diego Maradona, know more about football than Jose Mourinho, whose total experience as a player was a few minutes in Belenenses reserves? Did Keane's knack for geeing up teammates on the field translate once he had become a jockey?
True, there was a time in some bits of northern Europe when leading players doubled as managers on the pitch. In the 1970s, Johan Cruijff and Franz Beckenbauer pretty much ran their teams. They would kick players out of the team, and rewrite the lineup. It is no surprise that both later became great managers. But in British football, players were always expected just to shut up and listen to the almighty manager. That didn't prepare them for becoming managers themselves.
There is only one advantage the ex-player has when he becomes a manager: for a while, fans, media and his players give him the benefit of the doubt. Frank Rijkaard just looks like he could be a better manager than some little bloke who never even made it in Belenenses reserves. But this benefit of the doubt doesn't last long. As one ex-player-turned-manager told Bridgewater: The benefits of who I am lasted about six weeks.
At first you get some credit from players because they know that you can do the things you are asking them to do, but that soon wears off. Then you're judged on whether you can manage and if you can't then your reputation won't be enough.
In fact, there's reason to believe that ex-players are less well equipped than schoolteachers to become good managers. Asked once why failed footballers often became great coaches, Mourinho replied: More time to study. Just look at his own career. He was barely in his teens when his father, coaching a Portuguese third-division team, began sending him to write analyses of future opponents. Later, at second-division Setubal, Felix put his son in charge of the ballboys so that he could send messages to players during match. Mourinho peaked as a player in Belenenses reserves, then studied sports science at university in Lisbon. He read about the physiology, psychology and philosophy of sport in several languages, before teaching physical education in schools for three years. Villas Boas and Rodgers have taken similar career paths.
Clubs are starting to see the uses of schoolteachers. In 2007, Burnley were looking for a new manager. The club received dozens of expressions of interest from some of the most glittering names in football. They called some of these names in for interview. Often, the name would walk in, make it obvious that he knew almost nothing of Burnley's setup, and express no clear plans for improving it. Asked in the job interview for his vision, one famous former international said: Well, hopefully get promotion.
Aha, but how?
Hopefully buy some good players.None of the names bothered giving anything as nerdy as a powerpoint presentation.
Burnley didn't see anyone they liked. Eventually they were given the name of a bright young manager named Owen Coyle. He'd played football, but not very well. They called Coyle for interview. He arrived perfectly prepared. He got the job, helped Burnley win promotion, and is now with Bolton in the Premier League.
If you study this season's 20 starting Premier League managers, you see the schoolteachers' ascent. Bridgewater says that from 1992 onwards, only 5.6 per cent of managers in the Premier League had never played professionally. Normally, then, one out of 20 managers would be a non-player. This year, three are: the newcomers Villas Boas and Rodgers, plus Roy Hodgson at West Bromwich Albion. Another trend: if you are going to get hired as a British manager in the Premier League, it helps to have continental experience. That applies to three of the recent arrivals (Hodgson, Blackburn's Steve Kean, and Norwich's Paul Lambert), while Rodgers learned his trade under a Portuguese boss, speaks Spanish and is learning Italian.
Meanwhile there are few former star players among our sample of 20. Only three of this year's managers fall into that category: Dalglish, Roberto Mancini and Steve Bruce. But Dalglish and Mancini had won titles as managers long before they got their current jobs. They were hired as expert managers, not chiefly as ex-players. Only Bruce โ€“ a leader on the pitch with an indifferent career as a manager โ€“ is a throwback to the old method of choosing managers. Other former great players (Keane, Bryan Robson, Hoddle) aren't wanted by anyone. Maradona publicly begged for an English club to take him last year, but none did. Here is what Anuradha Desai, chairwoman of Blackburnโ
Indian owners Venky, said about the greatest ever player: He is not being considered, not now and forever in the future. I can assure you there is nothing we are having to do with Diego Maradona."
Rijkaard, the schoolteachers' nemesis in 2005, is now in lucrative exile in Saudi Arabia. Alan Shearer, touted for years as the coming Newcastle manager, after briefly presiding over their relegation in 2009 has stuck with TV. Tony Adams, another former leader on the field, now coaches the Azerbaijani club Gabala. They finished seventh in Azerbaijan last year. One of Adams' former teammates with England, while affirming to me what an inspirational figure Adams had been on the pitch, added that he didn't expect him to emulate that as a manager. Adams, he was suggesting, is a horse not a jockey. English clubs are finally realising that there is a difference between the two
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