The cult of the manager fades in England

LONDON – There is no escaping the cult of the manager in English football.

Some of the greatest are commemorated with statues outside their clubs’ stadiums – Herbert Chapman and Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley at Liverpool, and Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, to name a few.

These men did not just win hearts, minds and trophies. They shaped eras.

Players are adored, but managers – the truly great managers – are placed on a pedestal. Their modern-day successors are left knowing, without a doubt, that they are standing on the shoulders of giants.

But the cult of the manager is not what it was.

We might obsess more than ever about the minutiae of their work – their overarching philosophy, their team selection, their in-game management, even their body language on the sideline. But their expected shelf life and the scope of their work has been vastly reduced.

For the past 10 Premier League managers to leave their jobs, their average tenure was 722 days – a shade under two years. But that figure was inflated by

Jurgen Klopp’s almost nine years at Liverpool.

Among the 10 before that, the average was just 348 days. How can a manager be expected to shape an era when it has become a battle to last only a year, never mind two?

The power structure within the English game has been changing for two decades. The diversification of ownership models vastly increased the financial stakes, heralding a set-up that replaces all-powerful managers with coaches who appear expendable in the chain of command from sporting directors to chief executive officers to owners.

Some are still known as the “manager”. Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, Mikel Arteta at Arsenal and Unai Emery at Aston Villa were elevated from “head coach” under the terms of their new contracts after successful starts to their tenures.

Those three are the most powerful, secure figures in the Premier League coaching fraternity.

But it is not really about job titles. It is about where the power lies within a club.

Coaches are expected to excel on the training fields and in the dressing rooms. Their opinions might be valued in discussions about player recruitment, but they are unlikely to be the ones calling the shots on transfers.

Erik ten Hag did so at times in his first two summer transfer windows at United, but the new sporting director Dan Ashworth and the new technical director Jason Wilcox will now hold sway.

There is no cause to mourn the streamlining of a manager’s responsibilities. Until very recently, a top-class coach was expected to lead recruitment (of players and backroom staff alike) and also travel to watch prospective signings and forthcoming opponents, simply because that is how things had always worked.

With Ferguson omnipotent at United, it seemed natural for others to crave the same power and influence.

The post-Ferguson model is more or less universal now, but culturally, we are still wedded to the idea that the manager holds the key to everything. If a team is not functioning, it must be down to his shortcomings.

The strange thing is that so many clubs operate in that way, too.

Chelsea have spent £1 billion (S$1.7 billion) in the transfer market since a consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital bought the club two years ago.

Over that time, the team have barely achieved beyond mediocre status. Naturally, the coaches (Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino) were held responsible for the team’s dysfunction.

There has long been a contention in data-analysis circles that the influence of managers and coaches is greatly overestimated, but studies highlight a correlation between financial investment and performance.

And when a big, wealthy club have consistently performed below expectations, under a succession of managers, it points to bigger, deeper problems.

Certainly, there are clubs like Chelsea where the identity of the manager or coach seems to be of little consequence. But there are also others where the impact has transformed results and playing style.

Guardiola’s success underlines the value of a top-class coach. So does Klopp’s impact at Liverpool and the progress Arsenal and Villa have made under Arteta and Emery. Andoni Iraola and Ange Postecoglou oversaw significant changes in playing style after taking over at Bournemouth and Tottenham Hotspur last summer.

If anything, developments over the past decade – the stripping away of managerial responsibilities and the emergence of more sophisticated patterns of play, in and out of possession – have increased the importance of coaching.

The emphasis on coaching, as opposed to management in the traditional sense of the word, has never been greater.

But it is no longer enough to be a successful coach. Equally important these days is the ability and willingness to work within a structure and to accept restraints. Many of the game’s most successful managers have been forceful, abrasive characters, but fewer and fewer clubs are willing to put up with confrontation behind the scenes.

The great contradiction about modern football is the way decision makers at so many clubs treat coaches and the art of coaching so casually. They expect a steep upturn in results but then cast them aside quickly if it does not come or if, having come at first, it is not sustained.

Fewer and fewer of them are granted the time to build anything. Just as Ferguson (27 seasons at United) and Wenger (22 at Arsenal) are now looked upon as the last of their kind, perhaps Klopp and Guardiola (beginning his ninth at City) might come to be seen in similar terms.

That is the thing about the modern game. The culture and conditions behind it have changed beyond recognition. NYTIMES