by Peter Crouch
Peter Coates was the last chairman it should have happened to. He was Stoke City through and through – one of fourteen kids in his family, his old man a miner, a regular at the old Victoria Ground from an early age, an amateur player with the club sixty years ago. He used to come into the training ground on a Friday, say a quick and pleasant hello to his players and then have lunch with the manager. He never came down to the dressing-room and never tried to throw his weight around. When I left Stoke for Burnley he sent me a lovely personal letter, thanking me for my eight years, telling me I’d been a great ambassador, inviting me to come back any time I liked. It was a simple but wonderful gesture from a fantastic club.
Coates lived and breathed it. He invested in a new stadium and in an excellent training facility at Clayton Wood. None of that was done with an intention to sell on for profit. Now it’s his daughter Denise who runs the ship, who took his original chain of betting shops and turned it into the bet365 online behemoth. She’s obviously the most able of businesswomen – in 2018 she paid herself a £220 million salary with another £45 million on top in dividend payments, more than twice as much as the entire first team squad earned. She pretty much owns the town of Sandbach. Ryan Shawcross has seen the grounds of her £90 million house there, and he says that the lake actually is a lake – not a vast ornamental water feature, but something you can happily race sailing boats on.
No matter what their character and personal tastes, the chairman seldom influences you when you’re choosing which club to sign for. You never work with them on a day-to-day basis. They’re the top of the tree, while you’re mere foliage. When I joined Spurs in 2009 I wasn’t thinking about Daniel Levy’s financial acumen. When I had rejoined Portsmouth I wasn’t doing due diligence on Sacha Gaydamak. I looked at the manager, the other players coming into the club and the value of my contract. You are concerned only with the playing side. You’re not storming into the chairman’s office to ask him about his loan structure. ‘Sacha, man, what interest rate are you paying on this? In God’s name, why have you leveraged your buyout on the future season-ticket sales of a club with an average attendance of well below 20,000?’
David Moores was the Liverpudlian equivalent of the Coates family. He had been chairman for sixteen years, his family involved in the club for more than half a century. Littlewoods, the Moores family company, employed thousands in the city, its headquarters a local landmark. I always found him a genuinely nice man, someone trying their best for the club. He had turned down offers from Sheik Mohammad and Dubai International Capital before selling out to George Gillett Jr and Tom Hicks.
He had looked into Gillett and taken Hicks on Gillett’s word. No one predicted how spectacularly it would go wrong, how the two new owners would fall out, how the club would have its worst start in fifty-seven years and start losing fine managers and appointing questionable ones. There was a banner on the Kop by the end, ‘Built by Shanks, broke by Yanks’, and you could feel it going wrong even at our level. One of their sons was sent over from the US to keep an eye on things. You’d see him at the training ground in his chinos and deck shoes, talking loudly in an American accent about subjects that seemed outside his comfort zone, and then you’d see him out that night in the Newz Bar in town, trying to persuade female supporters to inspect his personal investment portfolio.
It could never end well. Hicks and Gillett had no affiliation to the club at all. They hadn’t come because they loved football, but because they loved money. When it fell apart, they were unable to handle it, which is often the way. Chairmen love the adoration that can come with running a football club. Mandarić used to beam away in the directors’ box when the Portsmouth fans were singing his name, getting to his feet to give a patrician wave, with south coast personality and club director Fred Dinenage usually alongside him. Most have been successful in business. They’re used to winning. But football is a volatile game, much harder to control than a typical company’s fortunes. If they don’t get that success straight away, they can struggle to cope. When the fans turn on them, they stop coming. The manager can’t escape. He has to go. So he gets the abuse by proxy, the players too. Most chairmen lap up the adoration and run a mile from the blame.
I know a fair few Aston Villa fans who had no great love for Doug Ellis. Some of the criticisms were fair: after he ended his first spell as chairman, Villa won the league title and the European Cup; five years after he returned, they were relegated. You don’t end up with the nickname ‘Deadly’ by being backward in your HR dealings. Thirteen managers were sacked on his watch and he sold the club to American billionaire Randy Lerner, who then burned through managers at an even faster rate, and got the club relegated again. By the end, in his dotage, you feared some others at the club were taking advantage of Ellis. But Ellis wasn’t rinsing the club. He put money in, and he only occasionally came into the dressing-room. When he did, he would never publically slaughter the players. He just loved to talk about football.
He was certainly eccentric, not just for his habit of wearing carpet slippers to games, or bowling about in a Rolls-Royce with the personalised plate AV1. I remember being in the boardroom at Villa Park, twenty-one years old, having just signed for my first Premier League club, and standing with manager Graham Taylor, the chief executive and the club secretary. ‘Ah,’ they said, ‘you’ve got to meet Doug.’ They brought him in. He waved dismissively at the rest of them. ‘Everyone out.’ Just him and me, me wondering what he was going to say – welcome me to the club, tell me about the great Villa strikers I had to live up to, or maybe go old-school and offer me a brandy and cigar?
‘You know I invented the overhead kick?’ he asked.
It’s quite hard to know how to react when a seventy-eight-year-old football chairman who has never played the game professionally makes that his opening conversational gambit.
‘Yes,’ Doug continued. ‘We were playing, the ball bounced up, and I just did this thing. Everyone said to me, what was that you did? And I said to them – that was the overhead kick …’
It was the only thing we talked about. When he led me back out of the boardroom a few minutes later, the manager, chief executive and secretary all said the same thing to me – ‘Did he tell you about the overhead kick?’
Graham Taylor was a very nice man. He had my sympathy with Doug. It is a cross that many managers have to bear: deferring to a boss who knows far less about the game than they do. I found it very hard to imagine Rupert Lowe kicking a football. I’m pretty certain Abramovich could never do a Knighton on the pitch. But in what other industry does the top man have no experience of the company’s primary product? Maybe that’s like expecting the current boss of John West to know how to handle a fishing trawler. Yet chairmen are the ones who choose the manager. The success or failure of the club begins with them. It’s almost impossible for a manager to contradict them without raising their hackles and quite possibly getting the boot. Can even Pep Guardiola go to Khaldoon Al Mubarak in Abu Dhabi and tell him he and Sheikh Mansour have got something wrong?
You can have your run-ins with a chairman and still respect them. Levy has impressed me at Spurs. He does all the deals himself, has signed their brightest talents – Harry Kane, Dele Alli, Harry Winks – on long-term deals. Kane might be on £150,000 a week but Real Madrid have players on £350,000 a week. He buys young because of the resale value. He plucked Pochettino from Southampton when the manager’s English was still poor and he had only eighteen months’ experience of British football. The club have a world-class training facility and the best new stadium in the game. If I were an owner of a football club I’d have Levy as my chairman every day of week.
Rupert Lowe always seemed more like a rugby club chairman than a football one. When he took over as chairman he had only seen his first game of the association code six months earlier. I personally found it hard to even call him Rupert. I’d literally never called anyone Rupert. I didn’t grow up with a Rupert. There wasn’t a single Rupert in my scho
ol. The difference in cultures between him and Harry Redknapp was amazing to witness. It was like a 1960s sitcom about the owner of the mill and his foreman.
Fortunately I never had to call him by his first name. Just as every manager is always known as ‘Gaffer’ or ‘Boss’, every chairman is always addressed by a player as ‘Mr Chairman’. If you meet the owner and he’s not the chairman you still call him Mr Chairman. You’d never say Mr Owner. It just doesn’t work. Also, they’d never stand for it. It’s the twenty-first century, but we’re still expected to know our place: many, many rungs below them.
FORMATIONS
There is a constant debate within football around formations. Not only which one works best, or which is coming next, but if systems should dictate the players you sign or the players you have dictate the system, and whether the coach in the stands with his playbacks, playbooks and Prozone stats knows better than the lads actually trying to make the theory work in the real world out there on the pitch.
To which we should probably insert the views of Tony Pulis, one of the most astute managers I’ve worked with and a man whose dream day was three hours of shape drills with the defence and midfield while his strikers were sent to a different pitch to do whatever they wanted. There was a point at Stoke where, having consistently finished in the top half of the league, having made it into Europe and started to attract the sort of players that had not traditionally been interested in spending a portion of their lives in the wider Stoke-on-Trent area, some within the squad felt we were ready to loosen the stylistic straitjacket and play a little more.
A meeting was called with the manager. Reasoned points were made. ‘Gaffer, we’re ready to go to the next level.’ ‘Boss, we can be more fluid. We’re a proper Premier League football team now.’
Pulis looked back at us, gave his cap a tug and sighed heavily. ‘Don’t get carried away, lads. You’re just average players in a great system. We carry on as we are.’
The subtext was clear. My formation comes first. I’ve made this team. And while this may be a strange thing to say about a man who habitually wears tracksuits, trainers and a club-branded baseball cap, Pulis understood that formations are like fashion. You find a look that works as well as possible for the lumpy shape nature has given you and you stick with it. A short man with the leg girth of Will Carling should not attempt to wear skinny jeans. A man of six foot seven should not wear a short-cropped swimming short, even if he is a professional footballer. A Stoke team based on set pieces, aggression, long throws and a good defensive shape should not attempt to play out like Barcelona.
But fashions come and go, on the pitch and off it. The trick is to not only realise what suits you but what might be coming from the catwalk into the high street in the weeks to come. For so long, British football was all about the 4–4–2. It made sense to us. It worked. You looked at the number on a player’s shirt and you knew where they would be standing on the pitch.
I was aware as a kid that continental football was different. I loved watching Football Italia, and I could see catenaccio in action most Sunday afternoons. The first World Cup that had me smitten was Italia 90, when England switched to five at the back with Paul Parker and Stuart Pearce as wing-backs and were suddenly turbo-charged where before they had been stuck in second gear. But I hadn’t seen anything radical in the flesh until I went to Stamford Bridge with my dad one week and found Glenn Hoddle playing himself as a sweeper.
It blew my mind. At a time where most goal-kicks were routinely booted as far down the pitch as possible, Hoddle was taking them off the keeper. He had a wall of big defenders ahead of him, and with that protection was using the time and space not to push little passes out to his full-backs or deep-lying midfielders, as you might do now, but instead to spray the most glorious passes around the field.
In truth it was a formation entirely based around making Glenn Hoddle look good, but I still loved it. Even as a kid I was so obsessed with football and how it worked that I used to watch it more intensely than anyone around me. My dad would ask me how the formations were changing and who was free where. I was purely about monitoring the flow, the tactics. He would defer to however I called it. For ninety minutes every fortnight, I was the boss.
When Hoddle moved upstairs to manage he brought Ruud Gullit in to play the same role. It seemed the perfect balance between system and personnel. The sweeper-quarterback worked. Gullit could pass like a god. Yet it failed, because Ruud was too instinctively forward-thinking to be a defender. He kept wanting to rampage forward, which you could understand given his rampaging-forward success throughout his career, but was no good when you had Erland Johnsen and Frank Sinclair constantly looking over their shoulders. The formation did not work without the right player.
The innovations keep coming. I had never seen nor understood the box midfield until Joe Allen explained to me how it worked for him and his team-mates with Wales. They had wonderful free spirits in Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey who would be wasted in a conventional three or four. They had Allen and Joe Ledley who would run and track for you all day long. Two attacking mavericks, two holding midfielders. The box was the shape that allowed Chris Coleman to maximise the talents at his disposal.
If a formation works, it drips through into other sides. When Terry Venables used the Christmas-tree formation with England before Euro 96 it led to a number of top Premier League clubs using the same shape with some of the same personnel. Three at the back won Chelsea the league title under Antonio Conte in 2017 and was suddenly spotted at Stoke. Spain used a false nine, turned their forward line into a series of constantly shifting small wingers/attacking midfielders: Liverpool and Manchester City dominated the 2018–19 Premier League with an updated version of the same.
As a footballer, because you are selfish, your favourite formation is the one that leads to the greatest success for you personally. The false nine upset me because I’m a genuine nine. The false nine might be radical but it does not involve me, so I can’t pretend to feel anything but seething resentment when I see it working so successfully.
Because I was a selfish footballer I would blame the formation if I didn’t score. My dad, genetically predisposed to also watch football specifically from my perspective, would back me up. Together we would drive away from a game in which I had struggled to make an impact, bitching furiously about the shambolic waste of getting the best from three other younger attacking talents instead. I really required a nice old-fashioned 4–4–2, which was increasingly a problem in the later years of my career when managers were as loath to set up in such a dated way as they would be to stand on the touchline in flares and a crocheted tank-top. I needed crosses. A runner up front alongside me with two wide men getting crosses in worked a treat. My strike partner could get in behind or feed off my chest-downs and headers. I could receive the ball to feet, get it wide and then canter gamely into the box for the return. When I had Rafael van der Vaart in the hole alongside me at Spurs, with Gareth Bale and Aaron Lennon charging up and down the flanks, the full-backs bombing on – it was CrouchBall at its purest, and I loved every second. It was the formation that did for Inter Milan and then AC Milan at White Hart Lane. It worked.
The alternative – me on my own up top, three midfielders, wingers playing on the wrong side so that they instinctively wanted to cut inside to shoot rather than clip a cross over first time – did not. I was too far away from the midfield and with the primary source of crosses cut off. Those were lonely days for me, and if you were the sort of football fan who assumed that a striker should keep striking as long as he is starting, you would have assumed that my form had gone, that my mojo was on the wane. It wasn’t. I was the same player. I was just in a system that neutered my better abilities.
During my golden spell with England, the year when I scored eleven goals and felt I could have had more, the formation was geared up for me. I had the beautiful combination of David Beckham and Gary Neville down the right, Gary whipping crosses in on the run, Be
cks either driving balls onto my chest or bending them in with that glorious right foot. I knew that Joe Cole on the left would shape to go down the wing, pull a trick and curl it in first time with his right, which meant I could still time my run and still get in ahead of the centre-back. It was the same with Liverpool as we charged to the FA Cup and Champions League finals in successive years – Stevie Gerrard running off me everywhere, Harry Kewell and Steve Finnan with the pacey crosses off either side, lots of support all around me.
Like I say, selfish. But when it works for the man scoring the goals it usually works for the team too. And when it’s not working for the team, the manager’s highest principles and avowed methodology never last long. You can work all pre-season on one formation. You drill it in training and roll it out in warm-up matches. The coach spells it out repeatedly: this is our pattern of play. Keep working at it and the results will come. This is the way we now are. You begin the season, lose your first three games and the whole lot gets jettisoned. No one cares about grand ideas when you’re in the relegation zone. None of your fans get on the radio phone-in shows and declare how happy they are with a home defeat because you were easy on the eye as you capitulated. I saw it writ large in my final season at Stoke: Nathan Jones came in as manager, having had great success at Luton with a midfield diamond, and told us all that the diamond was the only way he ever played. We lost, lost and lost again, and the diamond was gone. Nathan will implement it in time, but you need to win games to get that time.
When you ask whether the formation comes first or the players, just look at the team’s position in the table. You might wish to play with a holding midfielder, but if you don’t have a good one, you can’t. Unless you have the sort of multi-faceted player who can operate in the hole behind the main striker, you will have to consider playing two or three up top. You can be stubborn, as Maurizio Sarri was in playing N’Golo Kanté, the world’s premier defensive midfielder, in a position other than that of defensive midfielder, but you cannot bend reality. At Stoke we were able to play Jon Walters in the hole because he had the fitness to make it work, to push up alongside me when we had the ball and to drop into midfield when we didn’t. But only Jon in our squad could do that. If he was injured, the formation had to change as well as the line-up.
