In retirement, I have found myself watching the way other managers deal with press conferences. I love it, because I want to see where I can help. Every now and again I will phone one of them with some advice. Last season, when Leicester City was lodged at the bottom of the Premier League, I phoned the manager, Nigel Pearson, and told him that he looked too relaxed and over-confident. I told him that he had to show some concern without looking vulnerable. By contrast, when I talked to Sean Dyche, manager of Burnley, who also had a tough season, I tried to reassure him. Sean, who always had a bit of a wee joke with the interviewer, reiterated how hard his team was working, and–while not oblivious to where Burnley stood in the table–he managed to convey a feeling of confidence. Last season, I also took it upon myself to offer Alan Pardew some unsolicited advice before he left Newcastle United to take the helm at Crystal Palace. I asked him, ‘What’s happened to you? You don’t argue with anybody any more. You’ve given in. You’ve chucked it. If you want to keep your job, start being Alan Pardew.’ He phoned me up a couple of weeks later and said, ‘Thanks.’ He didn’t need to. I know how difficult the job is. I am always happy to help a fellow manager.
9
LEADING NOT MANAGING
Owners
Authority, and the exercise of control, rests on possessing the confidence of those who provide it. No leader stands a chance if the people he is supposedly managing sense that his hold on his job is tenuous. In football the providers of this authority are the club owners. If they are unequivocal about their confidence in–and support of–the manager, they make his job a lot easier. When I applied for my first managerial job, the part-time role at East Stirlingshire, I was so eager to get my foot on the ladder that I didn’t pay any attention to the condition of the club or the personalities who controlled the purse-strings. As the years went by, I quickly gained an appreciation of how important it is to understand the person, or people, to whom you have to report and are accountable.
Most of us don’t think about the nature of our employer, or boss, or the tone and atmosphere they cultivate inside their organisation. That’s really important in football, which is littered with bad owners. I cannot say enough about the benefits of a long-term, stable ownership that’s prepared to make the necessary investments to create a vibrant organisation. It’s a priceless foundation for management in any walk of life. I’ve read quite a lot about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, and I imagine that the people heading his various companies all think much more about long-term prosperity than the CEO of a publicly listed company who is worried that the investment fund managers will be at his throat if he produces disappointing earnings in the next quarter. If you have owners, or shareholders, who only think about short-term results, it brings about a never-ending cycle of misery for everyone. That’s especially true in football.
Football managers should look for their own modified version of Warren Buffett–people who care about the long term; who provide them with the money they need to build their team; who don’t meddle in daily management; who are available when needed; and who understand that their job is only to make two decisions. The first is to replace the manager or CEO; the second is to sell the club. Unfortunately, these people are almost impossible to find in football, and the problem only seems to have been exacerbated by the way in which ownership, over the last 50 years, has gradually shifted from local businessmen to foreign oligarchs, sheikhs and hedge-fund managers, chasing their share of the television money that now floods the Premier League.
For their part, owners need to understand that football is different from the businesses they themselves run and where they have enjoyed success. The clubs aren’t supermarket chains, banks or electronics wholesalers.
Football is live entertainment, conducted on a scale that has no parallel. You just cannot manufacture wins with the reliability with which you can produce phones or razor blades, because everything hinges on the performance of individuals and the random influences of emotion, chance and injury. Any owner also needs to be realistic. A devoted fan may come to the stadium for every game expecting a victory, but an owner has to be much more grounded.
Between the time I took over at Manchester United and my retirement in 2013, the 48 clubs that have occupied the remaining slots in the Premier League went through 267 permanent managers (not including caretaker roles). It makes you wonder why some clubs even bother to pay managers. At the start of the 2014–15 season, Arsène Wenger had managed almost as many Premier League games as all his fellow managers combined. The real title of the top football man in most Premier League clubs should be ‘temporary manager’.
Chelsea ran through 13 full-time managers (not including caretakers) while I was at United, and Manchester City went through 14 (not including caretakers). It would not surprise me if Chelsea has paid as much as £40 million in settlement payments to fired managers. Chelsea and Manchester City have plenty of companions. The Premier League is littered with examples of poor hiring practices. Take Liverpool in 2010 after they sacked Rafael Benítez. The owners looked around and fastened on Roy Hodgson, who had just taken Fulham to the UEFA Cup final. Liverpool hired Roy and within six months they had fired him. I’m not sure it is any better in Europe. Bayern Munich made 14 changes of manager (not including caretakers) while I was at United, although several of the same men held the post on different occasions. It is all so silly, since there is no evidence that frequent sacking of a manager leads to better results.
Years ago there used to be much greater longevity among football managers–perhaps because the owners came from the surrounding communities and were more vested in the long-term success and stability of their club, rather than many of the people who own clubs today. United obviously had Matt Busby for 25 years between 1945 and 1969 (he returned to the club for 1970–71); Joe Harvey was manager of Newcastle for 13 years between 1962 and 1975; Arsenal had Herbert Chapman for 9 years between 1925 and 1934, and his successor, George Allison, was there for 13 years between 1934 and 1947. Scot Symon was at Rangers for 13 years (between 1954 and 1967) while, before him, Bill Struth held the job for an extraordinary 34 years (1920–54).
There’s nothing more reassuring for a manager than to feel that he has the support of his boss. It’s as true for young people taking their first job, who are at the bottom rung of an organisation, as it is for a leader wanting to know that he is backed by his board of directors. Your boss can make or break you. I learned that while I was at Aberdeen managing under Dick Donald. The greatest gift he gave me was unerring confidence in my capabilities.
This was particularly true in my first year at the club, when we had a bumpy time. I also had to deal with the legacy of the previous manager, Billy McNeill, who had left to manage Celtic and had been popular with the players. In March 1979 I was feeling pretty despondent after Rangers beat Aberdeen 2–1 in the Scottish League Cup final. A couple of the players had made no secret of the fact that they preferred my predecessor, and the local newspaper, The Press and Journal, had been questioning my credentials; I said as much to Dick. He just said, ‘I hired you because you can do the job. I’m not interested in what the press say. You just get on with your job. Don’t moan. Be a man.’ It really lifted my spirits.
I received the same sort of support at United, particularly during my early years at the club before the trophies started to appear. In 1990 we travelled to Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup and the match was billed as do-or-die for my career. The day before the game, Martin Edwards called me with a simple but much appreciated message, ‘Whatever happens tomorrow, your job is safe.’
I was fortunate, at both Aberdeen and Manchester United, to have principal owners who had an abiding pride in their ownership of the clubs. At Aberdeen Dick Donald had been involved with the club from 1949, and became its chairman in 1970. He was not about to tolerate any other shareholders meddling in its affairs. His Annual General Meetings were almost always dispatched within three minutes; the longest extended to about se
ven minutes when a local businessman engaged in a bit of agitation. Even though Dick had played stints of professional football as a young man, he understood the dividing lines that separate owners from managers. I never felt that he wanted to show he knew more about football than me. That was an enormous blessing. The greatest bosses also take great pride in making sure that if employees who have served them well choose to leave, they go on to greater and better things. That was certainly the case with Dick Donald, because when, in 1986, I began to mention to him that I was thinking about leaving Aberdeen for the challenge of a larger club, he was emphatic that I should only contemplate one: Manchester United. This was well before I had any inkling that Manchester United were interested in me, but Dick’s allusion to the club was not just characteristic of the man, but also bolstered my confidence. When I finally left Aberdeen, I knew that he didn’t want me to go, but I also left with his blessing in my pocket–a priceless benediction.
Today, I tell managers who are casting about for a club to be sure they find a chairman who understands the complexities of their job. The greatest luxury any manager can obtain is sufficient time to either develop a club or turn things around. It takes years to implement your ideas and put your structure in place. If they are fortunate to find an owner who understands the job and is willing to give them time (and those people are rare human beings), they stand a chance. Otherwise, if they don’t get results they will be sacked. Every football manager has been sacked. I was sacked–albeit not for football reasons–and José Mourinho, Arsène Wenger and Carlo Ancelotti have all been sacked. The only football manager who has not been sacked is the one who is two minutes into his first job.
There have been some really good owners of clubs but, unfortunately, they are in a distinct minority. The Cobbold family, who controlled Ipswich Town for many years, were gems. They were deeply rooted in the surrounding community and were brewers and pub owners. Both Alf Ramsey and Bobby Robson worked for them as Ipswich managers, for whom they must have been a godsend. Today there is a VIP club at Ipswich Town called the ‘Cobbold Club’, even though the family hasn’t been involved for quite a long time. That speaks volumes. Most clubs would probably like to forget their former owners. Arsenal has also been blessed by owners with a long-term view. For many decades it was owned by a pair of families–the Bracewell-Smiths and Hill-Woods–and then David Dein (a shareholder and vice-chairman), who was responsible for attracting Arsène Wenger to Arsenal and was the club’s driving force for a long time.
When I arrived at United, Martin Edwards was the chairman and largest shareholder. He had inherited the position and stake from his father, Louis Edwards, who himself had first bought control in the early 1970s.
As I noted earlier, Martin shared some of Dick Donald’s traits. He did not feel impelled to demonstrate his knowledge of football. He was not confused about the difference between an owner and a manager and, on the whole, we got on well.
The Glazer family have taken a lot of flak during the time they have owned United. People have criticised them for paying vast sums in interest payments to the banks that loaned them the money to buy the club, and for the various fees that have been charged. Others have said that the reason United is once more a publicly traded company is so the Glazers can cash in on their investment. I used to get calls from the people running the various supporters’ clubs asking for my backing in various campaigns to get rid of the Glazers. Whenever one of these efforts cranked into high gear, somebody would argue that if I announced my resignation as manager, the Glazers would be forced to sell the club. That never made any sense to me. I told the agitators, ‘If I quit, do you think United is going to take the field on Saturday without a manager?’
While I was manager, the Glazers caused me no bother. It might surprise people but, from my perspective as a manager, they have been very good owners. A manager wants four things from the owner: no meddling; money when it is needed to buy a player; support; and fair compensation. When they bought the club, the Glazers said it was a long-term investment, and I took some consolation from the fact that, at the time, they had owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the American football team, for a decade. After they took control, they did not come barrelling in with all guns blazing. It was quite the opposite. After they bought the club, nobody got fired. They valued continuity. There was not one change to any of the commercial or coaching staff and they never exerted any pressure on me regarding the squad or our results. That says a lot about their approach.
They never said ‘no’ or refused to do something that I cared about. I was also probably manna from heaven for them because I never asked for ridiculous amounts of money. When we signed Robin van Persie in 2012 for £24 million which, at the time, was the largest amount we had ever paid for a 29-year-old player, the only question the Glazers asked was about his age. It was a fair question because in 2008 we had bought Dimitar Berbatov from Tottenham for £30.75 million when he was 27 years old. Berbatov’s stylish but languid approach did not work out at United, even though he scored 21 goals in 2010–11 and was joint top scorer in the League. In 2012 we sold him to Fulham for £3 million. So I could see why the Glazers had questions about Van Persie. It was entirely reasonable. But when a player of his calibre becomes available, you have to act.
If I was an aspiring football manager, or dreamed about running a big company, I’d take a very careful look at the composition of the ownership before accepting any job. The former chairman of Birmingham City, Carson Yeung, is–as I write–in jail. Former Manchester City owner Thaksin Shinawatra is in self-imposed exile and cannot return to Thailand. There are plenty of inept British owners too. It does not matter where they come from, these people breeze into football. If they buy a club at the bottom of the Premier League, they are all anxious to get a slice of the revenue from European football that accrues to the top sides; if they go fishing for a club in the lower divisions, they all dream of promotion to the Premier League.
Even the dimmest owner knows that if there is a dispute between an individual player and a manager, it is crazy for them to back the player. As soon as they do that, they have let anarchists into the club. Every now and again there will be an example of a manager who antagonises his entire squad, but that’s very different. It has been reported that Paolo Di Canio got sacked by Sunderland in 2013 after a group of players marched into the chief executives’ office, but there are not many examples like that. I always knew that, even if a player was stirred into a frenzy of self-pity by his agent, the owners would never side with him.
Most former players who decide they want to become managers are like I was when I joined East Stirlingshire. They are too desperate and willing to jump at any offer. They cannot stand waiting at home hoping that the phone will ring, and a period of unemployment can cause anyone to doubt themselves. But managers are invariably too anxious, getting themselves into a position where, on the day they sign their new contract, they are simultaneously signing their own death certificate. The turnover is preposterous. A housefly has a longer life expectancy than the manager of a Premier League team.
Despite this overwhelming evidence, eagerness and ambition often seem to triumph over cold facts. A couple of years ago Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who was a great striker for United, and scored the winning goal in the 1999 Champions League final against Bayern Munich, was negotiating to become the manager of Cardiff City. After he had retired as a player, Ole had managed United’s reserves and then returned to his native Norway to manage Molde, which he did most successfully. After a few seasons in Norway, Ole was pining to manage a Premier League club, and I read in the papers that he was in the finishing stages of discussions with Vincent Tan, the owner of Cardiff City, who had just fired Malky Mackay. I thought to myself, ‘Surely he’s not thinking about taking that job–it’s bound to be a nightmare.’ So I texted Ole and gave him some very firm advice. I told him, ‘Tomorrow is the strongest you will ever be with the owner. So get everything, down to the smallest detail tha
t could interfere with your management style, written into your contract.’ Nine months later, the inevitable occurred and Tan decided that he would pick a new manager. The good news for Ole was that he had a watertight contract and his talent is bound to be recognised by a more appreciative owner.
Then there are victims of misfortune who suddenly find themselves reporting to new owners. That happened to Sam Allardyce at Blackburn Rovers after it was bought by the Rao family, owners of the V. H. Group, a company that operates chicken-processing farms in India. A few weeks after they bought the club, the new owners fired Allardyce, who had managed the club for two years. Even though he was forced to manage on a shoestring, Sam had always ensured Blackburn placed respectably in the Premier League. The Raos had brought in an agent, Jerome Anderson, as a consultant, fired Allardyce, and replaced him with his deputy, Steve Kean. Then, just to demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of football management, the Raos insisted that Kean, towards the end of his time at the club, had to fly out to board meetings in India. They fired Kean two years later and replaced him with a former United player, Henning Berg, who had called me after he had been offered the job. I warned him about the owners, but he was eager to get into the game after being fired by the Norwegian club, Lillestrøm. Fifty-seven days later, they fired him too, and were forced by the courts to pay him £2.2 million to buy out his contract.
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