The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders

by Carson, Mike

  Clarity of understanding and clear lines of responsibility make a big difference too. Allardyce’s successful relationship with the chairman at Bolton was founded on clarity. In 1999 when his long-standing friend and peer Brett Warburton became vice chairman and Phil Gartside became chairman, they established some clear ground rules. ‘Phil looked after the new stadium build and infrastructure; I looked after the football side. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The club had got into severe debt, so the business needed major restructuring and a new board. They recreated the business; I recreated the football. And I learned to speak their business language – which was important when it came to getting across my requests for investment. It was about making a business case based on success and working within budgets. If I could show I’d added an extra £2.5 million of value in a year, then I expected them to reinvest in the football.’

  ... and instability

  By contrast, instability at the top creates anxiety and additional challenges that a highly operational leader does not need. Walter Smith joined Everton from Rangers in 1998 but, pretty soon after, it all began to get tough. ‘The owner-chairman, Peter Johnson, had one or two problems just avoiding relegation the year before I arrived. He told me up front there would be money to invest in the team when, in fact, the reverse was true. After about two and a half months he sold a player without consulting me. Shortly after, he put the club up for sale and then effectively walked away. Only then did we all realise what a chaotic financial situation the club was in.

  ‘After he left, we had to sell nearly all the players that we had brought in. There was no transfer window then, so it was back and forward, bringing in players to cover for ones who were leaving. Then there was a new ownership. That new ownership was done on the back of a deal with NTL Communications. That fell through after two months, and we entered an unstable financial environment. That was where a little bit of anxiety crept in. I didn’t really have the confidence to say it’ll be OK in six months. I was there for three and a half years and it was pretty much a constant battle. Looking back on it just now I can say that I enjoyed it – more than I did at the time!’

  Football stirs deep emotions for everyone involved. Players, staff and fans all feel pride and despair, strong attachment and overwhelming joy. They can also feel anger, resentment and pain. Allardyce recognises that owners and business leaders are susceptible to all of these feelings and more – and sometimes with difficult consequences: ‘They get the bug as much as we get it. They get the adrenalin rush, love it, can’t leave it alone, have to have it. High-powered businessmen find a new form that they have never experienced before in their life – and they can lose sight of where they were originally heading.’ Maintaining clarity of thought, perspective and long-term vision with such emotions at play is a challenge for a leader in any field.

  Living on the edge

  When the relationship between owner and manager is working, life is good. But success can be fleeting. In his second full season at the City of Manchester Stadium, Roberto Mancini’s Manchester City were in the Premier League’s pole position for much of the season. In late March his team slipped up and the pressure on him – real or perceived – increased significantly. It’s at moments like these that the relationship is truly tested. Speaking at that time, Ancelotti understood the pressure Mancini was under: ‘Everyone says that Mancini has to win; if he doesn’t win this year it could be big problems. But the owner one week ago said he is happy with the performance of the team. The problem is in football that only one team wins.’ He himself has had his tougher experiences. At Chelsea – unlike at PSG – he inherited a team that was ‘fully ready’. He was sacked after two seasons, despite winning the league and cup double. He is philosophical, while admitting the pain of the experience. ‘I didn’t feel good. I think that I did my best, but I had a problem with the owner because the owner wanted more. This is normal, but I cannot do anything more.’ Successful leadership under such intense personal pressure is no mean feat.

  The art of leading upwards

  If a football manager is to play his part in creating the stability he needs to function properly, then, as in most organisations, he will need to lead upwards. Leadership is rarely about some heroic ‘follow me’ message – it’s more often about inspiring all round. And an important component of that is inspiring confidence, trust, excitement and commitment in the person or people under whose authority you stand yourself. Hodgson believes it begins with respect and pragmatism: ‘You have to work on the basis that the person at the top is there because he should be at the top, and even if he isn’t, he’s there anyway. It’s a given. Then the three most important things he will need from anyone working together with him will be competence, diligence and communication. So when I have gone to football clubs, I have never really given serious thought to how I need to manage upwards – I’ve always concentrated on doing the job that I’m being paid to do. That’s where the competence and diligence bit comes in. The communication point is all about speed of decision-making. We take a lot of decisions: every day the decision questions are flashed at you left, right and centre. The important thing is not to treat the club as purely your domain or to treat any questions about it as intrusive. The people running the whole show are responsible for the club surviving or not. They are entitled to ask questions. I have always tried to create a good line of communication upwards, provided the chairman wants that. You can’t force it upon them, but I have always been pleased to get a call from the chairman asking how’s it going and what’s going on at the club because I think it’s important for them to know.’

  Choosing the right man for the job

  Football managers like any other brand of leader all have their own style. Owner-manager relationships come in an infinite variety of textures, set as they are against variable and shifting landscapes. What is clear is that the successful owner will appoint an excellent manager, and one with whom he has natural chemistry; and the successful manager, once appointed, will devote considerable energy to making the relationship work – for the good of all at the club. ‘Owners now are making massive investments in their clubs,’ says Hodgson, ‘so it is entirely reasonable that they may go for high-profile managers with track records, no matter where they were born. People now quite happily realise that being English is in itself neither an advantage nor a disadvantage [for Premier League management] – in the same way that being Italian or French or any other nationality is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. A manager can succeed or fail whatever his nationality. There is some interesting variety though that comes from cross-cultural appointments. While the actual job of coaching and managing a football team in terms of the physical and tactical side may not vary much, what can vary from culture to culture are the leadership qualities and characteristics required, and with those the ability to lead a team of people to success. Bob Houghton and I both used our own style to get to success in Sweden in the 1970s and 80s; Wenger and Mancini have been doing it recently in England.’

  While Hodgson positively encourages the arrival in British football of high-profile managers from other countries, he reinforces the absolute need for skilled communicators: ‘Every day as coaches, we are in the communication business. In lower leagues we are also educators, but at the top end we work with people who know how to play superb football. I have been privileged to always work at the top end, so my work has been making sure that the skills and abilities the players have are blended together and are used purely and solely for the benefit of the team. And that’s where you come to the major leadership challenges: some of your players whose abilities are important to the club and the team are going to be ego-driven and insufficiently team orientated to bring those skills to the team itself. They might even destroy the team ethos because they are only interested in their own personal gain – they are in effect using the team. There are two types of players: the players who bring what they have to the team to make the team good, and players who use
the team to make themselves look good. When you encounter the second type, communication skills are absolutely critical if you are going to convince them that they are on the wrong road.’

  The man in the middle of so many stakeholders needs excellent communication skills. The successful chairman will ensure this before he appoints a manager, and once he appoints, will trust his man and give him the space to use those skills to the full.

  Governing Bodies

  In addition to chairman/owners, modern football managers also have to deal with the governing bodies of the game. As a four-time national manager in very different geographies and 12-time club manager at very different clubs, Hodgson is well placed to address this topic.

  First, the man at the top: ‘The Football Association chairman is very much like the chairman at a club. But often clubs don’t have large structures behind the chairman. Jack Walker owned Blackburn and had really set the club up as the Blackburn that we know today, Mohammed Al Fayed was the same at Fulham and Jeremy Peace the same at West Bromwich Albion. So it’s a little bit different for David Bernstein than for those men who, as major stakeholders in a club, could basically bring people on board that suited them and could essentially do whatever they wanted. At the FA, David has to relate to a large board that represents the whole range of aspects of the game, and they have created a smaller Club England board who can deal rapidly with the operational issues as they arise, or form opinions to present to the main board in a formal way. Not unlike an executive team in business.’

  So while the chairman can make a difference, it is essential that the structures around him be configured with the right purpose in mind. Hodgson pays tribute to the forward thinking of the Swiss FA: ‘Switzerland was far ahead of its time in 1992 when I joined. As with other countries, the football association there is the governing body, so it looks after all aspects of the sport from refereeing to handicapped sport, amateur football and so on. The difference is that in most countries, there is a large gap between what the FA is trying to do and what the professional leagues are trying to do. Whereas in Switzerland, they ensured there was board representation from league football, pure amateur football and the professional lower leagues from an early stage. This worked extremely well, because these four important people and I would get together regularly, and determine together how to get the most out of my role.’ This may sound like a minor tweak, until we hear the effect of the body on the wider game: ‘The classic example of how it worked well for me was the time they gave me with the players outside of the standard days around qualifying matches and friendlies. I would get the team for five or six get-togethers during a qualifying campaign. So when the players had played for their professional teams on a Sunday I would get them until the Wednesday morning, which gave us a couple of days together regularly during the season. That’s a very good example of co-operation between all the bodies working in favour of the national team. The clubs were asked to commit to it, and they accepted that between three and five times a year we would have access to their players. Then thinking more along PR terms, we took the players that I had selected to different venues around Switzerland. That’s easier in a small country, of course, but we wouldn’t meet in Zurich or in Geneva all the time – we would go to Berne, Basle and other cities so that people in the various regions felt the national team was engaging with them. The arrangement worked really well, and I got to know players so much better. So often I had to make decisions based on one or two sightings from a distance in the stand – do I want him or not want him? It fell down, of course, when some players built reputations and went to play in Germany and Italy – then I didn’t get the same access. But overall it made an enormous difference.’

  Hodgson’s message is clear. Getting the governance structures right makes all the difference to the task of the manager. A leader cannot lead successfully and with authority without the right support and structures around him.

  The Lifeblood

  The Barclays Premier League is widely regarded as the most compelling football drama in the world. More than 35,000 people attend every one of the ten matches every week on average, with hundreds of millions more watching live coverage or highlights across the globe. It is estimated that 4.7 billion people watch Premier League football out of a global population of 7 billion. The true fans – those who pour enormous emotional energy into their chosen sides – will be gratified to hear the views of England’s Roy Hodgson on them as the lifeblood of the game. He thinks of football supporters with great respect – almost affection: ‘I’ve always worked on the basis of three very simple thoughts: that the fans know what they are looking for, that they understand what football is and that they want the best for their team. Then I add to that the simple fact that they keep our football going. It may not be their gate receipt money that keeps the current level of the game afloat – and they know that – but it is their presence. When you watch a Premier League game, you can’t see an empty seat for love nor money. Then you watch a game in Serie A and you often see the empty seats everywhere, or you turn on to a League Cup game and there’s hardly anybody there. Compare these and you realise that it’s fans who are the lifeblood of everything we do. The reason there are such powerful sponsorships of football – everything from cars to soft drinks – is because so many people want to watch it and so many people care passionately about it.’ From this basic understanding, he operates on a simple principle: as with all things, he focuses on the people he’s with. ‘At a football match, I focus on the team. I should not be the point of attention for the fans – that should be the players. The fans are wise enough to understand that you need a coach or a manager to look after your team, but he’s not the one you’ve come to watch on a Saturday afternoon. He might be the one you get interested in when he’s talking about the team, talking about his players, talking about his philosophy and plans.’

  Hodgson’s thinking here is valuable. Every business, every organisation has stakeholders whose voices are important and influential. But one of the traps of leadership is to believe you are the centre of the universe. Hodgson has both humility and pragmatism, not disregarding the fans for their emotional attachment, but honouring it with respect and thoughtfulness. And he’s right to do so. The emotional power of supporters to drive the business of a club is unusually strong.

  This emotional power can put pressure on an organisation, and considerable personal pressure on a leader. Wenger cites it as the single greatest pressure he faces: ‘The biggest pressure you have is to drive home on a Saturday night having lost a game and to think that some people will cry because you lost that game. That is the biggest pressure, to let people down. That’s a big responsibility and I feel that the longer you stay at a club, unfortunately, the bigger the responsibility becomes.’ Wenger is right: the deeper the relationship becomes between manager and fan, the more burdensome that can feel for the manager. There is, though, one special case where this works for a manager, as André Villas-Boas explains: ‘At Porto, I had one massive, massive advantage, which Pep Guardiola also had at Barcelona: we were both coaching teams we supported as fans. When that happens, you know exactly how your fans behave, you know how to touch people, you know how to move people, you know the channels. It’s almost like every single word that comes out of your mouth touches people in a different way and moves your dressing room closer to what you want to achieve. The greatest managers are able to replicate these things at different clubs and in different leagues. José [Mourinho] is the greatest example of this kind of adaptability with maximum success. It is something that is not achievable for all other managers.’

  For Warnock, supporters are both a pressure and an encouragement: ‘At all my recent clubs – Leeds, QPR, Crystal Palace, Sheffield United – people have said, “Well, I’ve got to say you weren’t my number one choice, but I’m glad you are here” and that’s nice. They have heard or read about this Neil Warnock who breathes fire and smoke comes out of his ears and they don’t want th
at – but when they actually get me working for them they understand how I work and they quite enjoy it. I think that’s what I love – making ordinary people happy and lifting expectations. One of the best moments in my life was going back to Palace with QPR. I had left them when they went into administration – and I thought I would get some real stick. But as I walked out of the tunnel the whole ground stood up to a man and woman and clapped. I will never, ever forget that. Even talking about it now is giving me goosebumps. And I just walked down the tunnel and I have never felt as emotional as that, and the Palace fans were fantastic, and it was one of the best moments ever.’ He also finds that supporters provide a very real reference point when the going gets tough: ‘I knew the QPR fans were totally behind me and it’s been fantastic to get the emails. If we’d been relegated and finished rock bottom, the fans would have been fantastic and wanted me to carry on. But we wouldn’t have got relegated, we would have finished mid-table and every one of those fans knew more about me and the football club than any of the new owners. That’s why I knew that the fans were right.’