The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders

by Carson, Mike

  The Bolton story

  Allardyce’s reign at Bolton was an extraordinary time for all involved – from chairman to fans. Inheriting a team in mid-table Championship anonymity he made an instant impact, leading them to the play-offs and two domestic semi-finals. In his second season they won the play-off final in handsome fashion (3-0 against Preston); and thus began a period of top-flight success not seen at the club since the heady days of Nat Lofthouse in the 1950s.

  Inheriting a club with a proud history is rarely an easy task. Expectations are either ludicrously high (‘here at last is the man we’ve been waiting for’) or depressingly dismissive (‘why should he succeed? – no one else has’). Allardyce felt a mixture of the two on arrival at the Reebok Stadium. But the story was to become a shining example of how high-performing leadership teams can deliver high performance at the front line. ‘In 2000 we had a dream that was short term–long term. The short term was to get to the Barclays Premier League, but the long term was to become a successful Premier League football club, to develop a winning environment and then to take Bolton where it had never been before: the Champions League. We set up a war room, which was named by Fordy [Mike Ford], and the room was our room and only our room. Normally, it was for core members of staff only, sometimes it would be all of us right down to the kit man – one of the most important people at any football club.

  ‘Three or four years later, the challenge became: “Now we have to win something, now we have to achieve something that’s not been achieved before.” We got to the Carling Cup final and lost it, then in year five we got into the Europa Cup, something that had never been achieved in the club’s history. Then I realised it had all changed – that, in fact, we didn’t need a siege mentality. What we needed as a staff was to understand our own potential, and what it would take to live up to it. Our players were extremely high quality – international stars mixed in with home-grown talent – and if we were going to get the best out of them we would have to live up to their standards.

  ‘So we set ourselves a goal to get above even their standards and ask them to live up to ours. I was doing a lot of thinking about current reality and what could be. Our squad between them had won in the region of 30 championship medals throughout the world of football. The clubs that many of them had played for had demanded performance from them just by their nature. But Bolton couldn’t do that. Bolton is a 28,000-seater stadium. It’s got its tradition, but it’s not Manchester United, it’s not Arsenal, it’s not AC Milan or Real Madrid or Bayern Munich, so it doesn’t demand an awful lot out of you. So we realised we were going to have to demand it ourselves, drive ourselves on – because that’s the only way we were going to be really successful. And that’s where we earned respect from them, coming from AC Milan or Real Madrid to little old Bolton.’

  Allardyce and his team created magic at Bolton, finishing level on points with Liverpool in 2004–05 and securing a UEFA Cup place – just five years after a standing start in the Championship. ‘That was a lot faster than we first imagined, and I think that there were probably four key people responsible as well as me: Phil Brown my assistant, Mark Taylor head of sports science and physiotherapy, Mike Ford performance analysis manager and Jack Chapman in recruitment. He was an old-school scout – fantastic eyes to spot a player, then later on we added all our technical scouting approach. That group all went out to add to our team, and went through a serious recruitment and interview process to put it together.’

  Complexity

  How do you know when a leadership team is truly adding value? In football, it appears to revolve around the three overlapping challenges already framed of complexity, technology change and people.

  In the daily running of the club, the leadership team brings a welcome routine, cutting through the complexity. At the start of each day at Sunderland, O’Neill would meet with his team of four or five colleagues, assessing medical reports and getting player updates: ‘In the run-up to a match, we would maybe take a look at some video and we might agree we want to introduce some new things into training.’ Then the players would begin their warm-up in the gym: ‘This is something that has come into the game in the last couple of years. Working in the gym suggests that the players are lifting weights but it in fact refers to the agility work they do in preparation for the work about to take place on the practice field. I would know that the warm-up would be done very, very well by the fitness coach and I wouldn’t have to concern myself too much about that. Then we would get out on to the field together and begin the training session, and we would all know what we needed to be doing.’

  Howard Wilkinson points out that how much a manager makes use of a leadership team to help resolve complexity remains very much a personal choice. ‘A lot of teams will have someone in the stand to give an overview, and some managers want to know the stats even before half-time. So there is a range of people now feeding in to decision-making processes. Some managers will even take a member of staff in to the half-time team talk from time to time to make a point. It’s not that common, but for sure the manager’s role is more flexible now, and if you are going to have a staff team then you have to use them well. Generally, though, the manager remains the voice that delivers the message.’

  Expertise, of course, can create simplicity for the leader, cutting through the complexity. At Fulham, Martin Jol is very happy to rely on an excellent medical team: ‘Within my staff we must have the best medical team in England. These guys used to work for Sam Allardyce at Blackburn, where they created excellent procedures. Now they work with me at Fulham. Post-match and pre-match we have all these procedures and Mark Taylor – not a doctor but a former physiotherapist – is the head of my medical team. He’s a big part of what we do, and I talk to him every day.’

  People

  One of the key areas of complexity for the leadership team is recruitment – in football as in business, the organisation stands or falls on the quality of its people. The war for talent needs fighting well – and it’s another battle that no leader of a complex organisation can win on his own. Twenty years ago the war was fought more simply, but no less ferociously. Kevin Keegan recalls the scouting organisation at Liverpool: ‘They’d have a couple of guys who Shanks really trusted who he thought had a good eye for a player and they would be despatched off to watch Bury play – or Scunthorpe, or Doncaster or whoever with a view of watching a player like myself. That’s all you had – it wasn’t rocket science in those days, it was very simple.’

  Thirty years later, it was beginning to move faster at Allardyce’s Bolton: ‘We started by watching games in the traditional way, and then would file an individual report on anyone that stood out. Then as more technology came in, we could make great use of this data. We added to our own scout reports some information from a scouting organisation that we bought in. In that way we could scout for the ones we could afford, and keep an eye on that top player because one day we might be able to afford him. The secret was to persuade the club leadership to recruit bright young people coming out of university who knew their IT. They liked doing all this stuff that footballers and ex-footballers don’t like – research and data entry on a laptop. We went as far as hiring interns so the critical staff didn’t waste time doing it. Through the interns they could play the numbers game, i.e. if you look at enough information you eventually find something that’s worth going for.’

  Allardyce’s first golden nugget was none other than French World Cup and Euro winner, Youri Djorkaeff. ‘We were desperately short of a quality front man in year one of the Premier League. We were beginning to evolve our recruitment practice, when Youri came up. It’s an interesting story because people said we would never get him. He was in Germany, not really playing. We knew that people in Europe wouldn’t know much about Bolton Wanderers, so we had put together a club profile – and we had agreed that if a European player was worth going after, we would travel to and meet him on his turf. Football in general says don’t meet them on their
turf, bring them to yours – if they really want to play for you, they’ll make the effort. I thought, “No this is Youri, he’s won the World Cup, European Championships, played for AC Milan ...”

  ‘The word was that his national coach had called him in the January and with the World Cup coming up in the summer had said, “Look, Youri, you’re not playing so you aren’t going to be in the squad.” So we went out and said, “Youri – this is Bolton. We’re in a dogfight because we are bottom of the league, but we’re a great club. Then we put the video on: Reebok Stadium, Manchester Airport, 40-minute flight to London, Premier League football, play every week with us, if you do the business you get in the World Cup squad. You can help us; we can help you. That was it. He said, “Right, that’ll do me.” Then the hard bit came because of money: we knew Youri would have a lawyer, an image rights lawyer, his agent – but in the end we had the upper hand because he needed to play football to get to the World Cup and he’d been dropped at Kaiserslautern, he was training on his own. It was a good discussion. It worked out pretty expensive compared to what we were paying for the rest of the players, but that was the start of the golden recruitment time. Other players and other clubs started to realise that we were recruiting some of the world’s best.’

  In 1983, the young Allardyce was playing for the Tampa Bay Rowdies in Florida when he met up with some of the American football players from the Buccaneers across town. Even back then, Allardyce was stunned by what he saw: ‘There was one coach for the quarterback, probably four physiotherapists, qualified, at least ten masseurs, a dietician and a nutritionist. The food was laid on in the restaurant in the morning, at lunchtime and before they left along with the fluids and the supplements. And then there were the stats lads; the lads who used to make the play-book with the head coach ...’ Allardyce saw how the experts in a high-performing leadership team have great impact on people matters: ‘The sports psychologist and the psychiatrist used to do sessions with the players on a weekly basis. The sports psychologist would do the group sessions, whereas the psychiatrist would literally sit with the players on the sofa one-to-one. There was this monstrous organisation ...’

  Glenn Hoddle is a great believer in scientific expertise: ‘I always used psychologists with the team. As a player I saw how it broke down barriers and made us purer to go on to the football pitch and perform as a unified team. When everything’s going well and you are playing well, life is easy. The real test of the leader of people comes when things are not going well. That’s when people turn on each other and they say things that have built up between themselves. It’s almost like an invisible wall starts to build. Using experts helps prevent the sort of problems we heard about in the Dutch squad in Euro 2012.’

  Soon after his arrival at Newcastle, Keegan and his team had immediate people impact with a simple example of creating an environment for success. ‘We won our game on the Saturday and I gave everyone the Monday off. I asked for the training ground to be fumigated and painted. We spent about £5,000 on it at that time, which wasn’t a fortune but was still quite a lot of money, and when the players came in on Tuesday the reaction was unbelievable. The place was spotless – everything was clean, everything was repainted, the physio’s room was immaculate, the baths had been cleaned, it had been re-tiled, and it looked like a different place. I spoke to the players before training and said, “I want to change a lot of things here, but you’ve got to help me.”’ A leader getting his team’s working environment right can provide an excellent platform on which to build success.

  Technology change

  In the modern game it is widely accepted that good use of technology can give a team a competitive edge. In Shankly’s Liverpool era, tactical data was pretty limited. As Keegan recalls: ‘They had a system that consisted of maybe two people who would watch the opposition. That was the job of a guy called Reuben Bennett when we first went there – and he was also in the boot room. People don’t mention him very much, but he was a great guy and very important. We used to do tactics on a Subbuteo board! It’s a bit more high tech now ...’

  Much of the mindset and technological capacity that Allardyce saw in Tampa has now landed in Premier League football. While it has the power to reduce complexity, it does need to be in the hands of experts the leader can trust. As in the matter of recruitment, Allardyce eagerly embraces all the technology he can find: ‘I like the language of sports science and of sports medicine. There is an accuracy that shifts people’s thinking. Instead of “he’s broken a bone in his foot,” they explain about the metatarsal – what it is, what it does, how it works. It puts it all on to a new level.’ The point is significant in any leadership setting. Imparting a new language and using it to share accurate information is an act of empowerment.

  O’Neill is delighted by the advent of video technology, but points to his and the staff team’s role of filtering the information so the players aren’t overwhelmed. ‘In Clough’s time [at Nottingham Forest] the tape machine was in its infancy, but I don’t think we ever had a session with him where we actually watched a game on television, stop-starting the opposition. I do believe that in the modern game it’s a good thing for players to see how they’ve performed, both individually and collectively, as soon as possible after the match. A day or two after a game we use video to bring some condensed, thought-through points at a time where the players’ concentration is at its height.

  ‘Before a game there’s only so much a player can take in and, no matter how intelligent he is, if you give him four or five new instructions just before he goes out, he’s unlikely to take them all in. Even after a game, going into something for more than an hour is counter-productive. Our job is to make good use of the brief time of heightened concentration. These moments are vitally important.’

  Gérard Houllier is also enthusiastic about technology – and sounds another interesting warning note about how best to use it: ‘It is nearly 15 years since we started to have match analysis in Clairefontaine [the French national training academy]. Systems like Prozone helped me a lot when I was in previous clubs because I could assess the effort and the technical achievements of the players in the game. But I never use technology for negative reasons. I’ve never shown a player “You’ve done wrong, this is where you went wrong” – I never show that. I prefer to enhance the positive aspect of his game. I would say, “You’ve done that before and there is no reason why you can’t repeat that.” The image is very important – the image gets into the mind of a player. So if you want to show something, make it something positive.’

  From recruitment and routine through technology to personal issues, a high-performing leadership team creates the environment for a high-performing playing team to emerge.

  Creating a High-performing Playing Team

  Establishing the ideal environment is essential – but in itself is not sufficient. A high-performing leadership team goes on to model and coach the behaviours needed from the playing side to achieve their shared vision.

  The war room and the boot room

  People are much more likely to imitate what they observe than to do what someone tells them. If a leadership team wants to inspire high performance among their people, then they must themselves display the behaviours and set the standards they seek. In Allardyce’s war room, he and Mike Ford fashioned a leadership team that modelled what they needed to see from the playing team. Allardyce was especially struck by Ford’s thinking on sports psychology, disputing the then commonly held belief that those who sought it were weak. His commission to Ford was focused primarily on building the leadership team: ‘I told him, “We don’t need you mainly to work with the players – we want you to work with the staff, and we want to build these goals and dreams that we want to aspire to achieve.” We planned it out while we were growing the staff in each department, so everybody understood where they wanted to go in five years’ time, what they wanted to be – collectively and individually.’ As well as planning, the leadership team modelled
renewal and learning. ‘An important piece was looking after their own development. Too often in football the people that work for the players are not in a position to go out and improve the job that they do. I made sure the team were given enough time to go and learn about leadership and other subjects – and they come back refreshed and much revived, instead of the 24/7 that they so easily get sucked into. There is a lack of development in football while you are working at team level: the 24/7 is looking after everyone else, but not looking after yourself.’

  In many ways, Allardyce’s war room is a successor to the famous Liverpool boot room, where successive managers at Anfield somehow combined warmth with mystique, modelling excellence and creating an environment for high performance that spanned a quarter of a century. Keegan recalls that the boot room ‘was nothing to do with the players! It was Shankly, Paisley, and their team. Someone told me – and I believe it to be true – that they had a book in there where they wrote down the training they did every day, every week, before every game and the results of every game. And if they ever lost two games on the trot they went back to look for patterns. I’ve never seen that book though I’m 100 per cent sure it existed. It was kept as a close-guarded secret.’

  The mystique was there all right, but the legendary boot room leadership style was about role modelling and human engagement. Shankly, Paisley, Fagan and many great managers at many great clubs since have led teams around a set of core principles. There is no definitive list, but there are seven that are commonly talked about:

  1. Collective belief

  When Keegan arrived at Newcastle United in 1992, the famous Magpies were in the lower reaches of the second tier of English football – a worrying place for a club of its history and stature. He describes a dangerous downward spiral that had taken place: ‘We had players that didn’t even come through the front door – they were parking their cars at the back and coming in that way. I had to change pretty much everything really. What happens at a football club when things go wrong is people start to punish each other. It’s like “we aren’t staying in hotels any more, they don’t deserve that, we’ll travel down the day of the game, three and a half hours ... We’re not washing the kit any more, they can take it home and wash it ...” This is where Newcastle had got to: some of the players were in black and white stripes and some were in grey and white stripes. The club was pretty much saying, why should we do anything for them when they’re not performing?’ The collective belief had disappeared and the overriding mindset was one of negativity.