The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders

by Carson, Mike

  André Villas-Boas strives for collective belief by emphasising the equal value of every individual to the team: ‘My European background has taught me that players should be treated equally, because the club is always more important than any single individual player or employee. In the European model, the executive board actually comes to training sessions with the manager, and represents the club with him. I’ve always based my leadership on collective values rather than individual values. At Chelsea and at Tottenham I’ve had to explain that when I encourage the group it’s not because I don’t want to praise an individual – it’s because you want the players to understand that the group is more important than anything. Within that, I want them to understand they are all important. The person who scores the goal and wins the game is only as important as the third goalkeeper who never gets to play – and this value runs very deep for me because it was the way I was educated. Give everything that you have to give for your club, and the club will give everything back to you.’

  2. Selflessness

  In a high-performing team, the players play for one another. Keegan puts it like this: ‘There has to be selflessness. All the top players in teams will tell you that you can’t win European Footballer of the Year on your own. You need five, six or maybe seven good players around you. It’s not an act – you genuinely say thank you for making me be able to score goals. They are working to make each other successful.’

  This applies also to going the extra mile for one another, which for Sir Alex Ferguson is at the very heart of a high-performing team: ‘The essence of a good team is recognising the qualities of each other, and the weaknesses of each other too. And on a given day I always think if eight players are playing well, then you’ve got a great chance of winning the match – and sometimes maybe you’ve got to carry one or two players. To ask or expect a footballer in today’s world to play 50 games a season at 100 per cent performance is impossible – there will always be off days and bad days. Pulling together when that happens is the essence of teamwork.’

  Teamwork is another of Gérard Houllier’s four foundational values. He uses it to guide his players’ approach towards one another and the club: ‘I need to think team first! It’s a collective sport – the team is more important than me. Not just the club, but the team. So that means, “What can I do for the team? How can I do better for the team?”’ It is also Allardyce’s number one value. He very frankly sees teamwork in his playing team as the most crucial contributor to his own success: ‘If you are going to have a long career in this game it’s all about results. It’s not about how much money you make or save. If the results don’t back you up they won’t stand up for you – if the crowd get on your back, you’ll be gone. So it all depends on the players and how they play as a team. So the biggest value that I communicate to the players is how we should come together to be a team to enjoy what we are doing and deal with the pressure and be all in it together. That way we can achieve what we all want to achieve.’

  3. Excellence

  When Keegan arrived at Hamburg as a player, he had a tough beginning. But he was struck by the club’s commitment to excellence: ‘I was 27 years of age and I just relished the challenge. It was massive. Everybody says but you were so successful, and I say the first six months were horrendous. The players didn’t really want to know me. I couldn’t understand why because I couldn’t speak the language, so I couldn’t ask them. The coach was brought in because he could speak English – they didn’t like him and they blamed me for that. I got sent off and suspended for about six matches for punching a guy in a mid-season friendly, and I had to go back and apologise to the guy. Plus I was on a big wage there compared to other players, and the president put it in the papers – here is the guy who will save Hamburg! It was too much about me, and the players just downed tools and said right go on then.

  ‘It wasn’t easy. But I knew I could play, and I knew I would get through once I was given a fair chance. But when you win a battle like that, it’s like a juggernaut – once you turn it around, wow! I learnt the language so I could communicate and have a laugh with them – I could swear at them if I wanted to! Then I saw it was much more professional even than we were at Liverpool, believe it or not ... The players would do anything. Some of our training was ridiculously hard and I think at Liverpool Tommy Smith would have gone in and said, “Hey you’re killing us!” There they just did it. The German players were very disciplined. The players would run through a brick wall for the coach, almost to the point where it took away some of the individual. If the coach says it, it is right. So I got very fit, and we won the championship!’

  4. Motivation

  Excellence becomes in itself a motivation for leaders and their teams. Gérard Houllier is driven by a quest for excellence: ‘If that winning mentality is in you, then once you have won something it becomes like a drug – you want to win again, and again, and again. I remember when I was managing at Lyon and we knew halfway through the season that we had won the title. No team had ever won La Ligue in France with more than 80 points. We managed to do it in two consecutive seasons.’

  For Houllier at Lyon, the classic upward spiral of high-performing teams kicked in. ‘When you win, of course you create an atmosphere: people work hard, they enjoy their work, they work for each other. This is the most thrilling experience. It’s more than just working together – it’s truly working for each other.’ Motivation and selflessness would appear to be closely connected.

  5. Personal commitment

  In a high-performing team, individual commitment to the team is strong. Keegan sees it as one of the great indicators. ‘What’s the commitment? Are they here for the benefit of the team or are they here for the journey? Are they here for the money or do they really want to win something?’ More than this – in a high-performing team, they show it. ‘You sometimes think: “This kid’s not committed,” and then you find three months later actually he is very, very committed; he just hasn’t shown it. [In great teams] players show a bit more – actually state their case why they should be in the team, why they shouldn’t be sat on the bench.’

  Allardyce is single-minded on this issue: ‘The leadership team would sit down and ask, “What does our group look like – staff and players? In the playing team we would have a good number of what we call Players. These are people the leadership can look to, people who will lead others. Then there are the Followers – people happy to commit to the team and go with the Players. But then there would be a couple of Saboteurs. These are the ones we had to be careful about – or else they begin to recruit some of the Followers and cause problems. Generally I am a bit more direct and abrupt with these people. If I find I have one or two recruiting other people, I know I have to get into them to turn them back. Generally the Saboteur is a good player who just has a bit of a problem. Maybe I’ve left him out for a while, or for some reason had a contract fall-out. If you can’t resolve that, you have to get the board to get rid of him as quickly as you can. If you can bring him back, then you are doing OK.’ Keeping everyone committed will prevent these disruptive behaviours.

  6. Clarity

  Great teams have clarity of role and process. Keegan again: ‘Everybody needs to know what’s expected of them, where the parameters are, what they’re expected to do. At Liverpool it was so easy because you knew what you could get away with and you knew what you couldn’t get away with, so you knew exactly what your job was and what your fitness levels should be.’

  They also have clarity around responsibility. Martin Jol encountered an interesting challenge during his time in England: ‘Just recently I told a right-footed player [player R] to play on the left, and a left-footed player [player L] to start in the centre of midfield. I did that with a purpose because player L can be very good on the inside with his left and player R is right-footed so he can change play to the right. And then they changed it from the start! Player R played on the right and player L on the left. So after two minutes I thought w
hat are they doing? If you leave it, if you let it go, you’ve got a problem – they will do it for the rest of the season. So at half-time I said, “Never do that again, OK? If I tell you to play on the left, play on the left. Don’t change it!” And he said, “Yes, but player R prefers to play on the right!” I said, “Everything I do, I do with a purpose. So if I studied the opposition, if I tell you to play on the left, then you play on the left, OK? And maybe at half-time or after a game we can talk about it, and maybe in the next game I could do something else or change it – but never do it on your own, don’t take these sort of decisions.” I don’t want them to take those sorts of decisions. Players are very black and white. If you leave it and if you won’t explain why you are doing things, they will think, “OK, this is a manager where I can express myself,” and that is not want you want.’ The strong leader needs clarity in his message – both in delivering it and in enforcing it.

  7. Positive response to pressure

  Great teams respond to pressure as one. Glenn Hoddle recalls the 1981 FA Cup final where Spurs took Manchester City to a replay. ‘We had to learn from that first match – we knew we had to change. We had a real open discussion from that; we all spoke individually. It was this dream and it was too big. All of us had gone through it and we wanted it so badly. We got there as a team, we played well as a team, but at the big occasion we started to fragment. We all wanted to be the man of the match, and in a team sport that won’t work.’ Spurs took the pressure on board as a team and won the replay 3-2.

  So there they are – seven mindsets and behaviours needed in a high-performing team, football style. All seven need to be both coached and role modelled by the leadership team, though, if they are to take hold and truly create a high-performing team at the front line.

  The High-performing Leader

  The leader of a high-performing team in a complex and changing environment needs to inspire both directly and from one step removed. He can curse complexity, technological innovation and societal change, or he can choose to embrace them. He can be fazed by the scale of his team of staff, or he can create it himself, building trust and leading it to high performance in its own right. In doing so, he can infuse it with his own personality and leverage it to tackle successfully all the challenges that present themselves.

  High-performing leaders create high-performing teams – in football just as in other arenas. While individual priorities vary, most leaders will agree on the four major tasks to focus on:

  1. Understand the nature of the battle and the need for close allies:

  Some will use the war analogy more readily than others, but high-performing leaders recognise the gravity of their task, and happily admit their need for support. In that vulnerability lies a strength that will bring them success.

  2. Create a high-performing leadership team:

  This is a group of close allies – normally not more than eight to ten – in whom the leader has trust. He trusts them to both support him and challenge him, and he knows he can delegate to them in their areas of expertise. They will bear his signature, so he needs to express his character through them. And he may wish to have as part of the leadership team his playing captain, who takes his leadership philosophy right to the front line.

  3. Build the environment for success:

  The leadership team adds real value when it fashions an environment where success is inevitable. It does this by dealing with the pressing issues of the industry in which it is working. In football these include complexity, technology and people; in business these three might translate to strategy, operations, IT and HR.

  4. Create the high-performing playing team itself:

  Finally, a leader’s focus should be on the people at the front line. The leadership team – from their war room, boot room or executive team room – need to model and coach the key behaviours and mindsets they expect to see from those people. In football, these distil down to seven critical principles: collective belief, selflessness, excellence, motivation, personal commitment, clarity and positive response to pressure.

  As with many leadership arenas, football leadership has become a whole lot more complex. But the leader who can use his team of staff to bring simplicity out of the complexity will win the day.

  PART THREE

  Delivering Results

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE FIELD OF PLAY

  THE BIG IDEA

  Leaders establish a way of being in their organisations, through what they think, believe, say and do. They impart some sort of fingerprint – some DNA – that is intimately associated with their character, which drives the behaviours and performance of their people and leaves a clearly defined legacy. Think of almost any society from any era. England of the 16th century, for example, is associated with seaborne trade, commercial flourishing and religious reform. All these were driven by the character of the leader, Queen Elizabeth, and the era is naturally called Elizabethan. But she clearly did not do it all herself.

  Leaders at all levels are judged by the performance of their people. From captains of infantry companies to heads of schools, leaders need their people to perform at the front line if they and their organisation are to achieve their goals. In professional football, nothing is more public or more defining than the team’s results. From technical areas and half-time talks to technical reviews and training sessions, every intervention counts. So how do football’s leaders ensure they inspire their teams to deliver world-class performance on the field of play?

  THE MANAGER

  Roberto Mancini established himself as a 17-year-old attacking footballer at Sampdoria where he won multiple domestic trophies and the club’s first-ever European competition. Fifteen years later he left for Lazio where, under Sven Göran Eriksson, he again won multiple trophies, both domestic and European. As soon as his scoring touch began to desert him, he announced his retirement and moved seamlessly into coaching as Eriksson’s assistant.

  Mancini was an almost instant success as a top-tier manager, winning trophies at both Fiorentina and his former club Lazio, and working with a huge array of world-class talent. At Internazionale, he led the club out of the shadow of their Milanese neighbours, rebuilding the Nerazzurri’s reputation over five years and taking them to an unprecedented three consecutive Italian league victories.

  In late 2009 he accepted the enormous challenge of revitalising Manchester City under the new ownership of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour. His first full season in charge brought an end to a 35-year trophy drought with FA Cup victory, and a first ever place in the Champions League. In his second full season, Mancini went one better and won the Barclays Premier League title after the most dramatic of season climaxes to end the club’s 44-year wait.

  His Philosophy

  Roberto Mancini is a charming man with a core of steel. His philosophy is very straightforward: assemble great players and work extremely hard. By ‘great players’ he means players with both the skill and the mindset needed for the task. ‘I have good players because you can’t win if you don’t have top players. But if you tell me they all look like top players, then I tell you with some we need to work on mentality. You can look like a good player, but not have the mentality to win at the top level.’ And by extremely hard, he means a relentless pursuit of excellence. As his assistant and former Sampdoria teammate David Platt comments, ‘Even winning the league did not alter that. After a break, it was straight back to work.’

  The Dimensions of the Task: Skills and Mindsets

  Roberto Mancini was installed as Manchester City manager in time for the 2009 Boxing Day fixture against Tony Pulis’s Stoke. Presenting an immaculate and calm image, he oversaw a 2-0 victory – and so began his journey to club success. It was not a simple journey though. To begin with, Mancini has some unshakeable views of how a team should work: ‘When I started to do this job I wanted players with good mentality ready to understand my view, my mentality.’ David Platt observes a single-mindedness that alienates the less co
mmitted: ‘He has a very strong work ethic. There is an Italian way of doing things which is professional, strong and committed, and he brought that with him. When he arrived at Manchester City he didn’t say, “Well, I’ll hang around and look and see what’s happening and maybe change the odd thing.” He said, “I am going to come in and do it my way and that’s the way we are going to do it and it’s as simple as that – because in the end, I am responsible for team performance.”’

  Mancini may have felt he knew little of English football, but he wasted no time in getting to grips with the challenge. ‘It was difficult because I didn’t know this championship, I didn’t know the English players, I knew only David. In Italy it is different. I had to adapt a bit to the culture. Sometimes this is not easy and the first six months were difficult because I changed the training sessions, the method of training; and for the players it was also difficult for the first few months. However, in the first six months we improved a lot as a team, and we fought until the last game against Tottenham for the Champions League place.’