The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (2 page)

THE BIG IDEA

Professional football is a crucible. Working inside that crucible, the managers of the 20 Barclays Premier League clubs in England have their leadership publicly examined,
challenged, lauded and ridiculed on a daily basis. Some of us feel we could do a better job if asked. Others stand back in admiration of the great achievers, and cast a sympathetic backward glance
at the ones who look like they’ve failed. But we actually have very little appreciation of the full scope of their work.

The role of a leader in Premier League football is fascinating, complex and tough. Fantasy football leagues may convince us that it’s about buying players and selecting a team. In reality
it is about creating winning environments, delivering on enormous expectations, overcoming significant challenges, handling pressure and staying centred throughout – a set of challenges
familiar to leaders in all sectors.

There are plenty of people with influence around the managers – all of them having or wanting a piece of the action: owners, fans and the general public, media, the players of course, and
now the agents. This massive, global interest in top-level professional football is what sustains the game. But although the influence of these various parties may be welcome – and even
necessary – they pose an ever-present challenge to the managers. So how do the managers cope?

Roy Hodgson is a football manager of considerable international standing. Since his early 20s he has been passionate about coaching and about the global nature of football.
Since beginning his work in earnest in Sweden at the age of 29, he has accumulated and deployed a wide range of experience, leading 16 teams in eight countries over 37 years – including four
national teams (Switzerland, the UAE, Finland and most recently his native England).

In Sweden, he is widely acclaimed as one of the architects of the national game, introducing new thinking and styles with great success in his 12 years at Halmstads BK, Örebro SK and
Malmö FF. At Malmö he led the club to domestic dominance and unprecedented European achievement – even defeating the Italian champions Inter Milan in the European Cup. In
Switzerland, he transformed the national side into genuine performers on the world stage. Under Hodgson they achieved World Cup qualification for the first time in 28 years, Euro qualification in
1996 and, at their peak, third place in the world rankings.

Roy Hodgson’s leadership has since been pressure tested in the toughest of club settings: the Italian Serie A with Inter Milan and the Barclays Premier League with Blackburn Rovers,
Fulham, Liverpool and West Bromwich Albion. Among these, his greatest impact came at Fulham: he joined them in a mid-season relegation battle in late 2007, led them to safety that season, took them
to a club record seventh in the following year and led them to a Europa League final the year after, defeating Juventus and the German champions Wolfsburg along the way. They lost the final in the
last moments to Atlético Madrid. His achievements with Fulham that season saw Hodgson recognised by his managerial peers when he was voted the League Managers Association Manager of the
Year. Previously holding a greater reputation outside his own country than inside, his coaching skills and leadership talent were fully recognised in 2012 when he was appointed manager of the
England national team to succeed Fabio Capello.

His Philosophy

Hodgson is a thoughtful and focused leader who operates along simple and clear lines: ‘The manager is employed to coach a football team. That has to be his primary focus.
So I concentrate for the most part on the team: making sure they are prepared for the challenge ahead. After that it’s about compartmentalising. The owner has employed me; and the fans are
the people whose interest in the game has generated my job and my players’ jobs. We must never lose sight of that, but you can’t work for the fans or even just for the chairman. The
only way you can satisfy both parties is to do your job well and win.’ Simple focus: team first, then each other party in turn, giving them real attention.

But this elegant approach conceals a raft of challenges. What are the realities of life in this high-octane environment? How do the successful managers – Hodgson and others –
practically navigate such difficult territory?

Many Cooks

In business they’re called stakeholders. In football we might call them interested parties. Whatever we call them, they have always been there – since the beginning
of the game there have always been those on the sidelines with an opinion.

A traditional snapshot of the game in say the 1970s would reveal the principal groupings as the chairman, the players, the fans, the press and the public. (There were always the governing bodies
too, but with little direct impact on the daily life of the manager.) Today the groupings are much the same. What has changed is the degree of influence and leverage they have. Take the chairman,
for instance. In a game where cash is often king, the man who holds the purse strings has massive influence. He is, after all, the person ultimately responsible for hiring (and firing) the manager,
and with the rise of the new all-powerful owner, these leaders are becoming public figures in a much more dramatic way than ever before.

Other groupings have also become more powerful in their own right. Top players whose predecessors would nervously approach their manager for a rise now get their agents involved in contracting
stand-offs with millions of pounds at stake. The public who used to confine their conversations to bars and pubs now exert influence through social media. And members of the press, who used to be
the guardians of footballing standards, are now influential enough to get a manager fired. For the managers themselves, this means a tough, multi-layered and often frenetic environment. Never have
the principles of centredness, self-knowledge, handling pressure and personal renewal been so important.

The Centre of Authority

The prevalent model of organisation in the world’s leading football clubs sees the manager as the centre of authority. Hodgson relishes this aspect of the role and
considers it a privilege: ‘The reward for success in our profession as a coach is to reach a position where you are that focal point, where you are the person that everyone – from board
to fans – is looking to for what they all require: a team that wins football matches. You’re the man who has been given the task of producing that team and organising that team –
and it can’t get much more important than that in football. What is more important in a football club than the team that goes out every week and wins or loses? Manchester United today are a
worldwide institution and they sold for hundreds of millions of pounds on the stock exchange. But the bottom line is, it’s still those 13 or 14 players who run out every Saturday in a red
shirt who are the essence of the business. If Manchester United spiral down into the second or third divisions of the Football League, then all of this will fly out of the window irrespective of
how good they are commercially. So Alex Ferguson was a key, key figure, because he was the man who governed the core of the business for so long.’

Sir Alex Ferguson as much as anyone embodied this principle of central authority over the last 26 years at Old Trafford. ‘I always remember starting at Manchester United. [Chairman] Martin
Edwards said to me that the guiding principle of our football club is that the manager is the most important person at Manchester United. Everything is guided by what the manager thinks. There has
never been an occasion in my time that the board has overruled the manager at any point on how you control the football club.’ His great peer and rival in north London, Arsenal’s
Arsène Wenger, goes a step further. ‘I don’t think it can be the future of the manager to have no control, because the quality of the manager is basically determined by the
quality of his control. How can you judge a manager if it is not for the fact that he controls the club? I believe that the manager is a strong guide inside the club. His players must have the
feeling that as well as establishing authority, he has complete control. If the manager is not the most important man at the football club, then why do we sack the manager if it doesn’t go
well?’

Whatever the model of governance in a football club, the manager is invariably the pivotal figure. Hodgson feels the same responsibility applies to the manager of national teams: ‘Managing
a national side brings its own challenges. The most obvious one is that I’m not with the players on the training field every day. I see them less often, and I have a wider selection pool
[it’s not about affordability]. My other big challenge, though, is the different demands on my time. I have time between matches, of course – the question is how best to use it. I like
to give of myself and of my coaching experience to the federation and the country. I believe I should be involved in helping all interest groups through coaching schemes and programmes designed to
produce coaches for the future.’

Whatever is going on – selection, injury, high achievement, low achievement, rumour – chairman, players, media and fans turn to him to make sense of it all. And not only is the
manager key to the business success of the club – but as Hodgson points out, his influence can extend a long way beyond the current team: ‘The manager’s philosophy, if
sufficiently clear and powerful, will filter down not only to his team, but also to other teams at all levels within his club’s structure – and it might actually impregnate the whole
club for a long, long period. We’ve seen lots of examples in the past of iconic football managers whose philosophy has actually led to the club adopting a certain style of football and
projecting a particular image that the club itself is very proud of. This is true of iconic leaders everywhere, of course – great military leaders, great business leaders or political leaders
whose character and philosophy can have a lasting effect on one or more nations.’ Managers who started out as football coaches now find themselves at the very heart of a complex business. The
coach has become a leader.

Gérard Houllier reinforces the point: ‘There was a time when clubs thought that winning on the pitch was enough. Now times have changed and you need to win off the pitch as well
– by which I mean commercially. If the commercial aspect works, the club generates good revenues, and from that flow better facilities, better staff, better players and then again better
revenues for the club. Then it’s important that the technical part is there too – and this is also based upon very good human relationships. I think that a good club is a club that
looks after its players, looks after its people, looks after its employees, its staff and everything. Its human atmosphere is to me the foundation for success. And it is the manager who is at the
centre of that.’ The familiar lesson of putting people first translates directly to organisations in just about every sector and industry; the leader who can focus on his people even in the
whirlwind of wider stakeholder relationships is set up for success.

The Man in the Chair

‘The single most important thing for a manager is the relationship with the owner of the football club.’ So says Tony Pulis, former manager of Stoke City. Is this
simply a case of ‘The man who pays the piper calls the tune’? Or is it that the owner has the potential to disrupt the smooth running of the club? Either way, if the manager can win the
trust of the owner, then he will be given the space and resources to pursue his philosophy. If not, then the owner is likely to intervene. It is, after all, his club. If the authority of the
manager is tested, then it is his relationship with the chairman/owner that will most likely present the greatest challenge.

The rise of the powerful owner

The acquisition of Chelsea in 2003 by Roman Abramovich triggered across a decade a series of high-profile football club takeovers. The emergence of Manchester City as a new
footballing power in Europe has been driven by the Abu Dhabi United Group led by Sheikh Mansour. Similar investments by high-net-worth individuals have taken place at Paris St Germain, Malaga and
elsewhere. Other clubs in the Premier League, while not in the hands of a single individual, are owned by large organisations led by salient people. These owner-chairmen control the flow of funds
around the club, including all that is needed for transfers and salaries. Sir Alex Ferguson represents many who have genuinely mixed feelings: ‘In England, you had a generation of people who
were fans who stood in the stand, and when they became successful their dream was to buy the club. That period looks to have gone and has been replaced by a generation of people coming in with
different motivations. With some of them it is to make money, with some it is for the glory. To have more money in the league is good because you want to be the strongest league in the world. But
it is very important that the structure of the game is not destroyed and that the pressure on salaries does not become ridiculous because the inflation pressure of too much money coming in at one
time can be very destabilising for the players. For example, if a player is paid 1 and then is offered 5 somewhere else, he may want to stay but want 3. So then you go from 1 to 3, and the direct
consequence is that all the other players go up as well – so it puts a huge pressure on the club’s resources.’

As Sir Alex points out, huge sums of money can be destabilising. Yet, for the managers working with the investment, there is clearly enormous potential to create something special. Carlo
Ancelotti describes enjoying the great freedom provided by the new owners at Paris St Germain: ‘The owner recently bought the club and they are changing everything. They changed 12 players.
They have good ambition. We have to build a team, and the club want to be competitive in Europe. This is a very good challenge. The owner is young, very ambitious, very calm, not afraid or worried
if you don’t win a game; he is looking forwards. They are very focused on their objective – to be competitive in the future. This is difficult to explain to the media, because the media
are thinking if we don’t win there is no future. The first season’s objective was to play in the Champions League. Then, in the summer, to buy some players to increase the quality of
the team, to invest money for the next five years and to build the new training ground. The objective is very, very clear. If we win or don’t win it doesn’t matter. This is rare, and I
hope that they will stay focused in this way.’ At PSG Ancelotti and his club’s owners achieved something important, which culminated in PSG winning the French Ligue 1 title at the end
of Ancelotti’s second season in charge: a truly shared vision, shared responsibility for delivering on that vision, and clarity around what success looks like. For a leader, this is extremely
empowering. Because he has both clarity and trust, he can pursue his philosophy with confidence, and without looking over his shoulder. This gives purpose and stability to the organisation as a
whole.