Unpicking the gaffer
Posted on | August 18, 2009 | No Comments
Barney Ronay is already familiar to many English football fans through his work for the Guardian newspaper and the magazine When Saturday Comes.
He is also an author, and his latest effort, The Manager – the absurd ascent of the most important man in football, is out later this month.
But what has inspired this literary waltz through through the smokey clutter of the upstairs offices?
Thankfully the author himself took time to answer some of my questions on why the gaffer has indeed become the most important man in the game.
Q: Why a book now about the role of the manager in the game? Do do you feel we’ve now reached a significant point in the development of the job?
A: Yes, I think we’re pretty much at fever pitch with managers. It’s a peculiarly British obsession too. From the 1920s and the era of Herbert Chapman, through the 1960s when these huge, iconic socialist hero-type managers emerged – your Busbys, Steins, Shankly and even Clough – we’ve had this fixation with personality and magnetism over more mundane things like coaching and teaching nine-year-olds how to trap a ball properly. It’s a fascinating thing, but it’s also self-defeating.
One issue which is inescapable in England at the moment is the rise of the continental-style directors of football and the influence they have over managers. Why have so many clubs in England begun to dabble in this trend?
I think we’ve probably seen the absolute peak of the powers of football managers in this country. Graham Taylor told me he had the power in 1985 to fire any employee at his football club. He was pretty much the most important person in the town.
That kind of power is on the wane at the top level: billionaire owners, plc structures, directors of football, it’s all undermining British football’s bizarrely top-heavy power structures, which until very recently had more in common with a late-Victorian jam factory.
There is great resistance to the director of football here. But you can see why. Managers have had absolute power for too long. They don’t want to work as part of a team. It’s seen as dilution of that essentially British way, the idea that only one man can build a club and a team, the Chapman, Busby, Shankly Clough template.
Managers now face their private lives ending up in the papers as well as their successes and failures in the job – does this reflect a change in the behaviour of managers or more a change in the behaviour of the media?
To be honest this started in the mid-1970s, when the cosy close-knit club of football reporters began to find itself infiltrated by more mainstream tabloid news hacks.
Managers had already become famous in this way by then: Malcolm Allison married a Playboy bunny and was sacked by Crystal Palace after taking a soft porn actress into the team bath. Tommy Docherty was sacked by Manchester United in 1977 for becoming romantically involved with the wife of the team physio (they’re now married: Docherty and the wife, not the physio). Managers have been fair game for the tabloids ever since.
Another more modern trend appears to be the number of managers who end up finding success in charge when they had at best mediocre careers on the pitch – will we one day see a ‘career manager’ who has barely had any professional football playing time but who has more deliberately trained for a career as a successful manager?
We already have got this: look at the top four clubs in the Premier League: all four have been recently managed by men with disappointing or largely non-existent professional playing careers.
If you ask Jose Mourinho about this he will reply that it makes absolute sense: “more time to study”. Other will say that being a manager is such a stressful business, such an unpleasant and debilitating job, you need to be driven in a way ex-players with successful careers behind them perhaps aren’t.
Mourinho and Sven Goran Eriksson certainly trained to be a manager from a young age and both have been remarkably successful.
A fair few managers are known to have short fuses and many have let fly at journalists – Joe Kinnear’s “you’re a c” performance at Newcastle last season springs to mind – have you ever got into a similar row with a manager through your job and what happened?
I was once lightly jostled by Nigel Pearson at Stamford Bridge, but I think it was an accident. He was walking around a corner quite quickly. To be honest the Kinnear incident was very unusual. Normally that kind of talk is reserved for the players.
There seemed to be a real lack of decent English candidates who fit the bill before Fabio Capello finally stepped into the England manager’s job – is it fair to say there’s a bit of a shortage of English managers who are good enough for the top jobs and why might this be?
It’s hard to put your finger on why there are so few capable English managers. Many reasons really: English football isn’t tactically geared in the way other nations are. It seems logical that Holland should produce more coherent coaches than England.
Plus there’s fashion: foreign managers have been very much in vogue for over a decade and in the global market of the Premier League there is no reason why a single nationality should dominate. When you’ve given yourself over so completely to importing talent you might also ask why there aren’t more Norwegian managers or German managers.
Certainly there is a shortage of top class English managers. The Euro 96 generation of players have been quite disappointing so far (Gareth Southgate, Paul Ince, Tony Adams). Stuart Pearce is disturbingly close to the England manager’s job. No Cloughs or even a Venables on the horizon just yet, but these things are no doubt cyclical.
Finally, you’re a successful sports journalist – but if you were given the chance, would you willingly manage a top-flight club given all you’ve encountered to date?
Yes, I’d do it in a shot. Although, I’d probably also be sacked within the first three weeks after “losing the dressing room” and, probably, bursting into tears under the sheer unrelenting pressure. But I would at least have insisted on a Sven-style multi-million pound golden goodbye in my contract.
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So what’s the book like? Well for those who aren’t familiar with Barney’s style all you need to know is that he once suggested we force Cristano Ronaldo to leave England by getting him to an airport and “scrawling ‘disco with orange women’ in ballpoint over the ‘Madrid’ bit on your Ryanair Dustbin Class boarding passes”.
In The Manager he takes us on a journey of how we got from quiet, moustachioed trainers to the modern era, where an older guard mix it with a new breed which smell of “homogenised international luxury: factory-fresh leather upholstery, executive grooming, private beach and high-end gastronomy”.
From the dawn and death of Herbert Chapman to the nadir of Ruud Gullit and his clothes line, Ronay entertains and informs in equal measure. I defy anyone to get through it without both laughing out loud several times and learning something useful about the cult of the man who takes up the hottest seat at a football club.
-The Manager: the absurd ascent of the most important man in football, is out later this month (published by Sphere £12.99)
-Barney Ronay is also presenting an online documentary for The Guardian on the history of the football manager. In the first of a six-part series, he looks at how Herbert Chapman transformed the role of the football coach.
Tags: Barney Ronay > The Guardian > The Manager > When Saturday Comes
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