Iain Macintosh has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by Century in 2015
First published in paperback by Arrow Books in 2016
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780099599388
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
To Dad
When you said you’d take me to my first game, you offered me a straight choice between Southend United and Colchester United. There wasn’t really a right answer, was there? But thank you for giving me the option and thank you far more for always being there
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was the brainchild of Miles Jacobson, but there are lots of brainchildren of Miles Jacobson these days. The man is a fizzing, crackling bundle of energy who appears to have evolved to a new level of existence where sleep is now obsolete. The eternally ebullient Ciaran Brennan is similarly tireless and redoubtable. By their example, they have both provided immeasurable assistance and inspiration, even if they might not have known it at the time.
Without the initiative and enthusiasm of my publishing director Ben Dunn, this book might never have made it to the shelves. His support throughout the process was invaluable. Ajda Vucicevic’s arrival, like an editorial Dick Advocaat, saved the book in the very late stages when time was running out. Thanks also to Josh Ireland at Random House, who took my words, resisted the temptation to ask how anyone this bad at punctuation could ever have held down a job as a writer, and dutifully made it all look nice.
Some of the stories in this book are familiar, some are more obscure case studies put together from previously published books, but when I wanted something more personal, I was fortunate to be allowed time with a number of figures from football who have lived the sort of lives about which
people like me can only dream. I have huge gratitude and admiration for Tor-Kristian Karlsen, Sean Dyche, Ronnie Moore, Howard Kendall, Nigel Winterburn, Adrian Clarke, Jimmy Case, Jim Bentley, Stewart Robson, Clayton Blackmore and Barry Fry.
I’m very grateful to Jonathan Wilson and Michael Cox, two gentlemen whose specialised knowledge was enormously helpful. Thanks also to Barrie White (not that one) for interviewing Jim Bentley and to Jodie Minter for interviewing Michael Cox. Jodie, Phil Costa and Ryan Kirkman all helped with the research during their brief internships at the small but perfectly formed football website The Set Pieces, and I commend them all to anyone who is in the market for hard-working, intelligent and determined young media types.
Thanks also to everyone at Totally Communications, the digital agency in London that hosts my office, owns The Set Pieces and never comments when I am asleep on the sofa underneath a newspaper.
You can’t write a book without a lot of personal support either. My friends and family have to put up with my moaning and they do it with the patience of saints. I couldn’t have done it without them and I promise I’ll make up for always being too busy to ever leave my office. Thanks particularly to Mum, Dad and Isla.
And, finally, to my beautiful wife, Rachael, and my wonderful daughter, Matilda, thank you for absolutely everything. I love you both very much and I’m very lucky to have you.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PS. General Zod? You’ll notice that I haven’t thanked you. That’s because you’ve been a right twat this year, scratching my arms to ribbons when I try to pick up my newspaper, waking me up in the morning by lowering your anus onto my nose, and generally failing in your duties as a cat. Get it together, or we’ll spend the royalties on a dog.
Iain Macintosh, October 2015
INTRODUCTION
‘We jump up and down like f***ing lunatics for ninety minutes, but it doesn’t have any effect.’
PAUL JEWELL
Why are we so fascinated by football managers? We worship them and we despise them. We lift them up and place them on pedestals, or we stand with thousands of others and we scream at them to get out of our club. We buy their autobiographies with such frequency that their publication is practically an industry of its own. We pore over their every word in long-read broadsheet interviews. Some of us even play immersive simulations of their lives on our laptops. Some of us . . . ahem . . . even write books about the people who play the immersive simulations of their lives on their laptops.
And yet, what is a football manager? Surely he, and you must forgive the use of the masculine throughout this book, for it is the man’s game on which we will focus, is little more than a PE teacher? Few have any academic qualifications of note, save for economics expert Arsène Wenger and Iain Dowie who, with his masters degree in engineering, was quite literally a rocket scientist with British Aerospace before his football career got going.
No, most football managers are just . . . blokes, aren’t they? Blokes who were pulled out of school early to focus on kicking a ball and have now become the bloke who tells other blokes how to kick a ball? Gus Poyet has actual toddler tantrums and kicks water bottles. Harry Redknapp once admitted that he could barely use a mobile phone. Why do we give the respect our grandparents would have afforded to war heroes to men who turn up for work in tracksuits?
Bill Shankly is little short of a god on Merseyside. He is Obi-Wan Kenobi, his spirit reappearing in times of need to urge people to ‘use the Liverpool way’. Sir Alex Ferguson was appointed by Harvard University to instruct America’s burgeoning elite in the art of leadership. A book devoted to the minutiae of Pep Guardiola’s first season in charge of Bayern Munich was painstakingly studied, not just by football supporters, but by other managers searching for hope. When a football manager succeeds, their profile rises to as high a level as any politician, pop star or tycoon.
Barney Ronay’s excellent The Manager: The Absurd Ascent of the Most Important Man in Football explored the way the role of the football manager evolved over the twentieth century: from elaborately mustachioed administrator to pinstriped tactical revolutionary to fur-coated personality and beyond. This book will touch on the past, but will also explore the reality of the present. Who are these people? What has their role become? What can we learn from the past? And what does the future hold?
Today’s football manager is no more a PE teacher than an astronaut is a taxi driver. Coordinating exercise is as much
INTRODUCTION
a part of the football manager’s role as driving a vehicle is for the astronaut. It’s a fraction of what they must do in order to survive.
Today’s elite football manager should, nay, must, be a masterful strategist, an inspired leader of men, an expert in diet, exercise, physiotherapy and personal development. More than that, he must be a skilled politician and an ambassador for the club he represents. He must also have impeccable judgement, not just of talent, but of character too. And then, when all this is done, he must conduct himself immaculately in front of tens of thousands of fans in the stadium and tens of millions of television viewers at home. And may the gods have mercy upon him if he dares to raise an umbrella against the torrential rain. And no, that’s not a metaphor. Just ask Steve McClaren. Football has changed dramatically since the inception of the Premier League. There is so much money sloshing around that the pressures are far greater now than at any time in the history of the game. Once, it was possible for a big team to be relegated and view it only as an embarrassing setback. When Manchester United went down in 1974 under Tommy Docherty, just six years after they’d won the European Cup, the Scotsman kept his job. If they went down under Louis van Gaal, he’d have to go into a witness protection programme. If your success or failure is entirely dependent upon the actions of others, you’ll know that that’s a stressful situation. Now imagine that those ‘others’ are footballers. Overpaid, oversexed man-children who, in many cases, care far more about themselves than they do the team. It’s a wonder that more football managers don’t smoke.
Stress is a relative concept, of course. There are world leaders who are so laid-back that you wonder if they’re reading the security briefings properly and then there are village greengrocers so tightly wound that they’d vanish in a small mushroom cloud if you asked them something complicated during the Saturday rush. Nevertheless, it would be hard to argue that football management is a chilled-out environment for slackers and groovers. It’s hard, unforgiving work with awful hours and intense personal pressure. At the right end of the industry, the money is life-changing. But not many managers ever get to the right end and even fewer are able to stay there.
And yet that never stops us wanting to become one. If you are holding this book now then I know this to be true. If you play Football Manager, then I know this to be true. You have, at some point in your life, imagined yourself in a tracksuit, waving your arms in the air on the touchline. You have held
DID YOU KNOW?
The Premier League has only ever been won by managers who have already won a league title elsewhere. Sir Alex Ferguson had won the league three times with Aberdeen, Kenny Dalglish had won three First Division titles with Liverpool. Arsène Wenger had won the French title with Monaco, José Mourinho the Portuguese title with Porto and Carlo Ancelotti the Italian title with AC Milan. Roberto Mancini had a hat-trick of Serie A titles and his successor at Manchester City, Manuel Pellegrini won titles in Ecuador and Argentina.
INTRODUCTION
a press conference in your head. You have scribbled out a perfect XI on the back of a beer mat. You have told someone, in no small amount of detail, why everything they think they know is wrong. And, of course, why you are right. We are all football managers. It’s just that some of us haven’t been appointed yet.
So what can the real-life football managers tell us about football management? What lessons can we glean from what has gone before to aid us as we battle into the small hours, swearing and cursing as tiny collections of pixels represent us with such spectacular incompetence? You had better read on, my friend. You had better read on.
Iain Macintosh
F‘In
CHAPTER 1: PERSONALITY
this business, you’ve got to be a dictator
or you haven’t got a chance.’
BRIAN CLOUGH
ootball managers cannot be mortal. They must be gods. They must at all times exude an aura of omnipotence and omnipresence. Nothing must get past them, for the first sign of weakness will be mercilessly exploited, both from within and without. Power is not used for fun or for vanity. In football management, power is a weapon that is used by you, or used on you.
Naturally, in this as in so much else, one man stands out imperiously from the crowd. Sir Alex Ferguson used a network of contacts across the city of Manchester to keep tabs on all of his players. And when those contacts told him of indiscretions, he rode into battle. And hell rode with him.
In Ferguson’s first autobiography, Managing My Life, he recalls the night in 1992 when he was told that young blades Ryan Giggs and Lee Sharpe had been spotted out and about in Blackpool when they should have been resting. Ferguson had just seen his team squander the league title to Leeds
United, his players unable to cope with a hideous run of five fixtures in eleven days across May. He made his excuses and drove like Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf to Sharpe’s house.
Ferguson arrived to find a party in full flow with young people all over the place, having fun and doing young people things. Ferguson is not a man who approves of young people doing young people things. Not when those young people play for his football team. He erupted and ordered everybody out of the house, clipping his players on the back of the head as they fled in terror.
A famous story, fondly remembered. Now read it again and imagine that Giggs and Sharpe are electricians and Ferguson is their site manager. Or, if you prefer, you may imagine that Giggs and Sharpe are trainee lawyers and Ferguson is a senior partner. It doesn’t really matter. In no other industry would Ferguson’s behaviour be accepted, never mind applauded. And yet this is the sort of personality that prevails in football. Dominant, aggressive, intrusive. Sometimes more monster than man.
‘It’s not pleasant,’ said David May of the famous Fergie hairdryer. ‘It’s in your face. There’s spit everywhere. Stuff goes flying around the dressing room. No, it’s really not pleasant. If we’d played badly, we’d walk down the tunnel at half time and we just knew it was coming.’
It is the sort of behaviour that is impossible to contrive. You either can pull that sort of thing off, or you cannot. Brian Clough, of course, was a master. Not only did he hit his own players, but when he hit two football supporters who had run
PERSONALITY
on to the pitch during a Nottingham Forest game, they ended up apologising to him on the evening news.
‘Expect the unexpected,’ his former player Tony Woodcock once said. ‘That was the only way to survive. He wasn’t scared of anyone. He was such a strong personality, he’d just do what he wanted.’
Clough had moaning players kicked off coaches and left on central reservations, he fi ned people for not shaving, he made Peter Shilton practise before a cup fi nal in the middle of a roundabout and he made his team run through stinging nettles in bare legs when he was annoyed with them.
Years later, former Forest stars Tony Woodcock and Viv Anderson could still vividly recall how Clough had insisted that the players take off their tracksuit trousers and run fifty yards through overgrown waste ground for no reason other than that he was the boss and he said so. And no one even considered complaining, just in case they angered Clough and he made it 100 yards.
DID YOU KNOW?
The shortest managerial reign of all time is believed to be Leroy Rosenior’s ten-minute spell at the helm of Torquay in 2010. The former West Ham striker, who had previously managed the team for four years between 2002 and 2006, signed his contract and was presented to the media, only to discover ten minutes later that the club had been sold and that the new owners wanted their own man, Paul Buckle, to take over.
