The Player-Manager Balance

What I was saying in that last post about the position of managers in modern football is touched on slightly by Richard Williams in today's Guardian:

"It is their [the players'] game, after all. Nowadays we tend to exalt the top managers – the Fergusons, Mourinhos and Wengers – above those who actually play the game, for the simple media-driven reason that they are not only more rounded characters but the only ones in a position to say anything provocative or even interesting, providing newspapers and broadcasters with the running narrative of a football season."

As a journalist perhaps he places too much emphasis on the media side of the game. I don't think managers are exalted because they say interesting things in the media, because, quite frankly, they don't. Mourinho's "Special One" comment was six years ago now. Last year, when Mourinho won the Champions League again with Inter Milan, he was notably quieter. No, I think managers are exalted not because they say interesting things so much as they just say something. Players are kept away from the media more, and managers have far more license to pontificate. Theirs, after all, is a game of words and thought; they are not actually playing. When they talk to the media or write their programme notes, they are doing their job. Talking to the media is part of that. For the players, it's something slightly different.

This effect of the massive media attention football gets, combined with the rise of sports psychology and greater understanding of the mental side of sport - all sport - I think is the reason managers are scrutinised as much as players are. I've always been suspicious of the school of thought that says "at the end of the day, it's the players' fault", because they go out there, most often, to execute a game-plan conceived primarily by the manager. It is the manager's job to look at his players, look at the opposition, and construct a game-plan that he thinks his players can do with respect to the other team. The England players' reaction to the awful game on Friday reveals this, I think. Their criticisms of Capello - at least the ones that have trickled out through the media - revolve around them having to carry out a plan they feel was the wrong one. It is very notable that once on the pitch they didn't try to change the plan. They gamely carried on, probably aware it wasn't working, but both powerless and ignorant to change it.

Players look to their manager to direct things, and for the most part they follow the plan, especially on the pitch. Off the pitch, as we're seeing, it's a different story. To say it's the players fault, then, disconnects fundamentally the relationship between the manager and the players during the 90 minutes of the game. Far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that the players are on the pitch and the manager not. What needs to be looked at is the operational relationship between the two. What is the balance of power there? A good manager constructs a solid game plan which is all the more solid for building in the flexibility to change it if it's not working. Managers are lucky if they have intelligent players they can entrust with understanding the plan, realising if it's not working and changing it. For the first few years of his time at Liverpool, for instance, this was very much Rafael Benitez's relationship with Xabi Alonso, who was often described as Benitez's "eyes and ears on the pitch".

The real problem, I think, with England at the moment, is that Capello has never had this relationship with any of the players, and so cannot create it now, even if he wanted to, which is doubtful, given his authoritarian stance. That balance between the off-pitch manager and the on-pitch players has been knocked off-kilter, and they are all scrabbling around in the grey area it's created.