Is the cult of the manager over? How English football's power structure changed (2024)

There is no escaping the cult of the manager in English football. From Busby to Ferguson, from Chapman to Wenger, from Shankly to Klopp, from Revie to Clough, from Mourinho to Guardiola, it sometimes feels like one of the last bastions of the 19th-century ‘great man theory’ — as if, to bastardise the words of Thomas Carlyle, the history of English football is but the biography of great men.

Some of the greatest are commemorated with statues outside their clubs’ stadiums: Herbert Chapman and Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley at Liverpool, Sir Matt Busby and Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson at Ipswich Town, Don Revie at Leeds United, Stan Cullis at Wolverhampton Wanderers. These men did not just win hearts, minds and trophies. They shaped eras.

Players are adored, but managers — the truly great managers — are placed on a pedestal. Their modern-day successors are left in no doubt they are standing on the shoulders of giants.

But the cult of the manager isn’t what it was.

We might obsess more than ever about the minutiae of their work — their overarching philosophy, their team selection, their in-game management, their powers of motivation, their public utterances, even their image, dress sense and body language on the touchline — but their expected shelf life and the scope of their work is vastly reduced.

Among the last 10 Premier League managers to leave their jobs, the average tenure was 722 days — a shade under two years. But that figure was inflated hugely by Jurgen Klopp’s almost nine years at Liverpool. Among the 10 before that, the average was just 348 days. How can a manager be expected to shape an era when it has become a battle to last only a year, never mind two?

This hasn’t happened overnight. The power structure within the English game has been changing for two decades. The diversification of ownership models vastly increased financial stakes, heralding a setup that replaces all-powerful managers with head coaches who appear highly expendable in the chain of command from sporting directors to chief executives to owners.

Some are still known as the ‘manager’. Pep Guardiola (Manchester City), Mikel Arteta (Arsenal) and Unai Emery (Aston Villa) were elevated from ‘head coach’ under the terms of a new contract after a successful start to their tenures. Those three are the most powerful, secure figures in the Premier League coaching fraternity. Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag probably does not feel quite so secure, even after signing a new contract last month.

But it isn’t really about job titles. It is about where the power lies within a club. A head coach is expected to excel on the training pitch and in the dressing room. His opinion might be valued in discussions about player recruitment, but he is unlikely to be the one calling the shots on transfers. Ten Hag did so at times in his first two summer transfer windows at United, but new sporting director Dan Ashworth and new technical director Jason Wilcox will now hold sway.

There is no cause to mourn the streamlining of a manager’s responsibilities. It is crazy to think just how recently a top-class coach was expected to lead recruitment (of players and backroom staff alike) and also travel to watch prospective signings and forthcoming opponents, simply because that is how things had always worked. With Ferguson omnipotent at Manchester United, it seemed natural for others to crave the same power and influence at clubs built with a more modern, less autocratic structure in mind.

The post-Ferguson model is more or less universal now but culturally, we are still wedded to the idea that the manager holds the key to everything. If a team is not functioning, it must be down to the shortcomings of the man on the touchline.

The strange thing is that so many clubs operate in that way too.

Chelsea have spent £1billion ($1.27bn) in the transfer market — much of it questionably — since a consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital bought the club two years ago. Over that time, their form has barely got beyond mid-table level. Naturally, the head coaches (Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino) were held responsible for the team’s dysfunction. New appointment Enzo Maresca will hope to be shown more patience.

There has long been a contention in data-analysis circles that the influence of managers/coaches is greatly overestimated, but studies highlight a correlation between financial investment and performance. And when a big, wealthy club have consistently performed below expectations, under a succession of managers, it points to bigger, deeper problems.

In their 2009 book Soccernomics, journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski proposed that only a vanishingly small number of managers have a significant effect on a team’s performance. Szymanski studied the spending of 40 English clubs between 1978 and 1997 and found that spending on salaries explained 92 per cent of their variation in league position — and that was when the financial divide between the top and bottom of the league was nothing like as extreme as it is now.

Kuper subsequently wrote in the Financial Times newspaper that wealth, knowledge and talent are now so concentrated among the Premier League hierarchy that “managers could probably be replaced by stuffed teddy bears” — all 20 of them, presumably, rather than just one — “without their club’s league position changing”. The manager, he wrote, “serves chiefly as a marketing device to fans, media, sponsors and players. As there isn’t much he can actually do, the key thing is that he looks the part”.

Certainly, there are clubs where — usually in a negative sense — the identity of the manager/coach seems to be of little consequence. But there are others where the impact has transformed results and playing style.

There will always be those desperate to demean Guardiola’s record, pointing out the enviable playing and financial resources at his disposal at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and now City. But he is the antithesis of the notion of the manager as a mere “marketing device”. The impact of his coaching is almost impossible to ignore.

Guardiola’s success underlines the value of a top-class coach. So does Klopp’s impact over his nine seasons at Liverpool and the progress Arsenal and Villa have made under Arteta and Emery. Andoni Iraola and Ange Postecoglou oversaw significant changes in playing style after taking over at Bournemouth and Tottenham Hotspur last summer.

Perhaps the most striking example among this crop of Premier League managers is a newcomer.

Ipswich were 12th in League One — the third tier of English football — when they appointed Kieran McKenna, then 35, to his first senior role in December 2021. Two and a half years and two promotions later, they are back in the Premier League, after 22 years away, where McKenna will hope a progressive playing style continues to reap dividends.

If anything, developments over the past decade — the stripping away of managerial responsibilities and the emergence of more sophisticated patterns of play in and out of possession — have increased the importance of coaching. The emphasis on coaching, as opposed to management in the traditional sense of the word, has never been greater.

But it is no longer enough to be a successful coach.

Equally important these days is the ability and willingness to work within a structure and to accept restraints. Many of the game’s most successful managers have been forceful, abrasive characters, but fewer and fewer clubs are willing to put up with confrontation behind the scenes.

In recent months, three of the biggest Premier League clubs found themselves in the market for a new manager/head coach: Liverpool with the departure of Klopp; Chelsea having parted company with Pochettino; United when they actively sounded out replacements for Ten Hag at the end of last season before eventually deciding to stick rather than twist.

Three of the most successful coaches of recent times were on the market too: Jose Mourinho (sacked by Roma in January), Antonio Conte (who left Tottenham by mutual consent in March last year) and Tuchel (whose end-of-season departure from Bayern was announced in February). So was the talented but volatile Roberto De Zerbi, having left Brighton & Hove Albion at the end of the season. United held serious talks with Tuchel and De Zerbi before turning back to Ten Hag, but Chelsea and Liverpool were not interested.

Liverpool didn’t give Mourinho or Conte a second thought either. They gave more consideration to De Zerbi but discounted him partly due to perceived stylistic issues and partly on account of his well-documented differences with Brighton’s owner and upper management last season. Their choice of Arne Slot was based primarily on his ability as a coach and perceived similarities with Klopp, as well as some interesting points of difference, but also on his willingness to work within a successful structure at previous employers Feyenoord rather than cause the type of friction De Zerbi had brought to Brighton.

Chelsea’s situation was different. Having quickly gone through Tuchel, Potter and Pochettino (as well as Conte, Mourinho and others before that), they wanted a different approach — but their choice of Maresca (14 first-team matches in charge of Parma in Italy in 2021 and then 53 at Leicester City last season) and the serious consideration they gave to McKenna (131 matches at Ipswich) and Thomas Frank (almost 400 matches as a club coach with Brondby of Denmark and now Brentford, but lacking elite-level experience) hinted at a preference for a certain profile — not necessarily a ‘yes man’ but someone who might prove more amenable than Pochettino and, particularly, Tuchel.

The difficulty is that when a club have been as resistant to improvement as Chelsea over the past few years, it suggests that — as Sir Jim Ratcliffe said of United after he bought a stake in the club at the start of 2024 — the fundamental issue has been one of “environment” rather than specifically the coach. United have made extensive changes behind the scenes this summer, but have stuck with Ten Hag. By contrast, Chelsea have rolled the dice by appointing yet another new head coach, seemingly without stopping to question the wisdom of their player recruitment strategy.

This is the great contradiction about modern football: the way decision-makers at so many clubs treat coaches and the art of coaching so casually, expecting a steep upturn in results but then casting them aside quickly if it doesn’t come or if, having come at first, it is not sustained.

Managers and coaches have never been more vulnerable or expendable. Slot has good reason to believe he will be given time at Liverpool, where he has signed a three-year contract, but Maresca will know that a five-year contract at Chelsea comes with no guarantees of patience, given Potter was sacked in April last year just seven months into a deal of similar length.

Equally, it is hard to imagine a one-year extension to his contract gives Ten Hag a feeling of total security, having been left in limbo while Tuchel, De Zerbi, McKenna and others were sounded out about replacing him.

There is still a tendency to look at United managers through the prism of what Busby and Ferguson achieved and to imagine that Ten Hag, for example, might restore the Old Trafford empire to its former glories if only he is afforded the same time and patience Ferguson was during his difficult early years at the club in the late 1980s.

But the cult of the manager is losing its undoubted appeal.

We have never been more fascinated by everything they do, but fewer and fewer of them are granted the time to build anything. Just as Ferguson (27 seasons at United) and Wenger (22 at Arsenal) are now looked upon as the last of their kind, perhaps Klopp (nine at Liverpool) and Guardiola (about to begin his ninth at City) might come to be seen in similar terms.

Nine years seems like an eternity in modern football.

Arteta and Emery might have empire-building designs at Arsenal and Villa, but such talk is a long way off. Eddie Howe has already publicly questioned whether the foundations of his regime at Newcastle United are as strong as he had thought. The club’s recent resurgence under Saudi Arabian owners has been built primarily on Howe’s vision and the relationships he has built, but, after a summer of boardroom upheaval, he has appeared aware that the sands might be shifting under his feet.

That is the thing about the modern game. The ‘great man theory’ of English football history persists. But the culture and conditions behind it have changed beyond recognition.

Before joining The Athletic as a senior writer in 2019, Oliver Kay spent 19 years working for The Times, the last ten of them as chief football correspondent. He is the author of the award-winning book Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football’s Lost Genius. Follow Oliver on Twitter @OliverKay