The Day of the Cheap Manager is Over!
February 28th 2008 03:46
Players are earning millions a year, so it is wholly justified that the men, who often carry the weight of an entire club on their hopefully broad shoulders, should also be in the money. They live by the sword and die by the sword more than any other position in football and should definitely be rewarded as such.
That said, what passes as a successful career manager in today's game isn't exactly what it says on the tin.
Today's career path for aspiring managers inevitably begins on the pitch and players have a direct line to the comfortable seat in the dug out. I've never quite understood this. The two jobs are entirely dissimilar and demand entirely different personal and professional traits for success. Great managers are not automatically bred from the best players. The likes of Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger, Sven Goran Eriksson and, to a lesser extent, Alex Ferguson, all enjoyed limited playing careers, yet went on to be amongst the most successful football managers of the moden era.
Yet one of the largest clubs in England, Newcastle United, was expected to willingly hand over the reigns to the completely untested Alan Shearer. To their credit they didn't, but Shearer has also been linked to the England job. The England job? For him even to mentioned, without being immediately followed by a cheeky snigger, is proposterous.
Great players do not necessarily make great managers - Brian Robson being an excellent example. He was practically begged into management by a whole host of decent outfits, each one sure that his battling spirit on the pitch would perfectly translate to his role as gaffer. This wasn't the case. Robson has merely ranged from mediocre spend-thrift to clueless buffoon (and is still going strong by the way).
Instead of aggressively hunting down a manager of pedigree and proven ability the clubs want that magical, yet ulitmately pointless, factor... the 'big name'. And nine times out of ten they end up paying for it.
For example, long gone are the days when a large European outfit would give the nod to a manager who has proven his worth in the lower leagues, though when you see David Moyes' Everton climbing to fourth spot you wonder whether this might well be the way to go. Yet Graeme Souness is still being courted to this very day. It makes no sense.
The problem obviously lies in the narrow time frame that managers are now given in which to bring success to the club. It is not unheard of for a manager to last less than six months in a role. Six months! Is this really long enough for a manager to truly call the team his own? I don't think so.
Chelsea, it seems, are the next big club to be looking for a new manager and the usual names are popping up; Marcelo Lippi, Frank Rijkaard, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Jurgen Klinsmann, et al.
But is this really the way to go for them? Especially as, given the right price, they could probably get Liam Daish from the mighty Ebbsfleet United.
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