Musa Okwonga has practised both law and football, with the emphasis on the latter. He won the Junior Bridport Prize for fiction in 1994, for poetry in 1995, and the WH Smith Young Writers competition a year later. His first book, A Cultured Left Foot, was longlisted for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. He lives in East London.
The necessary skills to be a great gaffer
First published in Great Britain in 2010
by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com
This eBook edition published in 2010
Copyright © Musa Okwonga 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 308 6
Introduction
Obsession
Vision
Case study 1
Presence
Strategy
Case study 2
Communication
Empathy
Luck
Diplomacy
Resilience
Bibliography
Index
Without the time, guidance and inspiration of the following people, I could not have written this book:
Vic Akers, Duncan Alexander, Guillem Balague, George Borg, Dr Sue Bridgewater, Terry Brown, George Carney, Greg Demetriou, Dr Dorian Dugmore, Mark Ellingham, John Faulkner, George Foulkes, Professor Bill Gerrard, Henry Gregg, Brent Hills, Miles Jacobson, Barry McNeill, Kirti Mandir, Gabriele Marcotti, Professor Ron Maughan, Wilson Okwonga, Raí Oliveira, Paul Simpson, Graham Turner, Andrew Wainstein, Jim White, John Williams and Gianfranco Zola.
I would like to thank my editor Pete Ayrton at Serpent’s Tail; my agent Heather Holden-Brown and Elly James at HHB Agency; and Gianluca Vialli, for going the extra mile.
Will you manage?
Seriously, if you stepped down there, right now, would you be able to do it better?
How hard can it be? you’re asking yourself. Go on, admit it. You think you’re smarter. You think you could do a better job than he has. You’re staring at that supposedly world-class manager sitting on that bench. Then you’re staring in disbelief at the team that he’s selected. Then you’re staring back at him, your disbelief increasing all the while. How is it – who is he – that he’s been given the chance to get these tactics so wrong?
The worst thing is that he doesn’t even look that special. There’s nothing about his appearance which reassures you that he’s on a higher intellectual plane than you, that makes you think, “Actually, you know, he’s a genius. He’s an Einstein sort of fellow.” There’s no wild streak of silver in his hair that marks him out as a maverick in the style of, say, the boxing promoter Don King; his posture as he watches the game unfold before him is far from imperial.
In fact, he’s stern and stiff. His shoulders are hunched so far inward that it’s as if they’re trying to headbutt each other, whilst his shoulder blades are jutting almost visible stab wounds out of the back of his puffer jacket. When he stands and wanders about, he doesn’t look like a sergeant marshalling his troops about the pitch. Nor does he look professorial, as is so often claimed. He looks like – like – like a commuter. Like that guy who’s standing in front of you in the queue at a quarter to nine at the coffee place just outside your office. Like the guy on the other side of the street, who may or may not beat you to the taxi that you’ve both just flagged on that long, cold, wet night. You’re thinking: he doesn’t look like all that. I’m smarter than he is.
Or, at least, that’s what I was thinking; that I was smarter than him. It was 15 November 2008, and he was Arsène Wenger. He was the manager of a club whose first eleven had just defeated Manchester United, the reigning English and European champions, by two goals to one in one of the finest matches in recent years; manager of a club whose second eleven, with an average age of around twenty, had decimated full-strength Premier League and Championship opposition in the last two rounds of the Carling Cup, firing nine goals without reply. What’s more, on his way to one of three English league titles, he’d led his team undefeated through an entire campaign; his Invincibles, as they became known, won twenty-six and drew twelve of their thirty-eight matches in the 2003–04 season.
But that was three Frenchmen and a stadium ago: Thierry Henry, Robert Pirès and Patrick Vieira had moved on from Arsenal, and Arsenal had moved on from Highbury. Four years later, during as half-hearted an autumn as the Met Office can remember, I was sitting on high in the Emirates stadium, directly above Wenger, as if in judgement on his efforts. There was a storm somewhere up in those off-colour clouds that couldn’t decide whether to break loose; and neither could Arsenal. With the exception of Theo Walcott, whose every sprint summoned excitement in the hearts of the most apathetic of corporate guests, there was no one else in the team who looked like troubling the speed cameras. Now, it wasn’t like Arsenal weren’t quick: Bacary Sagna and Gael Clichy were as rapid a pair of full-backs as you could find anywhere. It’s just that there was an alarming lifelessness about their play; and, though Wenger didn’t know why it was going wrong, I knew all too well.
Who was I? Well, I was managing a team of my own. Whilst Wenger’s Arsenal was fourth in their Premier League, I was faring somewhat worse in mine; in the FA’s fantasy football version of the top division, as the coach of “Frail Madrid”, I was down in 253,585th place, out of a total of 1,726,943 players. However, I’d experienced extraordinary success in another format of this game. During one season of the football game Championship Manager, I took charge of Parma and I defeated Real Madrid 8–0 in the UEFA Cup. Away from home. Yes, that’s right, eight goals plus a clean sheet; and I did it in the valley of the shadow of the Santiago Bernabéu itself, where many a proud defensive record has met a grisly end.
And what did I know that Wenger didn’t as I sat above him, my sense of smugness wrapped around me as tightly as my cardigan? Well, I knew that he should have brought off Nicklas Bendtner, what, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen minutes ago?… – Seventeen. – Eighteen. I knew that Samir Nasri was not the new Robert Pirès. Yes, he scored vital goals, as had his fellow Gaul; recently, and painfully, he’d scored twice against my team, Manchester United, in that aforementioned 2–1 victory. But he was too small, you see; when he wasn’t scoring goals, he wasn’t a sufficiently physical factor to justify his position as a starter for Arsenal. And there was Denilson next to him, the stiletto-thin Brazilian, who looked equally bewildered… And Bendtner was still on the pitch; still; Wenger should have brought him off, what, nineteen, twenty minutes ago…
If you’re as sure in your football opinions as I was when judging Wenger, then the chances are that you’ve got the essence of a great manager in you. An element of greatness in this job, after all, is the guts to stand firm in the face of opposing views from players, coaching staff, fans on post-match phone-ins; and Wenger, having spent some years coaching in Japan, was possessed that evening of an appropriately Zen-like concentration. As he would tell the Daily Telegraph some weeks later, “When you are focused you sometimes don’t even notice the rain.”
Of course, there’s more to greatness than being superbly stubborn; there are several other gifts you’ll need in order to amount to a Marcello Lippi, a Jock Stein, or a Rinus Michels. So many more, in fact, that we’ll look at many areas in which successful bosses must excel. Should you wish to emulate them, you must not only have a clear and compelling vision for each club that you join; you must also, through fine man management, be able to carry it out. You’ll need to be abreast of the latest training techniques, and to have the last word in tactical innovation. All the while, you should be well versed in – or, at least, well aware of – the machinations of club politics, so that you’ll be able to negotiate the dense web of egos and vested interests that manifest themselves at boardroom level. Finally, fundamentally, you should be able to handle the media with consummate confidence.
We’ll get to those matters later. For now, though, we should ask ourselves how we’ve come to this place, where we dare so regularly and so ruthlessly to question the methods of these exalted managers: and we should ask ourselves whether we’re at all responsible, because they’re becoming more and more of an endangered species with every passing season. Research conducted by Dr Sue Bridgewater at the University of Warwick has shown that, in the Football League, the average tenure of a manager was 2.7 years in 1992; by 2005, it had dropped to 1.7 years. By any measure, that’s an eye-catching decline; and an American writer has come as close as anyone to explaining it.
In The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell, the social scientist and best-selling author, argues that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do”. Further, he notes that there are three characteristics that enable such a spread. As Gladwell explains: “These three characteristics – one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment – are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the three, the third trait – the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic movement – is the most important… The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point… the Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”
There was a tipping point in the early nineties, after which football managers came under more scrutiny than ever before. At this moment, there was a perfect storm, where three powerful fronts came together. There was Sky’s acquisition of a multi-year monopoly over Premiership TV rights; there was the arrival of the computer game, Championship Manager; and there was Fantasy Football League, the programme that took football analysis fully mainstream.
The impact of Sky TV was to create, in the form of programmes such as Soccer Saturday, twenty-four hour coverage of football. Every last transfer rumour and tactical switch was analysed to the point of tedium, and then far beyond; there could now be no respite for the beleaguered boss. Within a couple of years Championship Manager, the virtual football management game, established itself as a recreation of Class A addictiveness.
And then there were Frank Skinner and David Baddiel who came from an unacknowledged netherworld between two types of man. Before these two comedians co-hosted Fantasy Football League, an irreverent and hilarious look at the professional game, male football fans had only really come in two types; publicly, at least. There was the geezer – the boozy, laddish type who only ever seemed to roam around town with clones of himself. And then there was the geek.
The geek felt it his mortal duty to stash in his memory any stat ever produced by the beautiful game. The geek was in a difficult position when he hung out in the vicinity of geezers. He was smarter than they were and could talk them under the table when it came to tactical chat, but he wasn’t as cool. Meanwhile, the geezers felt similarly awkward. Here was this smart-aleck whom they could comfortably drink under the table, but – though hugely irritating to be around – actually had expertise that they greatly envied. And so this uncomfortable state of affairs continued until Skinner and Baddiel came along, who were half-geezer, half-geek.
For the first time, you had two world-class comedians whose sole brief was to lacerate the football world, week in, week out. Gladwell has written – contentiously, it must be noted – that “social epidemics [are] driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people”, and that’s what, in this instance, Skinner and Baddiel were: the former had a Masters degree from Warwick University, and the latter had a double-first from Cambridge. Within football, it was now officially cool to wield your intelligence as proudly as your sixth pint of Guinness.
Fans were now liberated to infuse even the most drunken pub conversations with a fresh and scholarly nuance. Socrates the philosopher was referred to as readily as Socrates the player. Football men have never been the quickest to laugh at themselves, and early on several noses were put memorably, if cruelly, out of joint. In response, Sheffield United’s Dave Bassett referred to Baddiel and Skinner darkly, if accurately, as “comedians”. Ian St John, who had previously hosted a hit show of his own with Jimmy Greaves, commented that “all they were doing was taking the piss. Anyone could do that. They had no ideas.”
St John’s criticism was unfair: the “Phoenix from the Flames” segment of the show, in which Skinner and Baddiel recreated great goals of the past with the aid of the original players – now retired, and a very long way from fitness – was genius. But that’s moot. Thanks to Sky, Championship Manager and Fantasy Football League, you could now endlessly watch, coach and mock your favourite players; and you could forever second-guess the decisions that their managers made. Losing 2–0 to Villa? You’d never have done that. Why, just last night you were playing Villa on your PC, and you thrashed them 4–0 with your reserve side. And so on, and so forth. All of a sudden we weren’t criticising football managers from the comfort of our armchairs, which we’d always done before; now, we were actually on the bench with them.
What was all of this doing to managers? Not much good, as it turned out. I spoke with Dr Dorian Dugmore, at the Adidas Wellness Centre; Dr Dugmore and his team currently work with 120 current or former Football League managers, including “all but three or four” of the Premier League bosses. At the Centre, they offer “an holistic service, ‘Fit to Manage’,” which assesses each patient for heart, cancer and other lifestyle risks. Dr Dugmore compared the lot of a football manager to that of any eminent corporate figure, noting crucially that “the big difference, really, is very often media attention. Chief executives of big companies, of which we have many on the programme, have similar stresses and pressures, but what they don’t have is the massive media attention on everything that they do. You open the paper in the morning, it’s there; you walk out the front door, and the cameras are snapping. It’s there all the time.”
The average working week of a Premier League football manager was “easily” 80 to 100 hours, and often more, said Dr Dugmore. “The average Premiership manager,” he related, “can easily work that, looking at players, looking at other teams’ performances… they’ll eat fast food out of motorway cafes, they’ll skip meals, they’ll go to bed late… the body has to sleep. It needs time to repair, to recuperate. And if you’re constantly changing the demands you’re making on the body, and on the heart particularly, then eventually there’s a price to pay for that.” What kind of price, I wondered?
“We’ve heart-tested 120 managers,” he replied, “and between 40 and 50 per cent of them have cardiovascular risk factors that need to be addressed.” If not, they were likely to end up like Johan Cruyff, Graeme Souness and Gérard Houllier, who had heart operations involving a good few bypasses between them. Following this bracing conversation, I contacted Dr Sue Bridgewater, who in addition to her research also directed the Certificate for Applied Management in Football, a course whose alumni included Mark Hughes, Stuart Pearce, and Paul Ince. She sounded equally concerned about this predicament.
“What does always strike me is the human cost,” she remarked. “I remember one of the Premier League managers saying to me, ‘When we win, I feel relieved. Normally, on match day morning, I feel sick.’ And you think of that pressure they’re putting themselves under. You can get on the pitch and kick a ball when you’re a player, but as a manager once [the players] cross the line there’s not a lot you can do, and you know you’re going to be held accountable.”
“When you see them go through what they go through,” she continued, “I don’t see why anyone would want to be a football manager… Part of my introduction now [to the course] is to say, ‘This is a huge step. Look at this. Be aware that if you go into this, you’re going to be sacked, it’s going to be painful, and ask yourself a question: Do you want to do this? If so, fine, we’ll help you as much as we can.’” I was speaking to Dr Bridgewater on the telephone, but I could almost hear her shrugging at the end of the line. Why, to her apparent exasperation, were football managers drawn to the profession like lemmings to the brink of a cliff? Why did they seek out careers in which most were doomed to fail?
But, in playing the catcher in the rye, Dr Bridgewater was asking the wrong questions. As the old saying goes, “Man cannot reason himself out of that which he did not reason himself into.” There’s a very large group of people who don’t understand why people are obsessed with football; there’s an even larger group of people, like the respected academics and physicians above, who don’t understand why anyone would want to manage a football team, real or virtual. Both of those groups include managers themselves. They recognise it as both a calling and a compulsion, a profession with which, whether or not it rewards them, they must make peace.
After all, being a manager is partly about preparing yourself for a lifetime of being second best; of suiting up for a drama in which you’re more likely than not to end up as the punchline. The thought of those managers lining up only to be knocked down has something of a tragic romanticism about it; and since no one has ever really done tragedy like the ancient Greeks, it’s probably best to turn to them.
“Greek tragedy” is a phrase that’s often used in connection with sport, but too rarely dissected; it’s like one of those slightly curveball expressions that someone throws into casual conversation, like esoteric or quixotic, and in order to keep up with the intellectual Joneses you nod politely as if you know what they’re talking about. But in reality you’re not quite sure. I always thought that, in sport, the prime example of Greek tragedy was where someone – like, say, the disgraced Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson – was undone by a flaw in their character, a little like Icarus getting cocky and flying too close to the sun with his wax wings.
But that’s not totally correct; there’s a subtle difference. The true Greek tragedy, says Aristotle in his Poetics, is a situation where an imperfect but essentially decent guy makes a terrible but understandable mistake, or hamartia; an honest mistake, not one linked to the deepest fault lines in his ego, but a simple and spectacular miscalculation. As Aristotle writes, the misfortune would typically befall “the sort of person who is not outstanding in moral excellence or justice; on the other hand, the change to bad fortune which he undergoes is not due to any moral defect or depravity, but to an error of some kind.”
A Greek tragedy, on this analysis, was Kevin Keegan’s hamartia to return as Newcastle United’s manager in January 2008. In fact, so Greek was Keegan’s return that it made me think of Dr Spence.
Dr Spence was my GCSE history teacher, and we had a big disagreement once, which was mainly to do with the fact that he was brilliant and correct, and that I was conceited and wrong. It was nothing vocal; nothing heated; I doubt he even remembers it. It was to do with an essay that I wrote about World War I, in which I argued that, after a certain point, the outbreak of that conflict was inevitable. When I received the essay back, I saw a few short, red slashes through the word “inevitable”, and Dr Spence’s explanatory comment that “Nothing is inevitable in history. At most, things are only increasingly probable.”
Well, I didn’t have his phone number to hand and I hadn’t seen him in years, but I would gladly have told Dr Spence that Kevin Keegan’s acrimonious departure from St James’ Park was as inevitable as it gets: as inevitable as an England batting collapse in the mid-1980s, inevitable as the Rolling Stones doing just one more tour. So mercurial and impulsive had Keegan been in his managing career, suddenly walking away from the England job in 2000 because he felt that he couldn’t do it justice, that you expected something incendiary to happen. The best summary of Keegan’s appointment came, via email, from a friend of mine:
Isn’t it great though? Football should be entertaining… I’m a relatively chaste individual. I am normally sober, I don’t take drugs, I stay faithful to the missus. I will take my footballing pleasures where and how I will. This is the footballing equivalent of a carefree quickie with an old flame…it’s probably not the best idea in the world and it likely won’t last forever, but it keeps the heart pumping and keeps out the cold for a while.
Keegan departed, in duly acrimonious fashion, only eight months later (but, it must be said, with his dignity perfectly intact). In many ways, football managers such as Keegan have become our fall guys; and in the midst of all this it’s important for managers, and their advocates, to restate the difficulty of what it is they do. Great management, after all, is an act of craftsmanship, a mastery of many disparate trades. In a 2007 interview with The Times, the then Derby manager Paul Jewell quoted a mentor of his who had advised him that “to be a manager, you’ve got to be a boss, a friend, a money lender, a marriage guidance counsellor – the only thing you haven’t got to be is a gynaecologist. But then again, you’re dealing with c**ts every day!”
Jewell (to tabloid delight, inevitably) would eventually fall upon hard marital times of his own, but his point still holds true. A strong shout in favour of the Championship Manager (now known as Football Manager) series of games is that they have shown millions of players the exceptional complexity of managerial life – and the attendant neuroses that it produces. The buying, the selling, the fact that you’ve got to massage the egos of thirty squad players at the same time even though you’ve only got one pair of hands; the tactics, the contract tussles… it’s a discipline that demands total immersion, and which all too regularly gets it. I can confess that, whilst at law school, I played an edition of this game so intensely that it gave me a severe warning – at the end of one particularly long session, it advised me in you-naughty-boy italics to Remember that there is an outside world.
Football management is a profession of often overwhelming loneliness. Sir Alex Ferguson, not typically regarded as the most sensitive of souls, has commented that “as a manager there are a lot of moments in every week when you feel very much on your own. People don’t want to knock on your door because they think you’re busy all the time when the truth is you can be sitting there twiddling your thumbs. You can fill your time by phoning other managers but there are a lot of hours spent on your own.”
Let’s be grateful, then, to Football Manager; because it allows us, to some degree, to empathise with the greats. All those hours of joyous isolation spent craned over a PC give us a taste of the real thing; the mounting euphoria as you plot your way through each round of the cup, or the gathering dread as you spiral, slowly and surely as a sycamore seed, down the league table; and then you save the game, turn that computer off, and you’re sitting there with no one; and by now, it’ll be so late that the whole world is still, and you’ll lie there with dry eyes, dry throat and the echo of an empty gut, so consumed by that cruel injury to your number 10 or that last-minute equaliser away at Roma that you’ve forgotten to feed or water yourself for endless hours.
And then you’re there, knowing what it feels like to manage. Having sunk yourself into the onrushing thrill of it all, you’ve now thrust your head back out above the crashing surf, and seen that everyone’s sailed on without you. There’ll be the missed calls, the cancelled dates, the cold dinners. And, sooner or later, you’ll sink yourself back in.
As I’d looked down there at Wenger, he’d clearly sunk himself back in; he was in a strange kind of solitude, sixty thousand people watching as he tied himself up in his thoughts. For his own sake, you hoped that he wasn’t feeling too adrift. John Caccioppo and William Patrick, in their book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, note that “Social isolation has an impact on health comparable to the effect of high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity, or smoking.” They continue: “To measure a person’s level of loneliness, researchers use a psychological assessment tool called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a list of twenty questions with no right or wrong answers.”
I wondered if, in their darker moments, football managers might ever consider taking the UCLA test. It’s pretty short and simple; the kind of thing that they can easily complete on the coach ride home from that 5–0 annihilation at Chelsea, or the morning after that televised press conference in which they ranted about everything from the Cup draw to the breakdown of the family unit. The UCLA test includes faintly ominous enquiries, such as “How often do you feel that your interests and ideas are not shared by those around you?”, and “How often do you feel that people are around you but not with you?” The maximum that you can score on the test is 80; the threshold for “high loneliness” is 44; and as Gabriel Agbonlahor surged through a centre-back’s cotton-wool challenge to drive in Villa’s second, you could sense Wenger’s total rising steadily towards 70.
Why then, Arsène, and those like you? Why, in the face of hard facts and harsher fans, warned by a scornful chorus of physicians, psychologists and philosophers, did you do it? Why did you manage?
Simple. For the thrill of conducting your eleven-man orchestra in some of the most glorious fields and festival halls known to football, from Hackney Marshes to Anfield to Boca Juniors’ La Bombonera, and beyond. For the chance to watch your side, your side, flow endlessly from one end of the pitch to the other; or, almost tearfully, to see your back four, faced by a fleet of vengeful forwards, standing eternally firm as Stonehenge.
Part pastime, part obsession, football management’s a special and bizarre business; and so our examination of it will take us to some necessarily special and bizarre places. We’ll look at the threat that golf poses to football, and the advice that José Mourinho apparently took from a Chinese management consultant; we’ll relive what’s probably the greatest team-talk in the world; we’ll even talk of princes and pendulums.
But for now, in as good a place to begin as any, we’ll start with a craving.
Football.
It’s with you whilst you sleep, but it truly claims you as soon as you wake. Then it’s upon you, even as you take your first peek at the ceiling and then snap your eyelids shut in grim denial of the day, even as you or your partner peels away the duvet and lets all that carefully-gathered warmth out into the cruel clutches of the morning.
Football! Where can you see it first? Now you’re clambering for it, across piles of clothes, or across the unlucky limbs of your now-scowling partner, stretching for your phone so you can scour the Internet for last night’s scores – you scour, you don’t search, and you sure as hell don’t surf, those verbs are too casual for an action as passionate as this – or you’re barely dressed and in front of your TV, tapping frantically away at the remote control to summon Teletext; or you’re gripping a newspaper, whose back page, for you, is always its front page. Never mind where North Korea has just tested its next nuke; never mind which big bank has just folded or been sold; that can all wait. What matters now is what Wayne Rooney or Leo Messi or Steven Gerrard did in the 75th minute last night.
The thing is, you already know what happened. You were in the pub, leaping into the arms of similarly worshipful punters, or banging your fist on your dashboard as the joyful announcement of their goals soared forth from the radio. But you have to read the news and find out again. You see, if you’re obsessed with football, then it’s like the sun, your next pay cheque, or the front door of your parents’ home: you always judge where you are in relation to it. Because football is in you, not in your veins – that’s too shallow; it’s in your bone marrow.
As a manager, it’s a requirement that you can’t get enough of the game; nothing other than lifelong devotion will do, and there are those who will get their fix wherever they can. Dettmar Cramer, who managed Bayern Munich to European Cup success in 1975 and 1976, had a career whose fervour and scope matched that of a missionary; he went anywhere in the world in pursuit of football, taking jobs in – among other places – the USA, Japan, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. And then there’s Bora Milutinović, the itinerant Serb, who remains the only man to have coached five countries at the World Cup finals; between 1986 and 2002, he was in charge of Mexico, Costa Rica, the USA, Nigeria and China. Finally, and maybe most impressively, there’s Giovanni Trappatoni and Ernst Happel, who are the only men to have managed their teams to league championships in four different countries: Trappatoni in Austria, Italy, Germany and Portugal; and Happel in Germany, Holland, Belgium and his native Austria.
To travel far and wide as a manager is one thing; to succeed is quite another. The Dutchman Guus Hiddink has been as effective at assimilating as anyone in the game, with a resumé of compelling breadth. Holland, Australia, Russia and South Korea are even more dissimilar in culture than they are in footballing philosophy, yet Hiddink took them all to major tournaments, where they performed either to or beyond expectations. There are two particular highlights; Australia lost by a single, highly controversial, last-minute penalty in the second round of the 2006 World Cup to Italy, the eventual winners; and South Korea, whom he coached as the host nation at the 2002 World Cup, finished fourth in the tournament, following victories over Portugal, Italy and Spain.
Some would say that what Hiddink achieved with South Korea was worthy of a knighthood; the grateful Asians went one step further and gave him honorary citizenship of the city of Seoul. That was only right, since they hadn’t made it easy for him at first. He’d had to contend with the low expectations of the press and the public, who both took a dim view – realistically, it must be said – of their nation’s prospects in the upcoming tournament. It must also be said that Hiddink didn’t exactly help in building morale in the country since he’d been in charge of the Holland team that had humiliated South Korea 5–0 in the 1998 World Cup.
To some extent, therefore, the Dutchman was on a mission of atonement – although he didn’t help matters by openly wandering about town with his girlfriend; an unmarried man flaunting his relationship was continually frowned and remarked upon in the socially conservative country that he’d adopted. Yet Hiddink didn’t care. After all, stubbornness is the sibling of obsession, and by the time of his departure he’d transferred his single-mindedness to his players.
Obsession is important not only because it underpins a team’s winning mentality, but because it’s the one area in which football fans feel closest to their managers. When all’s said and done, we can’t honestly say that we’re smarter than Arsène Wenger, but perhaps we’d like to think that we’re just as crazy about the game as he is. The development of the football management game has been the best barometer for this passion of ours; and so I went to speak with one of its most successful devotees.
I had seen Henry Gregg only once or twice since university, so an interview with him was a welcome excuse to catch up. He’d studied politics, philosophy and economics as an undergraduate, and so his choice of profession was a logical step; he was now a lobbyist for the National Housing Federation, which urged the government to address the shortage of affordable homes in the UK. Vital as that work was, it wasn’t why I’d contacted him. By day, he was an advocate for his fellow citizens; and by night, he’d proven himself a brilliant online football manager, having won the national Fantasy league.com competition in 2006.
Gregg’s triumph had come after many hours spent in the company of Championship Manager – so many hours, in fact, that I briefly wondered whether they had affected his final class of degree. “When I was a student, I used to do all-night sessions quite regularly,” he explained. “I remember going to my parents’ place; they’ve got a shed down at the bottom of their garden; I’d go down to the shed and leave at about five o’clock in the morning.” It was there, doubtless fuelled by heart-hammering amounts of caffeine, that he learned of his talent as a gaffer in the virtual world. “I won the Champions League three years in a row with Cardiff [City],” he said proudly. Buoyed by this taste of the big time, he’d tried his hand at competing against a group of his friends on Fantasyleague.com. “A friend of mine set up a league and there were just ten of us, and I think that helped me because my initial aim was just to beat the other nine players,” said Gregg, “but I ended up beating the other 60,000 people who were playing it across the country.” He’d taken home a cheque for £4,000, but his victory had cost him a certain amount of camaraderie. “I tried to do Fantasy League again the year after I won it,” he lamented, “but everyone was so demoralised that I hadn’t just won their league but the whole league across the country, that they refused to enter a league with me.”
It’s no surprise that Gregg’s friends were somewhat demoralised. The UK has various fantasy leagues – several newspapers, including the Sun, Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times run them for their readers – and each of them is closely fought, with only a few dozen points separating hundreds, if not thousands of contestants. This phenomenon, described by Gregg as “crack for football fans”, had long since claimed me as a victim. During one year at law school, I was in the habit of returning home after a night out, sometimes at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., and then playing Championship Manager until sunrise. One of the game’s renowned features was its “addictiveness rating”, a short sentence which reminded you each time you logged on or off how hooked you were. I knew that things had gone beyond my control when my PC advised me about the outside world.
Who was responsible for my fate, and that of many others like me? Andrew Wainstein, an Arsenal supporter who’d created the original Fantasy League in 1991, has a lot to answer for: he’s indirectly caused or deepened the football addiction of millions of people worldwide. Fantasy Football League, a television programme based upon a version of Wainstein’s game, was a great success: online incarnations soon followed, such as the aforementioned Championship Manager and Football Manager, which soon found their way into millions of homes and offices. ComScore, an American company that analyses digital data, reported that “the proportion of time being spent on these sites during office hours is significant. On the Friday before the start of the Premiership season alone, over 230,000 hours were spent on the fantasy football sites analyzed in this study [of which there were 8], and 52 per cent of them occurred during office hours.”
Elsewhere, the social fallout was equally dramatic. Football Manager was reportedly cited in 35 UK divorce cases as a key reason why the marriage couldn’t continue. What’s more, the ubiquity of fantasy football led to a pretty bizarre pass where life began to imitate art. As Nick Pettigrew wrote in a November 2008 issue of ShortList, the free weekly magazine:
One professional recently visited [the offices of Football Manager’s designers, Sports Interactive], upset that he was given 12/20 for shooting ability ‘when I’m clearly at least 14/20’. It indicated how popular the game is among the footballing elite when one Premier League footballer admitted that, after training, most of his colleagues either go shopping, play golf or go home to switch on Football Manager.
So there was Andrew Wainstein, one of the leading minds behind a phenomenon that has wrecked homes and wasted office hours. Considering the widespread damage that he’s done to society, he seemed pretty at ease with himself. Initially, he’d organised a few leagues among friends, but had then broadened that initial market to acquaintances and beyond. Soon, he began running the game by telephone, and it had quickly assumed its own momentum.
“It was long before the Web, so people would actually phone and fax in their substitutions,” recalled Wainstein. “We just had a bank of people picking up the phone saying, ‘Groves out’, or ‘Merson in’. We must have done, I don’t know, five, ten thousand substitutions in a day.” Some of these came from prominent footballers who, even when they weren’t on the pitch, couldn’t stay away from the game. “I remember Kieron Dyer, who I’m pretty sure at that stage was at Ipswich, had a Fantasy Football team,” said Wainstein. “So he was one of our early subscribers… him and his mates played, and I think he was one of these people who would be on the phone on a Friday afternoon, saying, ‘I want to make a substitution’.”
Miles Jacobson, the managing director of Sports Interactive, had similar stories to tell me. He had been brought on board by the Collyer brothers, Paul and Oliver, who had developed Championship Manager. Following its name change to Football Manager, he presided over the game’s international conquest from his office in Old Street, east London. “We sell about a million games a year globally, and there are around 3–3.5 million people playing the game a year,” he said, when I’d asked him to tot up their figures. He’d noticed the true extent of his product’s impact when he’d been introduced to four international players, three of whom represented England; and when they’d found out what he did for a living, they’d spent the rest of the afternoon asking him for tips on who they should buy for their fantasy teams.
Jacobson, a fervent Watford fan, seemed particularly immersed in the game when I went to speak with him. “I was playing the game last night, against Rafa Benítez – who’s now manager of Manchester City in 2023. Before the match, Rafa Benítez said, ‘I have full respect for Miles, we have a good relationship,’ and at the end of the game – they beat us 1–0 – he said, ‘They shouldn’t be too disheartened by their performance’… So I get on pretty well with him. But there are other managers who are people that I don’t like in real life, who I will get emotional about – I let my emotions ride over during the game, and I will say stupid things, and it ends up pissing off my players.”
But, you might think, you don’t really have a relationship with Rafa Benítez; and it’s not 2023. And you’d be right – and wrong: you could spend so much time in front of that keyboard, obsessed with your closest rival’s latest result and the injury to his centre-forward’s ankle that you’d soon find yourself far adrift of reality. The average time spent playing the latest edition of Football Manager, revealed Jacobson, was 140 hours; almost six full days. No wonder his favourite addictiveness rating, as he told me, was “Don’t forget to change your pants”.
Historically, managers in the real world have been no less fixated with their players than their virtual counterparts. In Calcio: A History of Italian Football, John Foot noted that AC Milan’s Nereo Rocco “was obsessive about the private lives of his players, following them in his car and checking up on their relationships. Gigi Meroni had to pretend that his girlfriend was his sister when Rocco was his manager at Torino.” In the modern era, where footballers are multimillion pound assets, it’s almost logical that there should be this attitude of micro-management, this observation of what your players are doing at all times.
Players themselves are keenly aware of their place under the microscope, which has made many of them predictably wary. I found this when I went to speak to Ron Maughan, the Professor of Sport and Exercise Nutrition at Loughborough University. He worked with several of the world’s leading clubs, and frequently ran tests on their footballers; the routine that he described made them sound more like commodities than anything else. “When we measured all of these things on these players,” said Maughan, “we’d weigh them before and after their training session; we’d weigh their drinks bottles before and after training, if they went for a pee, we collected it and weighed it; we stuck patches on their skin, and collected sweat, and we took it away and analysed it; and then we gave each of them a feedback sheet, and on the feedback sheet we had bits of charts in various colours, and we tried to make it very simple so you could very easily see, you know: Are you sweating a lot, are you somebody who’s drinking enough?”
“The response from the players was astonishing,” continued Maughan. “They’re a desperately difficult group to reach, because every day they meet somebody trying to sell them something. Somebody wants a piece of them. But, almost without exception, we got an incredible response; and I remember somebody saying, ‘Thank God you’re treating us as individuals.’” Given that managers are now striving more than ever for any kind of competitive advantage, I asked him whether he thought there’d been an explosion of interest in the field of nutrition over the last few years. “It comes and goes,” he said. “You might say that there’s been an explosion of interest in the last few years, but, if you speak to someone like Trevor Lee at Manchester United, he’s been the club dietician there for almost twenty years; so it’s not as new as all that.”