Expensive marquee managers can struggle to replicate past glories and younger, less-exalted coaches who have their best years to come may be a better bet
By all accounts next year should be a golden one for Premier League football. All the perceived top managers are on their way here, and although it might be shooting for the moon to include Diego Simeone and Jorge Sampaoli among their number they, like Pep Guardiola and José Mourinho, will certainly receive offers.
Modern-day managers are essentially guns for hire, usually on shortish contracts, and with all the money English clubs now have to spend it is no surprise they can afford the best on offer. Whether that is what England’s elite band of managers will actually represent is a moot point. Chelsea let a perfectly good man go in Carlo Ancelotti, for instance, and once at Bayern Munich next season he will be in a better position to become the first manager to win the European Cup with three different clubs than Mourinho will be should he turn up at Manchester United any time soon.
Rafael Benítez and Luis Enrique are also underrated operators but you get the general idea. When the Premier League was first flush with money it blew it on players, now it has switched its attention to managers. If Guardiola, Mourinho, Jürgen Klopp and Louis van Gaal are facing each other next season – allowing for the possibility Van Gaal may be the man Mourinho comes in to replace – some huge reputations will be competing for a title only one of them can win. Perhaps two titles, if the Champions League is included, but let’s remain in England for now. The English league is notoriously competitive all the way down, as Klopp has been finding out after posting some tremendous early results against bigger clubs. Reputations count for little, as Norwich proved at the weekend by dumping Manchester United out of the top four.
Yet reputations are all clubs have to go on when appointing a manager, otherwise there would not be the clamour for United to make a move for Mourinho. Fair enough, Van Gaal has been dull but he has lost only four league matches this season to Mourinho’s nine. Manuel Pellegrini’s City have been beaten more times. Why replace a manager in fifth place with one who took his team as low as 16th and was then sacked? It is purely because Mourinho still carries the reputation of a serial winner, someone who automatically reinvigorates clubs and gives them a sense of adventure as well as purpose.
Or at least he always used to. Van Gaal was caught using a similar phrase after the Norwich defeat – and full marks to him for honesty – when admitting he may now have to accept he was a very good manager once. United’s mistake, and it does seem to be a mistake now, was in assuming the kudos and methodology from an undeniably successful career would carry over to a new club in a new country even though the manager himself was now in his mid-sixties. The club wanted a respected name after David Moyes struggled to convince top players and agents that joining his Old Trafford project would be a good career move. Van Gaal is certainly that, though in practically all other aspects of the job he has proved a disappointment. His best days are all too clearly behind him.
So what of the others? Any of the Klopp-Guardiola-Mourinho gang ought to be able to improve an English club but can any of them improve on their previous record? It is generally a good plan to identify a manager with his best days still ahead, so you get him relatively cheaply and your club reaps maximum benefit. Liverpool, for example, would have preferred Brendan Rodgers to turn into a homegrown version of Klopp rather than having to go to Germany to recruit the original, but though the former Swansea manager showed immense early promise it did not quite work out. At 48 Klopp is still young enough to have his best days ahead, though whether he can make the sort of impression with Liverpool that he did with Borussia Dortmund remains to be seen. Watch his side annihilating Manchester City on their own ground and you think he may have a chance; watch his side labouring to a home point against West Bromwich Albion a few weeks later and you might think again.
Manchester City are not really hitting the straps this season under Pellegrini, perhaps because the entire world supposes Guardiola will be in charge next year. At 44 the Bayern Munich manager is the perfect age to make a big statement in European football. The only slight problem is he has already made one. Three La Liga titles and two Champions League successes in the space of four years at Barcelona is going to take some beating, especially considering all the plaudits his unconquerable side accumulated.
He will probably never quite match that standard, though if Guardiola still has something to prove it is that he can take over an imperfect side and bring them to a new level. He inherited a marvellous team at Barcelona, one he knew very well despite being unproven as a young manager, and when he opted for the Bundesliga he not only put himself in the way of some snide remarks from Mourinho, he took over Bayern at the precise moment they won the first treble in German history. He has not exactly taken them on a downward path from that point, he just knew from the outset he could not take them any higher.
Mourinho is the biggest enigma of the lot, because while he seems to have been losing his way for a while his track record suggests he could still transform the fortunes of most clubs. Perhaps only for a few years but that is a pact most chairmen would readily sign. Until this season Mourinho was the nearest thing to guaranteed, instant success football had known, and he still may be, given the chance and a fresh challenge. But that does not mean his best days are still ahead. Mourinho’s best days, surely, were rising to prominence with Porto, laying down such a sturdy foundation at Chelsea that it lasted for years after his departure, and successfully parking the bus with 10-man Internazionale against Barcelona in 2010.
It is easy to see why big clubs go for managers with that sort of pedigree, even if they sometimes find it hard to replicate the glories of their past. England will be honoured to have any or all of the illustrious names above lending their gravitas to its football next year but let’s not forget, in this season of all seasons, that there are less-exalted managers who actually may have their best years ahead of them. Eddie Howe, for example. Quique Sánchez Flores and Mauricio Pochettino. Maybe even Alan Pardew. And Claudio Ranieri, of course, who may not have been an ideal choice for Manchester United or Liverpool but is going down a storm at Leicester.
They say that at the very top managers remain successful for only 10 years or so, then it is the next generation’s turn. Ranieri is 64. He has been in management for almost 30 years, though not always at the very top. During his ill-starred time with Greece he was closer to the very bottom and would have been surprised to have been told that one of his best ever seasons was to come.
The moral of the story is that while the managerial A-list will get most of the attention next year, there is still room in the game for ingenuity and relatively cheap solutions. It is tricky to match the right man with the right club at the right time, though as this season is rather gloriously showing, it can be done. It could be that some sort of golden age is here already. In terms of marquee-name managers being upstaged by bright young(ish) things at smaller clubs, let’s hope next season contains more of the same.
by Paul Wilson
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