the nascent appeal of managerial competency

the context being the more-or-less agreed supremacy of mourinho among current managers, personal corruption and recent failings notwithstanding, and the uncannily similar rise of his protegé andre villas boas. that neither of them played professionlly is notable but not entirely new, since sacchi himself never did either, but both are evidently rather more intelligent and technically adept than the average, and achieve their tactical determinism by extreme attention to detail. they aren't systematists in the vein of eastern european philosopher-coaches (zeman, lobanovskyi), and their program seems responsive to general trends and not at all prescriptive about how football ought to be played.

they seem altogether superior compared to a typical old school hack like say steve bruce, a deeply stupid man with an outsized sense of his own influence and a career largely founded on knowing when to jump ship before brief successes regress to the mean. entropy catches up with them, and a new generation of venerated ex players join the carousel, linked to each new vacancy and gradually exiled to thailand or azerbaijan.

the distrust of ~professional~ managers probably comes from a suspicion that players need one of their own in the trenches/coalface/etc, yet the uncommon blood brother spirit engendered by mourinho has invalidated that notion. this could become a trend, with charismatics and technocrats drawn from other fields and general managers feeling confident with appointing their own kin, and terrible narcissists like mourinho will mix with mba types and high functioning sportssciencebros in the upper reaches of their profession.

mou did play as professional iirc. just for short time, lower divisions etc.

but besides that pedantic, and perhaps wrong, point they didn't gleen their football knowledge from playing the game.

they both started as translators and later became opposition-scouts. taking copious notes on every aspect of the oppositions play. a more scientific or technical approach to the game. more rigorous perhaps? or maybe this is pure conjecture.

ya i'm not sure it's scientific as in some grand new praxis, just that they are much more assiduous, thorough and intelligent than the average manager.

i knew mourinho got a game or two for his dad's team, but i didn't realize he had played so much, including sixteen apps for LJ faves belenenses.

both are evidently rather more intelligent and technically adept than the average

Are there any good managers who aren't "intelligent"?

no

it's p obvious that mourinho is a cut above tho

A cut above Ferguson?

To name but one

But, ignore me, it's not about A's more intelligent than B

ya it's about a different type of manager

mourinho probably more intelligent than ferguson, but he's a wily old fuck himself and a complete anomaly within his generation

wenger is somewhere between the two

ferguson was cunning until he achieved full dictator status. Now, as is the wont with such men, he's a perpetually outraged bloated old cunt

Wenger only had 1 season of professional* football.

*He was an amateur for like 8 years though.

Also Mourinho will be a wily old fuck soon enough. Just a handsome one.

Yes, I don't think he's that different... or that intelligent for that matter

everything's relative, this is football

But yes, there are so many things wrong with the hiring practices of football clubs. The biggest, in my opinion, is that once a manager is sacked, they will go head on for 1 name and try to get him within 2 weeks. No-one is interviewed about their prospective plans for the club or what they think of it already etc. - they just jump in head first and hope they get a Harry Redknapp instead of a Avram Grant.

If clubs hired like, you know, a business would, I suspect you'd see a lot more comptenent managers oft with no real footballing background.

Tom who are you saying isn't that intelligent or different? Because if it is Wenger (or Fergie for that matter) then smh.

Nah, Jose

You asked: Is jose mourinho jewish?

You asked: Is jose mourinho a catholic?

I'm confused

Is mourinho really any more intelligent or technically adept than say del bosque or paisley? etc etc Or does he just portray himself that way and the fact that he seems to have come from 'outside' football (even thought that isn't the case) it is assumed that he must be a cut above and have something different about them.

I think how he reacts this summer will be telling when it comes to Mourinho. (Lke Sacchi, Real could be the breaking point.)

The thing we need to happen is the Maradona-takes-Napoli-to-the-title thing with managers to tell how good they are. It's why Clough is seen as the best. If Mourinho, for whatever reason, is no longer Real boss come next season, I want to see him take over Leyton Orient and if he can FM his way into the Champions League, then fine, he is the most intelligent and tactically proficient manager in history.

you're picking two exceptionally successful managers there, is the thing.

Intelligent and competent managers stand out in the epl, i think that's pretty certain. But if i think of eg fishing as a male dominated industry i've experience in, it's the same. The majority of promotion occurs from within the ranks, the pack leaders get the jobs. Professional management isn't welcome, regardless of how it would affect overall efficiency/performance, because there's still a strong element of protectionism associated with having one of 'your men' in charge.

Lol ramblings tho

xp porto

I was going to say that, but they're not Leyton Orient

where i do give mourinho credit is that I really don't think anyone could have done a better job than he did during his time at inter (i'm not including in that assessment developing players etc) just purely in producing results in that time frame with that group of players. I kinda think the same with regards to Chelsea. I don't think that AT ALL in the case of Real Madrid. So far.

no, but clough couldnt win the cl with notts forest today either

He might with Porto though!

xpost to darragh - lol ok but promotion rarely happens within? in the past five years there has been... tony adams, avram grant and steve kean? and those are all a case of assistants being called something more official than caretaker manager?

xpost to... darragh again - porto are by far the club in portugal with the most money and prestige? that's like the portuguese equiv. of being... real madrid manager.

xp mourinho's done a great job at real in every aspect but one- comparisons with barca

porto are by far the club in portugal with the most money and prestige?

I would have thought that would be Benfica?

becoming champion with a team from outwith one of the big leagues is a pretty big deal.

were they playing monaco in that final?

yup, 3-0.

Who was the Monaco manager?

Also I said 'into' the CL and not 'win' the CL. The likes of Toppmoller, Grant and Svara have all managed teams who made it to the CL final in the past ten years so I think we can agree that the competition depends on a degree of luck as well as great ability.

promotion from within the ranks of ex-players, not from within the club, sam

didier deschamps

i really don't see how he's done a great job at real tbh Not that I'm saying any manager could have got them to supplant Barca this season, just don't see any big improvement in the team compared to last few seasons.

Re: Benfica - the 3 decades leading up to Mourinho's time at Porto are called this by wikipedia

# 1.8 The silver era (1970–1994)
# 1.9 The dark years (1994–2003)

for a reason.

wasnt deschamps monaco manageer?

promotion from within the ranks of ex-players, not from within the club, sam

― socks & pwns may break my bwns (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:38 (1 minute ago)

if i try to rmde at myself i'd be worried about them getting stuck some how

Deschamps took over during the season, which makes my point about Svara null and void.

but would be interesting if football management went the way of head coaching jobs in nfl, where the job seems so technical and complicated, to me anyway, that being an ex player is pretty far done the list of qualifications I'd imagine. It also appears to be a necessarily collaborative effort with untold assistants, gm's, salary cap experts etc etc

i really don't see how he's done a great job at real tbh Not that I'm saying any manager could have got them to supplant Barca this season, just don't see any big improvement in the team compared to last few seasons.

― pandemic

he got real to the semi. and lost the semi in part because of the sending off of pepe in the first-leg and the disallowed goal of pipita in the second, both fairly unlucky breaks in such big games.

precisely, pandemic

Jeez, i'm getting flashbacks to my 'history of management theory model' and frederick taylor etc, but it's probably v much the same thing

fair points jim.

Reminded of this OSM article from 2007, about the influence of Moneyball and management theory on English football.

but would be interesting if football management went the way of head coaching jobs in nfl, where the job seems so technical and complicated, to me anyway, that being an ex player is pretty far done the list of qualifications I'd imagine. It also appears to be a necessarily collaborative effort with untold assistants, gm's, salary cap experts etc etc

― pandemic, Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:42 (2 minutes ago)

I wouldn't be surprised if this is closer than most think? Especially considering the debt most are carrying to see the smarter clubs go this way. (We've already seen 'Moneyball''s influence, this would be step 2?)

The examples cited there:

Aidy Boothroyd at Watford, Iain Dowie at Charlton, Alan Pardew at West Ham and Pardew's protege Phil Parkinson at Hull

Before the season was half done, Pardew, Dowie and Parkinson had all been fired after terrible runs of results. Boothroyd's Watford were adrift at the bottom of the Premiership.

this probably a better place to extend my comparison of moyes and martinez and why the latter while more flawed has greater upside. it isn't just about the notional aesthetic comparison between maloney vs anichebe. rather it's because what martinez doing is really rather unusual, today he played a formation that confounded manchester city. the use of wingbacks, even converting a dmid to the position because all of his other options are injured, and two forwards attacking from the flanks caused regular overmatching. zabaleta is the best rb in the league but he couldn't contain it and got booked twice, leading to the late surge that brought the corner and the goal.

sacchi described the multiplier effect as the aim of all tactics, getting players to play beyond their skillset via formation/coaching etc. moyes' success depended to a greater extent on physicality and aggression, midtable sort of strategies which top teams seldom rely on as an end in themselves. they depend on the particularities of the players, like having a £15m 6'4 nuisance capable of outmatching an adjunct centreback (how everton won 1-0 at goodison last year). and as such they are more predictable and more easily neutralized, like by putting phil jones on fellaini in the next game. martinez isn't dependent on his players to the same degree, most of his squad are interchangeable journeymen who he has to deploy in innovative ways vs more talented teams.

it's like how 'natural goalscorers' in the afonso alves vein fail to transfer to higher leagues because their 'instinct' reflected the naivete of the opposition, whereas a player like thierry henry with an unremarkable scoring record can become great because his exceptional physical and technical skills were not contingent in the same way. martinez succeeds via tactical determinism in the manner of the greatest coaches, rather than the dogs of war spirit of most lower table success stories.

― there is no special cathexis with mini fried donuts (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Sunday, 12 May 2013 00:16 (11 months ago)

that post is incredible btw. im not usually one to think much of someone to repost themselves but nakh finding nakh otm.

nakh otming nakh is vmic

great post all the same

maybe jury is still out on AVB but his tenure at Spurs at least was sadly more in the Moyes mold than Martinez

the reason for c&p isn't just cuz i thought moyes would be out of his depth, many many people thought that, so much as the amount of people who were arguing with me after the fa cup final about the significance of martinez' victory and of moyes' crappy record vs the big teams during his time at everton

not so much that moyes himself is shit (there is a post up there about his virtues, none of which he displayed this season) save that as good as his everton side were relative to expenditure, he could very seldom devise a way to defeat good sides, let alone outplay them as martinez managed a few times with a team far below everton in terms of resources

and it really showed this season, he could mostly rely on rvp or twp win games vs crap sides but his record vs the top eight was atrocious, just a single win

so when someone like jonathan wilson, one of the vanishingly small number of intelligent british fitba hacks and someone who has probably watched twenty times more fitba than i ever will, comes out with shit like this today....

Fans will argue whether Moyes was ever cut out to be United manager, but that is to slightly miss the point. Managers and players rarely fit neatly into categories. There aren't A-grade manager and B-grade managers and so on down the line: there are merely managers who are right for a particular job in particular circumstances and those who are not.

then i think he is completely wrong, and it reflects poorly on him that he thought moyes was still worth persevering with even last month

moyes' tenure at manchester united and martinez' eclipsing of moyes' best ever points total with four games to go in his first season exactly shows that there are 'B-grade' managers who are fine up to a certain level, and in martinez' case someone who could potentially be a success at one of the best teams in europe in the future

god I love this thread

avb, mourinho FOUND OUT

Managing yr way out of a slump looks like a very specific skill separate from base competency. Moyes never had it, which should have been apparent from his time at Everton, but it has been interesting to see Klopp, Mourinho, AVB to some extent and Allegri all struggle with it too recently.

i'd say the absolute intolerance of slumps is to do with this - once it's a slump you've only got a few games before the sack, in the vast majority of cases.

True for ordinary managers but Klopp, Favre and AVB have been allowed to write their own exits and opted to quit / not extend contracts rather than get sacked.

The last couple of seasons have been full of managers who initially look good managing midtable teams and then bomb. They are fine when it comes to sorting out someone else's mistakes but absolutely clueless when it comes to addressing their own - Pardew, Bruce, Redknapp etc.

Obviously Mourinho etc are three or four cuts above that lot but I think that managing your way out of a slump requires an admission that you're making mistakes, and that your ideas don't work any more. There's a degree of humility required that a lot of managers just don't possess. Or if they do, they're too ineffectual to do much in the first place.

In terms of managing their way out of a slump, the two most consistently successful managers have been Wenger and Martinez, who have also benefited from unusually supportive Chairmen.

Not really sure how Wenger can be considered to have managed his way out of a slump tbh. Arsenal over the last decade have occasionally slipped to 6th or 7th (if that) at some point midway through the season to end up in the top 4 come May.

I don't really see all that much variance in form from Arsenal unless you're talking a month with say 2 draws and a loss followed by one of 3 wins and a draw? Have they ever been in a prolonged (8-12 games) slump?

I think it kind of makes sense - seeing the problems in an existing structure is a lot different from building something of your own - there are prob divides like this in many careers.

Moyes prob did manage his way out of slumps - as in the odd awful season followed by returning to 6th or whatever, IIRC?

Wenger's never had a slump of the level of Mourinho now, but neither have most CL-level teams. They have had several periods of looking lacklustre for a month or even two, slipping out of the CL running, and bringing things back with a long run of consistent wins shortly after things looked at their worst. Wenger has been good at preventing a small slump from turning into a tailspin.

that's one way of looking at it - another would be to say he's been in a small slump for a decade.

I mean everything we know about Mourinho suggests that a refusal to admit wrongdoing is at the very least a major contributory factor towards Chelsea's form this season, as is an apparent inability to build bridges with key players. Repeatedly criticising the mentality of your players is the sort of crap you expect from John Carver or Tim Sherwood or whoever.

Oh man I've just realised they've got Stoke next as well, that's the sort of fixture where managerial graves are dug.

Moyes prob did manage his way out of slumps - as in the odd awful season followed by returning to 6th or whatever, IIRC?

His early years at Everton were a series of slumps and revivals - kept them up in his first season then finished 7th then 17th then 4th then couldn't buy a win the next season but brought them up from bottom to 11th by the end of the season. After that it was a consistent run of finishing between 5th and 8th but even then they always seemed to start or finish the season badly.

youd have him ahead of ambrose alright

there are at least ten things I'd change at Celtic before Ambrose, who, and let's be clear, is a fucking disaster of a centre hoff

Been paying less attention to the fitba than ever in the last year or two and confess that I have no great confidence in the current Aston villa squad to wriggle their way out of present difficulties, but I find the appointment of remi garde quite intriguing and I'll be interested to see where it leads.

Use of all the French players to hand during the recent man city match (even Charles n'zogbia ffs) has piqued my interest and got me to wondering if there are other examples out there of managers seemingly being appointed explicitly because of their ability to work with the particular resources available - villa invest large sums in young French players and then appoint a manager whose reputation is founded p. much entirely on his ability to work with and bring along young French players.

Are there other high profile examples of this kind of targeted appointment and if so, how successful has this strategy proven in the past?

Just re-read this thread top-to-bottom for the 10th time btw, so great

Valencia head coach Gary Neville has revealed in an exclusive interview with Sky Sports that the current focus is Valencia, but his long-term future does not lie in management.

The former Manchester United defender is in charge of the La Liga club until the end of the season, but is yet to win a game in the league.

His side face Real Madrid - live on Sky Sports 3 HD at 7pm on Sunday - following the 1-0 defeat by Villarreal on New Year's Eve. Valencia currently sit 11 points off the Champions League spots.

But the Englishman's long-term future is clear in his head, and speaking with Sky Sports' Geoff Shreeves, Neville said: "I'm not going to say where I want to end up, and it isn't in management or head coaching, so I want to be clear about that.

Gerrard thinks deeply about the game that has enabled him to fulfil his dreams and it is when the conversation moves on to management that his opinions strike a chord; he, after all, is one of a generation that includes Jamie Carragher, Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand with so much to offer.

'Would the likes of Carra and ex-players like Robbie (Fowler)? Keep them about. Find roles for them. They have too much to offer to just be let go. I have regrets now that I didn't start my badges at 21-22. All that time I wasted in hotels being when I was watching The Office and The Sopranos.

'I wish I could be doing my 'Pro' licence now. I know many players who get to the end of their careers and get handed a C licence pack, which is about four inches thick, and say "Nah, I'm not doing that". He could have 70/80 caps and 600 career appearances. They have so much to offer.'

the neville stuff is p ridiculous, like he had to distance himself from england and man u this week, when the valencia job, which he basically got due to being friends with a millionaire, is almost certainly a doomed project.

'I wish I could be doing my 'Pro' licence now. I know many 70/80 caps and 600 career appearances players who get to the end of their careers and get handed an elite club level job, which is about having to do work, and say "Nah, I'm not doing that". They have so much to offer.'

zidane at real madrid is going to be a disaster

afaik he is not very clever

charismatic megafauna

it's the opposite of a nascent appeal of managerial competence appointment

combining galactico signing policy with "good madrid man" appease-the-plebs-populism

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/04/19/2FCBEDBD00000578-3384157-image-a-61_1451936033479.jpg

It's like an elite version of replacing Villas Boas with Tim Sherwood.

lol right

down to the ballyhooed not-sign-zidane-already-got-sherwood.html tales of yore

like the idea of tuchel getting his defenders to play practice games while holding tennis balls in their hands to discourage shirt pulling.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/may/14/quique-sanchez-flores-watford-departure-explained

vg

Conte, Pochettino, Guardiola, Klopp, Mourinho, Wenger, Koeman, Pellegrino, Howe, Bilic, De Boer, Clement, Silva, Benitez.

Not all perfect by any means, especially at the back end of that list, but this probably represents the single best crop of managers to have all been working in the Premiership at once?

ffs you missed Wagner, who is as the chant goes "better than Klopp"!

Hard times for the Huddersfield fan: chased out of the EFL thread by angry Charlton hard-lads, unconsidered by the Prem lot.

Lol! It is hard out there when yr upstart club has just won the Euromillions jackpot.

xp
We might be getting Ince jr from Derby, so it will probably be our fault if they bid for Ollie Watkins. But at least they aren't shy of paying big transfer fees.

zidane at real madrid is going to be a disaster

― Cuombas (jim in glasgow), Monday, January 4, 2016 1:20 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um

Draw against a 3rd tier club yesterday in the Copa tbf

lost to girona in the league a month ago too and currently 4th in the league.

but still won the champs league twice and la liga once so perhaps not the worst disaster

Champs league don't mean shit nowadays. Just look at Spurs.

(he's not that bad though, I agree)

Fp ya cuntcha

I'll take it on the chin.

hadn't heard of this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxGz1nWwCaw

speedrunning managerial competency like never before