the nascent appeal of managerial competency

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.

Footballers no fuck all about football is the thing. See Gerrard saying LFC let go of Murphy too soon and that if Arsenal had Carragher they'd be champions.

Argh, *know*. I obviously don't no hw ot splel.

This LRB article is relevant - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n01/david-runciman/he-shoots-he-scores - discusses Mourinho's percentage-playing managerial pragmatism, but also notes his un-routinised charisma, in comparison with the even more pragmatic Rafa:

Mourinho has got one other thing going for him that no one who has watched him in action can fail to notice. He is astonishingly good-looking. Barclay is metrosexual enough to be able to discuss this without embarrassment, but he prefers to call it ‘presence’, comparing Mourinho to charismatic but hardly swoon-inducing men like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough. What he has in common with Clough and Shankly is that the players appear desperate to do whatever it takes to win his approval, like schoolgirls fighting for an approving glance from their favourite teacher.

See Gerrard saying LFC let go of Murphy too soon and that if Arsenal had Carragher they'd be champions.

shhh didn't want to bring that up in case ahoy hoy's head exploded!

yeah, mourinho definitely inspires love from his squads. him and materazzi crying when he left inter. this may be to do with charisma, it's hard to tell what he's like with the players as i can't imagine it is anything like the character he puts on with the media, but otoh it could be because he's a gaffer that will win you things, and players naturally respond to that.

lol i'd take carragher over squiggle

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

― Tom D has taken many months to run this thread to ground (Tom D.), Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:09 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

everything's relative, this is football

― socks & pwns may break my bwns (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^^^^

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 (1 hour ago)

i think it is heading in that direction

villas boas' promotion to manager from the backroom staff of another successful manager is a typical nfl trajectory (although with offensive/defensive co-ordinators there are more, and more demarcated/rationalized intermediate jobs)

pardew, boothroyd, dowie et al are all terrible managers and even worse people, a grim mixture of lower league clogger and management theory cant

pardew doing alright even having sold his best player tbf

he's shit

good lower level manager, which is another debate tbh

He's done worse in the lower leagues than in the Premiership, more often than not. Poor Charlton.

sorry, i meant 'good lower level manager'

I think that Newcastle team is just pretty good and is running along on its own momentum and the Pardew era will collapse as they realise he's a clown and he loses control of the rampaging egos and thugs and stupid haircuts that is Newcastle 2011.

next year's thread title

Feel like anybody could be Newcastle manager and they'd be doing exactly the same as they are now. Maybe not Shearer.

souness, b robson, shearer, gullit, yadda

newcastle currently winning their league battle: theyre above the mackems on goal difference.

Sven to Newcastle sounds plausible.

sven to cut off his head for £3m sound plausible

I wonder just how rich Sven actually is? He hasn't let a gift horse pass by in decades.

is that a saudi prince reference

nba becoming more like nfl in (theoretically) having coaches to manage these things is a v. interesting development to me.

― call all destroyer, Thursday, May 26, 2011 12:22 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark

wondering if the ubiquity of social media/blogs plays some role in highlighting the importance of coaching. so many blogs out there breaking down games and teams and analyzing, intense amateurs playing along as armchair coaches.

― dayo, Thursday, May 26, 2011 4:26 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark

Reposted from ILHoops, because it concerns both increasing specialization of coaching roles in American sport, which was already touched on itt, and (implicitly) the potential infiltration of the closed-shop player-manager axis by amateurs (or legit/accredited Fourth Estate members, I guess) who make tactics or statistics their specialty, and gather their credentials by blogging about top-level football rather than managing a lower div. or youth side. NFL/NBA/MLB have a head start in this regard but I can envision it becoming a thing in Europe as well.

The subtext of that post I copied is, I believe, that the intense amateurs are already being added to team payrolls, and that it'll be only another few years before they move from behind-the-scenes "analyst" roles to being visible presences on the court/pitch during play. And potentially only another generation after that before they become legit candidates for head jobs.

Stories about Mourinho and Villas-Boas have focused on fortuitous elements in their trajectories, like their getting into the club setup as translators, Mourinho's family connection, the coincidence of a teenage Villas-Boas living in the same apt. block as Bobby Robson. In 2011 all these pieces don't necessarily need to fall into place in that way, because there's an outlet for anybody as precocious as AVB apparently is/was to make a name for himself without any club affiliation at all.

dream job, where do i apply

I think the fact that we broadcast whatever microscopic kernels of insight we have here, rather than hoarding them for monetized publication on our influential blogs or Twitter acct.s, means we don't have the cutthroat mentality required. If you see some of your own wisdom repackaged elsewhere as new content, that's the guy to watch out for in the big club managerial openings of 2022.

Funnily enough with basketball a lot seemed to happen through gambling - guys who could consistently beat Vegas were seen as people worth employing.

And football gambling websites are starting to publish advanced-analysis pieces, are they not? It's not an aspect of the sport I follow closely but I've read pieces by the Zonal Marking author on betting sites.

Compare the CV/career path of Damien Comolli (Liverpool) with his American analogue, Theo Epstein (Boston Red Sox). Both employees of John Henry/FSG in positions of comparable importance, and both very young for that level. But Epstein reached the highest level much faster despite being much less credentialed - from 1992-95, he was editing the sports section at his university newspaper while Comolli was coaching Monaco's U-16s.

Which is to say, American ownership of European clubs could accelerate the rise of young overachievers.

The executive who gave Epstein his first high-level job is not part of the Liverpool ownership group, but the guy who poached him from a smaller team and installed him with the Red Sox (a Wigan-big 4 level jump, I'd say) just a couple years later, still under 30 y.o., is.

No-one is interviewed about their prospective plans for the club or what they think of it already etc.

I believe Celtic employ this interview method, but it got us Tony Mowbray, who talked a good plan but completely failed at putting it into practice. Also wasn't given time to put his longer-term plans into practice (see last-ditch salvage attempt to buy/borrow nearly a whole team halfway through the season, which failed completely).

Neil Lennon was doing press conferences with the Chief Exec just before he got the job full-time, where a lot of emphasis was put into long-term strategy and vision rather than just "we'll throw money at Robbie Keane and hope we can score our way into the CL".

When did the term 'project' enter the managerial phrasebook? Who coined it? Was it when Mourinho joined Chelsea? You hear it all the time now, pundits talking about 'the project', 'Mancini's project', 'Mourinho's Project'. Does it say anything about the role of the manager in the modern game, if indeed the role of the manager has actually changed over the years, or am I overanalysing?

No, it's definitely a thing - a sort of businessspeak, forward budgeting, brand-awareness type of affair. I associate it with Chelsea too, but more with the whole line of hiring Hoddle, signing Gullit, and keeping going from there. Not sure when the word itself started to be used, though.

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

i listened to wengers desert island discs the last night and hes a good charming speaker so he is

Unfortunately no Magma or Heldon among his picks.

alas Lorraine