Will You Manage?: The Necessary Skills to be a Great Gaffer

OBSESSION

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.

The wandering manager

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.

Fantasy Football 1: the champion

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.

Fantasy Football 2: the founders

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.

Micro-management

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