The King is Dead: Is the traditional manager no longer fit for purpose?

In their enlightening book 'Soccernomics' journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski set about examining the myths and half-truths which perpetuate modern football using the cold eyes of data and economics. Amongst other issues they discuss how difficult it is to tell who the good managers are. Managers unlike players are on the whole far less consistent in their performance and they along with Chris Anderson and David Sally co-authors of 'The Numbers Game' argue that the true effect of a manager is rather small as the great majority of success is determined by the level of wage spending.

I propose that we scrap the idea of the all-powerful manager, or at least remove the idea from our minds as best as we can as fans of football as in fact many clubs have been heading in this direction for several years.

As has been tradition, the manager of a club is the one who makes and should make all the decisions regarding the team. He (or she, but here we will refer to them male as has been the historical football management tradition) conducts the coaching sessions, he is the designer of the tactics, the motivator, the constructor of the team. Yet it is suggested that they have little actual influence on the game. In general it is not easy to compare one manager to the next even in the long run. Clearly there are better and worse managers. Sir Alex Ferguson is undoubtedly better than Dougie Freedman but the very fact that it is difficult to distinguish between who is a good manager and who is not possibly suggests that it is hard to fill the position with somebody who embodies an all round good football manager.

The manager is a flawed concept there to satisfy the wishes of a baying set of fans. No one man can embody a set of all the things he is supposed to do and perform them to the best of his ability. Football management cannot be boiled down to one formula but it can be broken down into some constituent parts be it the coach, the tactician, the motivator. Football has identified this to an extent already. There are more and more specialised back room roles for coaches, psychologists, data analysts and physios. Arguably all roles of the manager can be undertaken by specialists. Transfer committees are increasingly being used. Kuper demonstrates this with Lyon just after the millennium and their use of crowd wisdom to master the transfer market. Crowds make better decisions on the whole than one man whilst Kuper and Szymanski also argue that allowing the fans to pick the team (as Ebbsfleet United once did) may make the team perform better. The more voices you have going into a decision making process, the more likely that the result will be better than the view of one man.

Good coaches are often easier to identify and in the case of selecting a team I would propose that teams have a selection committee which selects the team and watches the squad train during the week. Rather than allowing the fans to select the team, information gaps should be closed as the decisions of a select group can be informed by a team of data analysts and tacticians with the three working together in order to achieve an optimum outcome. The same can be said for transfer decisions. There is a reason why governments have so many think tanks and civil servants to make decisions.

To varying degrees clubs are already doing this. Directors of Football are now increasingly common whilst more and more clubs such as Brentford are using data and committees to make transfer decisions. Reducing the role of the manager can only be a good thing in pushing for stability within a club. Long term goals can be achieved with a relatively stable set of specialised backroom staff who can use the wisdom of the crowd to make the best decisions whilst the fabric of the club would not have to be rewoven every time the man at the top or someone else lost their job.

But someone still has to lead and be that man on the touchline shouting instructions and pushing the gameplan. Managers and clubs should acknowledge the fact that the person in this role should oversee the constituent parts of the club and act as motivator for the players and the support.

This seems to be the primary role of Claudio Ranieri at Leicester. Leicester may not have been the same this season without the eye of his assistant Steve Walsh. The backroom staff is an increasingly complex team which a 'manager' should draw together. The 'manager' still has a role but clubs should utilise specific skills and accept that this person is not as influential as one might like to think in order to get the edge over their competitors. Fans should try and understand how the role of the public face of their club is changing and both accept and encourage this for their side's long term stability and performance rather immediately pinning blame on this singular person without truly understanding what influence they actually have. Teams can perform better through incremental changes rather than expecting one person to come in and overhaul the entire set up with their own incredible skill. More than anything if clubs have already realised this the fans should adjust their own expectations of how their club should be run and gain a better understanding of the real power and position of the face at the press conference.

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