The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (13 page)

But if your staff team is this important, who should be a part of it? Carlo Ancelotti brought his assistant Paul Clement from Chelsea to PSG ‘because of his player knowledge and his
knowledge about football, about training. He has a lot of experience, knowledge, charisma, and personality. He would probably be a very good manager, 100 per cent.’ Great leaders are not
worried about having people around them who might outshine them; in fact the contrary is true. One of the acts that distinguishes a strong leader is deliberately seeking close colleagues who will
stretch him, and who have strengths that complement his own. Allardyce would agree: ‘I recruit excellent people I can delegate to. I trust them to do the job better than me. I add to that the
experience of many years in football, and I always listen very carefully to them about the job that they do and how they do it. Again from sheer experience, I have gathered a little bit of
knowledge about how everyone’s job works so I can speak to them on their level: knowing what the words mean and how they think.’

The principle applies also on the field of play. Kevin Keegan looks for ‘the area of expertise where I’m not strong. I’ll take a defensive coach with me nine times out of ten,
because I was a forward and I can see how to score goals, I can see how to make goals, but I was never a defender so I don’t think from a defender’s point of view.’

The team also need to be people you can intrinsically trust. Keegan points out that players now easily make friends among the staff: ‘They have a favourite physio; the doctor has different
relationships. It can be more difficult where it should be easier, because you should be able to delegate. At Newcastle I had probably about six or seven too many staff for the way I wanted to run
a football club.’

Support and challenge

Martin O’Neill has built up a core of talented staff he trusts. When he arrives at a new club, the trick is to fuse them together with the existing team, and to craft a
new leadership team dedicated to the task ahead. ‘I started out in management at Grantham – it was really what I wanted to do, and I needed to find out whether I could manage at all. I
got in touch initially with John Robertson, who had been my playing partner at Nottingham Forest. My idea was that John might be able to play a bit for me even though he had left the game at that
time. He did play a number of games for me, but by now was much more interested in joining me in management. We forged a relationship then.

‘When I moved to Wycombe Wanderers, I reconnected with Steve Walford who had played with me at Norwich City. He dropped down to play at Vauxhall Conference level for me at Wycombe, and he
and I built a trusting relationship there. Steve’s fascinating – a quiet man, but a totally different person when he’s on the coaching field! He is a very, very good coach. We
were all at Leicester City, Celtic and Aston Villa together, and Steve was with me at Sunderland. Steve is remarkable: he is as good as any of the coaches out there, but never promotes himself. We
also had an excellent goalkeeping coach in Seamus McDonagh who was with me at Leicester City and at Aston Villa, and a terrific fitness coach called Jim Henry that I met at Celtic. This is the
small team I brought with me.

‘Joining a club in a mini-crisis, it was important to me to have these particular people. Apart from that, I didn’t make any other changes. At the same time I also embraced what was
happening at the football club. I’ve never gone in with a scattergun approach of relieving people of their jobs – I go hoping that I will be able to work with these people in time. I
think the staff are very, very important, and I always hope that eventually I can build the same levels of trust that I have built with the other people. There will be the occasional person at the
football club who’s been involved with the previous manager who might want to leave of his own accord or because he wants to go with the other manager who has gone to another club, and I
understand that fully.’

Of course, great leaders want to know that they will get challenge as well as support from their leadership team. As O’Neill says: ‘We have differences of opinion in the team, which
is good. But when we get to the field, we are all of the same mind.’

The art of delegation

Like Allardyce, Glenn Hoddle also thinks of his leadership team as close allies to whom he can delegate: ‘I can’t have my eyes everywhere, so I want people around me
I can delegate to. For example, I want them to tell me if they can see a problem coming up with a player. I remember once I was left out of a team. I was 20 years of age and I thought I should be
in the team every week. I went off and did my sulky bit and the manager left me for about two weeks, when I think if he’d had left it a day and we’d had a chat I could have been
straight back in to the team. So I learnt from that you have to communicate quickly – and a good team of staff help you to do that.’

If you buy into the value of delegation, then there is a very simple way to think about who you need. For any individual in any area of effort, there are two dimensions involved: skill and will.
For example, I might be excellent at clearing up my kitchen, but having done it a thousand times, I am not excited to do it again. In this situation, I am ‘high skill’ but ‘low
will’ so I might decide to pay someone to do it for me. Keen to earn the money, he is very happy to do it – but has no idea where anything goes. For the time being at least, he is low
skill but high will. Both these things can be improved – skill through training and will through coaching – but in the final analysis, the leader wants people allocated to tasks where
they are both high skill and high will. To these people, he can delegate with confidence. And delegation means you can almost forget about the task until it is done – or at least be checking
in only occasionally, to encourage and be informed.

O’Neill admits that, like a surprising number of leaders, delegation isn’t something he always finds easy: ‘The people around me would probably tell you I am not the greatest
delegator in the world. For me it’s a matter of trust – and part of that trust is in their sheer ability to do the job. Delegation has always been difficult for me, but I’ve
learnt over time to trust especially my close colleagues, Steve, John and the team, to do in my absence a job in a way that I would be happy with.’

A lot of a football leader’s daily delegation is done in the specialist areas: logistics, medical, analysis. Hope Powell puts it neatly: ‘I trust them to do a good job and if they
say to me, “Hope, I think this,” then I will listen. I’ll make the final decision, but I trust their knowledge enough to take it very seriously. If a medic says that a player
should only play for 60 minutes, well – I’m not a medic, so if he’s telling me that’s the case then I have to respect that.’ Acknowledging your team’s expertise
that complements your own skill set is important for the smooth running of your leadership team and for your own successful decision-making.

Another component of the art of delegation is knowing what
not
to delegate. There is an economic principle that translates into leadership: that leaders should ‘only do what only
they can do’. In other words, focus on the things that no one else can do. This principle allows Allardyce to delegate effectively to his team of experts: ‘I employ coaches to coach,
not to carry balls and put out bibs and cones.’ He defines his own role as leading his team of close colleagues, and making selective coaching interventions: ‘I spend my time meeting
with other members of staff and making decisions on a daily basis, then going out working with the coaches and still doing some coaching myself. I refuse to be a megalomaniac and do their jobs as
well as mine – so I make a sacrifice and let go of what I like doing the most, i.e. working with the players. But I won’t sacrifice that 100 per cent. I still think it’s important
to keep that personal link with the team.’

For O’Neill, results are what a manager lives or dies by, but just as significant is ongoing recruitment and watching potential new recruits for the squad: ‘Getting young players
through from the academy might take three, four or five years, and in the meantime you have to be on the search for improvement in the playing side. No matter how many times somebody would report
that this player is really good and we should do something about it, I need to see a player at least once in a live game before I make a decision on him.’ Alex McLeish also takes pride in his
deep knowledge of players’ skills – and not just his own players: ‘I’ve always been a bit of an anorak in knowing my players, but since I’ve come to England [with the
bigger league] I’ve learned to trust the advice of other coaches and scouts. However, I still find it important to take a good look myself at any player before he joins the team. If
we’re looking at a player individually and I’ve got a scout or assistant manager I trust and he comes back and says to me “sign him” – I’ve done that in the past
and I’ve regretted it. Unless it’s a household name like a Zidane, then you have to know what you are taking in.’

Expressing your personality

An important observation made by many managers is how their leadership team essentially bears their signature. A team is known by its leader – just watch how the press and
cameras pick out the manager at every significant moment in the life of his team. The leadership team should be intimately involved in formulating the vision and goals of the team, but once the
leader’s philosophy is articulated, they need to faithfully convey it. Martin Jol is clear on this point: ‘Half of my work is on the pitch, and the other half is with the staff. So
it’s important that the staff understand my philosophy. I want them to deliver their expertise, but that must be in line with my philosophy.’ His former close colleague Chris Hughton
echoes the principle: ‘It’s really important that we have a coaching staff that leads by example and creates an environment around my personality. My style is to offer people some
flexibility. So if a lad runs out two minutes late with his boots undone and gives the excuse that he had to go to the toilet, then we look around the rest of the players and ask, “What do we
do? Do we fine him or let him off?” We are being professional, but also creating warmth between the players and the staff.’

The special case of the captain

The captain is an appointment made by the manager and a position often held for a long period of time – typically more than a single season. Managers vary as to how they
use their captain – the responsibilities they assign and the performance they expect. But invariably they select someone with leadership qualities, who can act as a decision-maker on the
pitch and an authoritative influence in the dressing room. In this way, some managers see them as a full part of the leadership team. Roberto Mancini defines the captain as ‘the player who
has respect from all the other players; who creates a team spirit’. He also points out that he seeks six or seven players with a captain’s mentality. Hoddle agrees almost word for word.
Even when he was player-manager at Swindon and Chelsea, he appointed a team captain. ‘What I want is five or six good leaders, one of whom has got the armband. The captain is important to the
rest of the players because they go through the captain to the leadership team. When you are a manager and not a player-manager, that captain has to be an extension of your management. He goes on
the pitch while we go to the sidelines. But you need a character, you need the players to respect him.’

For the leader of a complex team facing a daunting challenge, the high-performing leadership team needs to be made up of people you can trust and will probably be founded on a core of people you
know well. They need to support you and challenge you, you must be comfortable delegating to them, as ultimately they will carry your signature.

Building the Environment

Once assembled, the leadership team needs to create a high-performing playing team. This is why Allardyce calls it ‘the team behind the team’. The work is a
combination of art and science – some things can be prescribed, others are intuitive. At its essence, it involves role modelling and coaching the mindsets and behaviours needed from the
playing team. But even before the leadership team can fashion the playing team itself, they must first focus on building an environment for success.

When British swimmer Adrian Moorhouse arrived at Berkeley, California in the mid-1980s to begin training for the Olympic pool, the first thing he saw was a large sign, high up, that read:
‘This is an environment where success is inevitable.’ Allardyce believes creating this environment is very much the role of the leadership team: ‘The team has to deliver the
philosophy you have so as to create a successful environment that people enjoy working in and that people don’t want to leave as quickly as they possibly can. I want an environment where they
want to stay and improve themselves as much as possible.’ Gérard Houllier agrees: ‘In creating the environment in which you are going to work, the first thing to get right is the
staff: make sure that the team behind the team is competent and that they have a very positive attitude because that attitude will influence the players and create the atmosphere. The leadership
team needs to infuse confidence, trust and positivity into the club.’

If the leadership team is to take on the responsibility for inspiring the players, then they need to be inspired themselves. Allardyce does this through dreams: ‘I believe in living your
dreams. I won’t call them goals – that undermines what a dream is. Not too many people in life can actually fulfil their dreams. We are very fortunate in professional football. If you
get into the game as a youngster, you have already started to fulfil one of your wildest dreams. And although there is hard work – you are getting paid for it! When I moved from playing to
managing, I felt like I was putting something back into the game that I loved. I wanted to dream dreams for others, and inspire them to pursue great things. I had to make sure it was reachable,
this dream – and I wanted to share it with just a close family. This family for me was the group of staff I assembled at Bolton.’