The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (20 page)

His skill at handling genius became apparent during his first spell at Chelsea, where he struck up a series of friendships that anchored an array of world-class talent. He arrived at Stamford
Bridge aged only 41: a comparatively small age difference from his players. ‘In terms of mentality, I’m not much older than them – I think I have the ability to put myself at
their level. I think it is important to understand. The more you understand them the more you can lead them – there is leadership and leadership, as you know. I never liked the leadership
where the boys say, “He’s my leader, I have to respect him.” I prefer them to say, “I respect him and he’s my leader.” It is a completely different thing. They
can say, “I do that because he tells me to do that and I have to.” I prefer them to say, “I believe in him so much, and trust him so much that everything he says I want to
do!” I prefer much more this kind of empathy.’

It is a commonly held belief in many cultures that friendship precludes effective leadership. But closeness to the players has always been a defining characteristic for Mourinho. ‘Of
course, many people say we can’t be friends with the players. I say exactly the opposite. If you are
not
friends with the players you do not reach the maximum potential of that
group. You have to be friends with them, but they have to understand that between friends the answer is never the answer they are expecting, or the answer they want to hear. They have to understand
that, but I think you have to be friends. I don’t understand some people that are afraid to be friends with them.’

The friendship approach involves regarding the players as peer colleagues – people who do a job every bit as important as yours. Mourinho gives an example of a symbolic action that betrays
very clearly the value a manager really attaches to his players: ‘A story from the past. I think there are two ways of travelling with the players in a plane: you travel having a business
class where everybody goes in business class, or if there is no space for everybody then the players go in business class and you go in economy class with your staff. If I go in business it’s
because they go. If there is no space for everybody else, I go behind them. Some time ago a coach arrived in a club and they travelled to pre-season and the first thing they did was to travel
executive for the manager and the staff with the players in economy. I was thinking, “Bad start” – and I was not wrong. One of the things you must remember as a leader is your
people are more important than you.’

There is a compelling humility about a leader who serves his people – and inspiration when he does it with confidence, unconcerned by any imbalance.

Walter Smith and Paul Gascoigne

Walter Smith believes in doing his homework: ‘When you sit down and you say, “I’m going for a player”, the pluses and minuses are there and you have to
understand the balance before you make a decision. It’s up to the manager to reduce the unexpected as much as possible.’

At Rangers, Smith chose Gazza – chose to bring him back after a time in the wilderness. ‘He’d been at Lazio for a few years and hadn’t played for maybe two and a half or
even three years, mainly through injury. So it was a matter of taking a chance with him, knowing that it was going to be a managerial challenge to try and get him back to his best. Because he was a
player who you knew if you were able to manage the genius, to handle it, and get the best out of him, then he would be good for your team. And the fans would love him, because genius stirs most
people.

‘I spoke first and foremost to Sir Bobby Robson and Terry Venables who had had him before and both were quite straightforward. They said, “If you can get him on your side then
you’ll have no problem getting him to play. You have to try and keep him on the straight and narrow all the time.” This was not the first time I’d had such a challenge in my
career, and their advice was right. I believe he felt I was supporting him and sticking up for him when necessary – and he would always play for me.’

Smith was excited by Gascoigne because of his sheer talent: ‘A lot of players that are exceptional learn about football as their careers go on. Paul Gascoigne was still the same player at
the end of his career as he was at the start. He was instinctive, he had a genius that allowed him to go on to the field and assess the situation and do things that other players couldn’t
do.’

Both Mourinho and Smith take material steps toward their talented charges. When they do so, imbalance – real or imagined – disappears and is replaced by commitment and
understanding.

Uniting, Not Damaging

If the leader gets it right, the team can flourish around a huge individual talent. Mourinho again takes a very simple approach: ‘The first objective is for the team to
succeed. For this to happen, the team must recognise that the special talent is crucial. Also, the special talent must understand two things: one is that the team is more important than himself,
and two is that he needs the team. For him to flourish, the team need to flourish too. I think that is very important – but for me that was very automatic. It was not something that I had to
work exhaustively on, absolutely not.’

Mourinho at Inter

When Mourinho arrived at Inter from Chelsea, he inherited a fascinating situation that could have spiralled downwards. ‘First of all there is the culture of the country,
the culture of the football of that country, and after that is the profile of the people you are working with. When I arrived at Inter I had I think 14 players who were more than 32 years old. I
had a team with 75 per cent of the guys in the last years of their careers, and with a history of frustration in European competition. This wasn’t just about not winning the Champions League
– it was also not even playing quarter-finals or semi-finals – it was a story of last 16 and out. At the same time I had a team that was dominant in Italian football, so a team that had
three or four consecutive titles in Italian football, but nothing outside.

‘My job was to try and create a team that was able to win the Champions League, but they had to understand that to make a team strong enough to win the Champions League (and that is 13
matches in a season), you have to be very strong in the other 47 matches. So the best way to motivate a team to win the Champions League was to keep winning domestic competitions. If we allow
ourselves to be afraid of the Champions League because we are not the best team, and if we focus too much on the Champions League, then we don’t win it. And we also don’t win the
Italian cup, and we also don’t win the Italian championship. And instead of the job becoming something extraordinary it becomes worse than they had before. So I had to go with the players in
just one direction: improvement. And when you are speaking about players near the end of their careers it is very difficult for them to improve individually. So we have just to focus on the team
improvement and let’s go and see where we can finish.’

Mourinho focused on uniting the genius at his disposal, creating for them a challenging, but realistic goal. At the end of his second season in charge, Inter won the UEFA Champions League
beating Bayern Munich 2–0 in the final. By winning the Italian league and cup, they also became the first ever Italian side to win the coveted treble.

Glenn Hoddle and Ruud Gullit

Glenn Hoddle was undoubtedly a gifted player in his own right. When he arrived at the pre-Abramovich Chelsea as manager in 1993, he was still playing. The Chelsea of that era
were not yet the European or even the national force they would become a decade later, and Hoddle set out to make a difference – not least by attracting major talent. ‘Ruud Gullit had
been World Soccer Player of the Year three years before I brought him across. He had played for AC Milan – and we were Chelsea! And it wasn’t the Chelsea of today – it was the
Chelsea of no money at all.

‘We had a big running track around Stamford Bridge – it wasn’t the most attractive of stadiums – so I made sure that Ruud didn’t go anywhere near the stadium or the
training ground! At the time if he’d seen that, I don’t think he would have signed, frankly. But Ruud was a smashing player so I took time to find out what he liked in his life outside
football. I wanted to be able to talk to him about things and show that I respected him, the talents that he had and what he’d achieved in football. But he also needed to know that I
couldn’t make a special case for him off the pitch. My message to him was, “Once you are on the pitch I want you to perform to the highest level you can – but the ethos of the
team has to come first.” Fortunately Ruud is a really solid guy. He knew his talent: he knew he was one of the best players in the world, but he has this real ability to laugh at himself. So
he was really easy to talk to and work with – but I didn’t know that when I first worked with him. Then, once we got on the training pitch with everyone else, I treated him just like
the others. If there was something to be said that he wasn’t doing right I would tell him. I told him what I wanted him to do for the team and he was absolutely first class, he was
brilliant.’

Hoddle invested time in getting to know the genius; then used the talent to unite the team. The model would work for him multiple times: ‘With other players, you might have a big problem
if they are arrogant – but for me the one-to-one approach always worked. I brought players into the team who had exceptional talent, and I knew they weren’t going to let me down on the
pitch, but you have to make them play within that team frame. The only way to get that balance is to spend time breaking through into that character and finding out more about him as a person. He
will then respect you in the end because the conversation will flow and you will end up opening yourself out to him and he to you. I even remember a couple of players who were really into
racehorses. I wouldn’t know one end of a racehorse from the other, but I started to look up a bit about racing and talk to them a bit about horses and suddenly it just broke barriers down. We
had something in common outside football that we could talk about, and I could see them change.’

Neil Warnock and Adel Taarabt

Neil Warnock was 62 and manager of QPR in the English Championship when he says he first encountered genius. He describes it as ‘the biggest plus of my career’.

‘In my first training session, the staff from the previous management team were there, telling me who was who. They pointed to this Adel Taarabt and told me, “This Moroccan guy
– he will get you the sack. The last two managers bombed him out as he never tried a leg, and you will too because otherwise he’ll get you the sack as well. He’s just a
luxury.” I watched the practice match and I could see what he had, and we didn’t have goals and I knew he would get us goals. There were only about 12 games left in the season, and we
needed to get to safety. I remember I pulled him over straight after the game. The conversation went something like this:

‘I did that and he did repay me. We stayed up and then I signed him permanently from Tottenham.’

Taarabt was a stunning success at QPR that season, and went on to become Football League player of the year. Indeed, in a calculated bid to get the most from his star midfielder at QPR, Warnock
decided to make him captain. He recalls, ‘The challenge for me then was to get all the other players on board that here we had a match winner, when on certain days of the week he looked like
he simply wasn’t trying. But I asked them to trust me when I said he would get us promotion to the Premier League, which would benefit everyone. I knew what this lad could do, and they came
on board. I told the five lads who could have been captain that they were really worthy captains, but if they went with my decision I might get another 20 per cent out of him, and that 20 per cent
would get us promoted.’

With Taarabt as captain, QPR went on to win the Championship. Warnock is rueful, but happy: ‘I had to change all my philosophies because he was a luxury at times. I had to change, even at
my age, because I never thought I would employ a player who didn’t give 100 per cent every game, every week. That’s how I thought football was, but I just felt there was something
special about him. And in his own way he was giving 100 per cent – just in an English way he wasn’t! He was born like that, he wanted to play football and caress the ball from when he
was a kid. To take him on board in the first place was the biggest thing, as I knew it was something most of the players wouldn’t want.’

And what about this whole question of integrating the genius into the team? ‘A player wants to know what his teammates are going to do. Everybody is a cog in the wheel. With Adel, you
didn’t know from one day to the next! If someone passed to him in our half, he’d just nutmeg an opponent and lose the ball in a dangerous place ... So we limited him. I banned everyone
from passing to him in our half and fined them if they did! And it worked so well. To see him named player of the year was a huge reward.’