As ‘managers’ disappear from the Premier League, are clubs really better for it?

Back in 2004, Arsenal had just won their second Premier League title in three years. More important, though, was what they didn’t do: lose. Twenty-plus years later, the Invincibles are still the only Premier League team to survive a full season without a single defeat.

They’re also the last Arsenal team to win the Premier League — in large part because of what happened after that historic season. Construction began on London’s first-ever spaceship, the Emirates Stadium. Although the intimacy of 35,000-person Highbury was beloved by fans, a new 60,000-person stadium was supposed to unlock a new level of revenue that would allow the Gunners to continue to compete with the commercial giants at Manchester United and the Russian oligarch who’d just bought Chelsea.

Unlike in the United States, the idea of a publicly funded stadium would’ve caused a riot, so the club had to find a way to pay for their new digs. Since every club that’s trying to win trophies has to reinvest the majority of its revenue back into player wages, Arsenal had to take out a $350 million loan from the bank. And since Arsenal suddenly had to pay off the interest on a loan that cost four times the then-world-record fee Real Madrid paid to acquire Zinedine Zidane from Juventus, the Gunners had to stop spending so much money on players.

You’ll never guess what happened next: Arsenal got worse. They finished second in the following season, but never got that high again until 2015-16, and even that felt hollow since the team that finished ahead of them was tiny Leicester City. So diminished were the club’s expectations that manager Arsene Wenger infamously said, “The first trophy is to finish in the top four,” after a 2-0 loss to Sunderland in the FA Cup in 2012.

This was all his fault, too. Thanks to his success since arriving in 1996, Wenger had control over everything at Arsenal. And we know this because he told us in 2017: “Some coaches are only interested in managing the team and they are happy with it. I am not like that, so I cannot change myself now.” The Frenchman decided who Arsenal signed and he decided who got on the field and he decided how they’d try to play. But that’s not why he’s to blame for the club’s decline after the undefeated season.

No: such was Wenger’s influence on everything that happened at Arsenal that the banks refused to loan Arsenal the money for the Emirates unless the club could guarantee that he’d remain the manager for another five years. The Gunners, essentially, used their powerful manager as collateral to pave the way for a future that suddenly doesn’t seem too far away: one where powerful managers no longer exist.

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The death of the manager

Managers, head coaches — call them what you want — have mostly always been hopeless figures.

In basketball, coaches are constantly making substitutions and drawing up new plays whenever there’s a timeout. They’re actively affecting what happens on the court. In American football, coaches are literally designing the game. An offensive coach picks a play, a defensive coach picks a play, the center hikes the ball to the quarterback, and all of the players on the field act out their individual orders.

In soccer, the coaches now have five subs — and even then, they’re still not really using player-changes in anything close to the optimal way. Instead, they just kind of stand there, in their “dress sneakers,” just-too-tight black pants and tech-performance jackets, trying to conduct an orchestra that either can’t hear them or doesn’t want to listen. Once the ball gets kicked off, the players play. All the gesticulating, whistling and stressed-out interpretive dances you see a given coach doing on a given Saturday — it has next-to-no effect on what’s actually happening on the field.

Historically, managers had their biggest impact by making large-scale changes outside of what actually happened on the field. At Arsenal, much of Wenger’s success was driven by the fact that he trusted foreign players more than any other manager in the league. This allowed the club to sign superstars like Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira without much competition from anyone else in England.

Wenger was the first coach in league history to select an entirely non-English starting 11. He was also the first coach to tell his players that it might make sense to start taking care of their bodies.

“When Arsene arrived, he changed things,” Vieira told me back in 2018. “You weren’t allowed to eat chips with brunch. You weren’t allowed the butter. You were doing all the stretching. He’d bring a nutritionist to make us understand how important it is to eat properly.”

Combine those two factors with Wenger’s preference for a more attacking, fluid style of play and Arsenal’s general financial advantage over most of the Premier League, and you get most of the way to understanding why his team was so good.

It was a similar story with Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United. He’s perhaps the greatest manager of all time — and none of that has anything to do with how he revolutionized the use of the double pivot, or some visionary understanding of cover-shadows and half-spaces. (He had assistants to worry about that.) No, his United were so successful because he was one of the few coaches in any sport who worried about anything beyond winning the next game.

“Although I was always trying to disprove it, I believe that the cycle of a successful team lasts maybe four years, and then some change is needed,” he told the Harvard Business Review in 2012. “So we tried to visualize the team three or four years ahead and make decisions accordingly.” He added: “The goal was to evolve gradually, moving older players out and younger players in.”

Ferguson had an innate understanding of the length of a player’s prime — four years — and when it typically started. Analysis from the Harvard Business Review found that Ferguson’s United signed a higher proportion of players under the age of 25 than any of their closest competitors.

United had more money than anyone in England, and they had a coach who better understood the patterns of player performance and what drives long-term success than anyone else. On top of that, he also had a better understanding of the competitive incentives — that a win is worth three-times as many points as a draw. His team specifically practiced for the moments when they needed to chase games, and he would always make aggressive subs if the match was tied or they were losing.

“I am a gambler, a risk-taker, and you can see that in how we played in the late stages of matches,” he said. Over his final 10 seasons, United won more points than any other club in matches that were tied with 15 minutes remaining.

United won 13 Premier League titles in 26 seasons under Ferguson because they were the richest team in England, and the guy who made all the decisions understood age curves, knew that you needed to behave differently if you wants long-term success, and focused his efforts on the specific moments where his coaching could actually influence the outcome of a game.

Unfortunately, none of these methods would work today because everyone knows about diet, that not all of the best soccer players are born on a tiny island in the north Atlantic, and that players peak in their early to mid-20s. Plus, the clubs Wenger and Ferguson took over were soccer teams that happened to make some money. Now, they’re more like gigantic businesses that have soccer teams attached to them.

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The rise of the head coach

In the 1997-98 season, the earliest for which the accounting firm Deloitte has published data, Manchester United brought in €132.4 million of revenue. They were the richest club in the world. Fast-forward to today and Real Madrid’s world-leading revenues are €1.61 billion.

These teams are corporations, not clubs, and most of their owners treat them that way. Outside of the handful of sovereign-wealth funds that don’t care about revenues and just want their teams to win because of the cultural benefits they get from being attached to winning clubs, a growing number of Premier League clubs are owned by a growing number of American or American-like groups of finance-types who bought the clubs because they saw it as a way to diversify their investments and make more money.

And let’s say you were running a corporation that needed to provide value to some form of shareholders. Would you give an outsized amount of power — in terms of both short- and long-term decision-making — to an individual whose average job tenure lasted just over a year? Of course not, and as James Olley wrote about recently, the average manager in England lasts only 1.42 years in his position.

If we step out of the corporate mindset for a second and just focus on trying to win, then the dwindling power of the manager also makes sense.

If you had two clubs, with equal levels of revenue, support, and sway, which of these two would you put your money behind: the club where the manager coaches the team, controls the medical staff, and oversees all contract negotiations, scouting, player arrivals, and player departures? Or the club where the manager coaches the team and manages chemistry; the medical staff independently determines what kind of minutes load players can handle without their bodies breaking down; a world-class analytics team identifies undervalued players and provides probabilities of success for given transfer targets; a director of football is constantly projecting the state of the roster in the future, figuring out the trends in the transfer market, and negotiating player contracts well before they reach their final years; and all these different groups trust each other and make these decisions together?

It’s obviously the latter. And a version of that kind of structure is what took Liverpool from bordering-on-midtable mediocrity to becoming the best team in the world for long stretches of time. But even that power-balance proved tricky to maintain. Toward the end of Jurgen Klopp’s tenure, almost every key front-office decision-maker left the club. And it’s not a coincidence that many of them returned right after the Klopp left.

Most other clubs now want their own version of this hierarchy, where the coach fits into the decision-making structure, rather than building the decision-making structure around him. Look at how many coaches even have the term “manager” as their title today: just five of the 20 currently in the Premier League.

Most coaches, though, didn’t get into coaching because they wanted to integrate advice from the medical team, listen to data nerds, or tweak their tactical approach because it’s what someone in a suit told them to do.

When Ruben Amorim gave his final press conference as Manchester United manager, he said: “I came here to be the manager, not the coach.” The irony, of course, is that he was never even given the title of “manager.” At Chelsea, Enzo Maresca told us he didn’t feel “supported” by the club, and then plenty of reports emerged about his various problems with the club’s front-office meddling and his supposed unwillingness to listen to recommendations from the medical staff.

Both coaches were fired because they envisioned themselves as powerful managers, and both of their clubs don’t think that role even exists anymore. We’ll see who United hire next, but by hiring an inexperienced coach from what is essentially their farm team in France, Chelsea seem to be telling us that “doing what we tell you to do” is one of the main requirements for the guy on their sideline.

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The new future of Premier League management

It really does feels like we’ve finally hit an inflection point, where what coaches and clubs expect from each other are no longer aligned — at all. So what might happen next?

There are a number of big-name coaches who will be wrapping up the main requirements of their current gigs this summer. Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, and Julian Nagelsmann are all currently coaching national teams who will be at the World Cup, and they theoretically should be in-demand for all of the top club jobs if they decide to leave after the tournament.

But if Amorim and Maresca — two inexperienced managers with no track record of any success at the highest level — couldn’t handle their lack of power, then why wouldn’t bigger name coaches with much more impressive resumes have the same kinds of issues?

At Manchester City, Pep Guardiola is closer to the traditional ideal of the manager than anyone else coaching one of the richest clubs in the world. And he’s unlikely to be at the club for more than another full season. But if he leaves, the most likely outcome isn’t that Manchester City give the next coach as much influence as Pep has. No, it’s that they hire someone that they don’t need to give as much power to.

Yet, as we’re seeing with so many of these new structures, there was an advantage to the consolidated power in the old manager model. There was no confusion about who was making the decisions, and it was easier to develop an identity when your identity was created because of the decisions made by one person.

Now, club structures are beginning to mirror the corporate bureaucracies that these new owners are used to working within. Chelsea, as Gab Marcotti pointed out recently, have eight sporting directors — eight! Tottenham finally realized maybe they should only have one. And at Manchester United, the balance of responsibilities within the hierarchy seems to change every couple of days.

And so, in trying to streamline the inefficiency of allowing one guy to do five different jobs, these clubs have simply put a new kind of inefficiency in its place. Almost none of them have actually had success with this new model, either, which creates an awkward, weekly situation: a coach who’s been more successful than any of his bosses has to sit in front of the media and answer questions about a bunch of decisions that he didn’t make.

Perhaps, then, it’s fitting where this Premier League season is likely to end up, with Arsenal winning its first title since the Invincibles did it.

When Wenger left Arsenal, he wasn’t replaced by a manager. The club named Unai Emery the “head coach” and when that didn’t work out, they replaced him with another head coach. The club’s operations staff ballooned in size after Wenger left, and they made a bunch of terrible decisions.

Today, the approach to making decisions appears to be a little more streamlined, if still much more modern than it was in the Highbury days. There are representatives from ownership, there’s the sporting director, and then there’s Mikel Arteta. He was hired as a head coach and, eventually, promoted to the role of manager.