A few weeks ago, academy-graduate Matthew Pennington signed a professional contract with Everton. The official announcement on the club’s website pointed out that, remarkably for someone at a dedicated football academy, Pennington had also been awarded ten A* grades at GCSE. But when asked about his academic achievements, he insisted that football had always come before his grades. ‘Hopefully,’ he said, ‘I won’t need them at all and I can make a career in the game’. Obviously he does not believe that education can contribute to his career in football, something that might well be true as long as we are talking about time spent as a player. Being able to mathematically determine what proportion of Brendan Roger’s face is made up of nose will obviously not help Pennington become a 20-goal-a-year-striker (especially as he is a defender).
But what about when his playing
career is over? Let’s say Pennington wants to make the transition from player
to manager as seamlessly as Alan Shearer - will an education not come in handy
there? On the surface there are few areas of a manager’s job that do not look
like they would benefit from the skills gleaned from an education. We as a
society value education not for the specific knowledge that it imparts, but for
the broader proficiencies that come with it: it helps us to express ourselves
effectively, think critically and logically and to understand the complexities
of the world around us. All of this has obvious relevance to the career of a
manager. They are at the helm of extremely rich and popular businesses. Many play
a central role in directing the investment of capital on new players, and every
manager is the most important point of media contact between the club and the
outside world. If you look outside of the football industry, anyone else who
occupies a similar position of importance in finance or
public relations is expected to be highly educated and trained in their area of
expertise
I know what you are thinking. But what about Harry Redknapp? For those
of you that don’t know, dirty ‘arry is currently the manager of the
recently-relegated Queen’s Park Rangers. He has had a long and patchily-successful
managerial career, presiding over the ruination of Portsmouth as a footballing
institution at his worst and taking Tottenham Hotspur to the Champion’s League and setting himself up as bookies’ favourite for the
England job as his best. This career is no more or less illustrious than the
vast majority of working managers, suggesting that Harry is, at the very least,
competent. But then, in 2012, Harry stunned the world with his in-court
arguments against charges of tax fraud. His defense, in a nutshell, was utter
incompetence. In his own words he ‘writes like a two year old’ and ‘can’t
spell’. Neither can he work a computer or send a text. As a result he ‘doesn’t
keep anything’ and at work ‘couldn’t even fill a team sheet in’. He also told
the court that he was a terrible investor of money, losing 250,000 pounds of
his own money when ‘persuaded… at very short notice… to buy [shares in]
Oxford United’. So, this man was
entrusted with control of a club worth roughly 300 million
pounds when he openly admits he is a terrible businessman, unable to communicate
through standard long distance methods and not capable of even basic tasks
like filling out a bit of paper with his player’s names on it. I don’t need to
expand on how absurd that is or how a man like that would not be allowed
anywhere near a PR or finance job in the real world.
Or do
I? When I say ‘Harry stunned the world’, I’m lying. It caused nothing like the
stir it ought to have, and, though Harry was out of work at the time, he was quickly
hired as a manager at a new club. I know. Mad. So why does no one care that
Harry has these obvious deficiencies? Why was no one surprised?
Harry wonders who he can persuade to write his team sheet
The
answer lies in a widespread belief in the footballing world that the only
preparation you need to be a manger is ‘a footballing education’. The idea is
that you can pick up all the skills needed to manage through playing football
and watching your manager at work. If, as a player, you never learned to read
and write, well these are obviously not skills a manager needs! In fact, this
is such a strongly-held view that it is actually very difficult to get a job as
a manager if you haven’t played football at a high level. The only problem is
that it’s obviously not true. A squad needs to have absolute faith in the
manager’s decisions and to obey his commands unthinkingly. Thus it is vital
that a manager keeps his players completely separate from the decision-making
process and even discourages independent thought on managerial matters - if
players were party to things like transfer policy it could obviously have a
serious effect on their performance. So, if this is true, how is it possible
for a player to learn anything
meaningful from their manager? Analogy exposes the
absurdity of the idea – would you employ a builder as an architect because he
claimed to have worked with Brunel? In fact, a footballing career is, in many ways, a bad starting point for a managerial career, especially in regards to money, because the culture that surrounds footballers is fundamentally detrimental to their ability to deal with their finances (as Timothy Kennet discusses in a forthcoming article on bankruptcy).
So, if
this is as obviously false as I claim, why do so many chairmen swallow it and
appoint people who are obviously not qualified for the roles they fulfil? A
slightly uncharitable explanation is that most chairmen are too stupid to know
any better. Stupid is unfair; not stupid, but, like the managers they appoint,
fundamentally unsuited the role they fulfil. Remember, anyone can buy a
football club – the only ‘qualification’ they need is a hatful of money.
Normally, the assumption is that this money is indicative of a high level of
business acumen in some area of life that can be transferred across to the
successful running of a club. This again is clearly not correct, no one
appoints a toothpaste magnate to the head of their Hollywood studio; different
industries require a completely different set of skills - none more than
football. Case in point is Mr Fernandes,
proud owner of budget airline AirAsia, who funded an insane spending spree at
his newly-promoted club QPR to try and keep them in the premiership. He
sanctioned the spending of nearly 70
million pounds on transfers in 2011/12 and 2012/13 season, mainly on older
players with no resale value and high wages. They were promptly relegated at
the end of last year with a shamefully low points score and are in a messy
financial situation in the significantly less-profitable Championship. He is
also the man who hired Harry Redknapp.
Fernandes,
to his credit, recently came out and admitted that in some ways he had ‘could
have done it better’. However, he then went on to claim that the reason for the
relegation of his team was that he had not spent enough time directly involved
in the running of his business compared to the time he spends at his aviation
company - ‘If I spent… every day at Loftus Road [the QPR ground], I dare say it
would have been a bit different’. Unfortunately, I worry it wouldn’t have made
a lick of difference; as long as Mr Fernandes equates the football business
with the aviation business he is going to make no progress whatsoever. He needs
to recognise that it is an industry in its own right and approach it as such.
How can a self-admitted amateur be expected to hire the best person to do an
extremely technical job?
Further
evidence that chairmen are not able to exercise the appropriate judgement in
the area of managerial appointments comes when we look at the early career of
Redknapp’s successor at Tottenham, André Villas-Boas. In 2010 the young manager
submitted an application for the vacant managerial post at Burnley which was
described by chief executive Paul Fletcher as ‘Amazing. Even by today’s standards there was some complicated stuff in it,
with some things that I didn’t understand.’ But Burnely
turned him down. The club was relegated at the end of the season whilst AVB went on
to have an undefeated treble winning year at Porto, his next team. And why was he
turned down? Fletcher explained it this way: ‘Tommy Docherty used to say he
never said anything to his players his milkman wouldn’t understand. I don’t
think any milkman would fathom the meaning of a lot of André’s presentation.’
Perhaps thirty years ago, when Docherty was in his prime, football was a very
different place, a place in which all a manager had to do was to explain simple
tactics in babytalk to his players. However, in today’s footballing world that
is simply not an acceptable selection criterion for a role as complicated,
multifaceted and demanding as managing a football club. The idea that someone
as woefully as unqualified as Redknapp managed to sneak into a managerial
position no longer seems all that surprising.
Harry and André embrace
But you
know what? I’m not even convinced that Harry Redknapp is that unqualified. The truth is that I absolutely don’t buy the
defence of incompetence that he gave in court - there is just no way a man like that could survive in a footballing
institution. Recently, Everton gave the world a peek at the ferociously complex
and comprehensive scouting network that served their now ex-manager David Moyes[1].
Sure, Moyes is commonly considered to be ahead of the curve when it comes to
the thoroughness of his managerial style, but I would be amazed if other clubs
didn’t have similar systems in place. When you remember that this is just one
small part of what a manager does you realise how vast their responsibilities
are. Even Harry must be hard working, capable of processing vast amounts of
information and able to communicate effectively. So why present himself as an
ignoramus? Obviously not wanting to be convicted of tax fraud was part of it, but I
believe that this incident is actually part of a wider trend. The sad fact is
that presenting yourself as an idiot is actually no bad thing in football – it
may even be a positive attribute (in the footballing culture of the United
Kingdom at least).
Let me
explain. One of the reasons football is so fantastically popular is that most
of the people involved present themselves as no different from the average man.
If he looks no cleverer or more talented than you as a supporter there is
nothing to stop you disagreeing with him and even coming up with your own (apparently)
equally informed solutions to his problems. This is why football is such an
easy thing to talk about and spawns so many discussions in the pub. Only in
football do we have supporter organisations of such vast size and with such
strongly held views, and only in football do chairman with no qualifications feel
in a position to make important decisions. Unlike entertainment industries in
which you are supposed to sit back and admire superior talent, football
encourages the supporter to imagine himself as a part of it. By cultivating a
false atmosphere of accessibility, football has become as close to interactive
as any fixed consumer activity ever has. No wonder, therefore, that managers
who refuse to join in with this semblance are criticised for being cold and
inexcusably arrogant. But realistically, these men do an extremely complicated
job; those that do it well have every right to refuse to pretend to be no
better than the average supporter. So I don’t for a second accept Harry’s
self-presentation.
But
what does this all mean in relation to education and managers, should they be
well educated? Well yes and no. They absolutely do need the skills mentioned
earlier that are granted by education, no doubt about it, but they don’t
necessarily need to obtain them in that way. It is notable that most uneducated managers devoted large amounts
of free time in their playing days to developing these talents though other
avenues: looking for extra responsibility within the team, investing their own
money and participating in the club’s PR programmes. The only difference
between these men who have worked hard to educate themselves and their more
formally educated co-workers are that they may find it easier to portray
themselves as the average man they are not. But I don’t for a second think
there is anyone as fundamentally incompetent as Harry pretends to be working in as a manager in
the Premiership. Chairmen, on the other hand, are definitely
idiots.
[1]
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/scouting-system-that-reveals-david-moyes-mind-8756011.html
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