BOOK OF THE DAY: The Manager: The Absurd Ascent of the Most Important Man in FootballBy Barney Ronay Sphere, 304pp, £12.99
FEW PEOPLE command as much respect as the football manager. The admiration afforded players is of the slack- jawed variety: we are awe-struck by their ability on the pitch and can only stare like dribbling loons at the feet of Messi or the power of Rooney. Off the pitch, though, in post-match interviews, their callow youth diminishes their aura and they become moneyed-up tearaways, easy prey for tabloid kiss and tell.
The manager, though, is (usually) above this. He wraps himself in the shroud of science and tactics. Some use their nous as a shield (Arsène Wenger, “the professor”, is almost unimpeachable); others cut such a stylish dash they unnerve teams into submission from the sidelines (does anyone else miss José Mourinho in the Premiership?).
There are those with enough experience to simply assert that victory is easily at hand with the merest flick of a substitute or a suitably explosive half-time team talk (the austere Alex Ferguson).
It wasn’t always so, though.
The manager began life as a scruffy necessary evil, the man who booked the bus for away games, collected footballs after training and turned the flood lights off after a muddy midweek game, a pawn for players and clubs to do their bidding.
It is here that Barney Ronay begins his book on the evolution of the modern football manager, in godforsaken backward boot rooms where pre-match preparation is a tot of whisky and training is a walk on local moors.
Ronay traces the grubby gaffer’s evolution to today’s terrifying sideline presence, armed with science, progress, cold hard cash and mercurial media savvy.
This is no empirical work. There is little discussion of tactics and systems, but what it lacks in forensic examination of the game’s mechanics, it compensates for with a glittering seam of anecdotes.
In fairness, Ronay’s source material is spectacular, from the earthy bluntness of Jock Stein, the playboy charm of Malcolm Allison and the easy affability of Jack Charlton, to the studied mind games of Ferguson and the bewildering antics of Peter Taylor.
Who remembers that Tommy Docherty was sacked for, in his words, “falling in love”? Bill Shankly is still a god at Anfield, but what of the mysterious power of the Anfield boot room, whose demise coincided with the erosion of Liverpool’s omnipotence ? And could all those Brian Clough stories be true? Ronay places all these tales in mindful context of their contemporary environment. Thus we have Major Buckley scandalising British society in the 1920s with his plus fours; Stein performing the ultimate hard- scrabble-town miracle in 1967 when Celtic beat Inter to become the first British team to win the European Cup, with a team drawn entirely from Glasgow and its suburbs; there’s the tackiness of 1980s Ron Atkinson, a Thatcherite model of management; then there is the complete model, personified, in Ronay’s eyes, by Wenger and Ferguson.
These characters take form against watershed moments in football, beginning with the 6-3 drubbing given to England by Hungary in November 1953.
As Ronay writes: “For English football, this was first contact. Abroad now existed. Not only was there intelligent life out there. It was hostile – and horribly advanced.” It would be decades, or more specifically 1996, when Wenger was given the job at Arsenal, before foreign thinking on the game would be welcomed.
This is an original, witty, deeply affectionate and stylish book, crackling with enthusiasm for the beautiful game. There is plenty of swagger, but beneath the gaudy training kit and impressive anecdotes, there is a thinking man’s level of research.
Ronay’s argument is that the rise of the billionaire owner will reduce the role of the manager right back to little more than club secretary. With the personalities at play and the passion he has described here, though, this would be a tragedy of Shakespearean, or worse, footballing, proportions.
Laurence Mackin is a freelance journalist