Ego, power, control: Why it matters if youre called manager or head coach

A sporting director is recalling a conversation with a Premier League head coach about salaries.

“I’m like, ‘So and so wants a new contract, do you want to keep him?’.

“‘He’s a good player, he’s part of my plans’.

“I’ll say, ‘OK, great. Do you want to know what he’s on and what he’s asked for?’. In the early days, he would. I’d say, ‘He’s asked for 50 grand a week’.

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“‘FIFTY GRAND A WEEK?!’.”

He breaks into laughter at the absolute disbelief in the head coach’s voice. “So now he doesn’t really want to know about the finances,” the sporting director adds, smiling.

That the man picking the team can opt in or out of those sort of discussions is a sign of just how much the job has changed from the days when managers would be expected to master the art of negotiating — Sir Alex Ferguson dedicates a section to that in one of this books — as well as the best formation to pick on a Saturday.

The emergence of the sporting director role has taken a lot of that wider responsibility, workload and stress away from managers and, in many respects, paved the way for a new generation of “head coaches” to be appointed in English football. At least that is the perception.

In reality, there are more managers (11) than head coaches (nine) in the Premier League and there is not necessarily a correlation when it comes to the sporting director model.

All of which muddies the water somewhat when it comes to working out the answer to a question that has resurfaced in recent weeks on the back of a couple of appointments: what is the difference between a head coach and a manager?

To give some context, last week Steve Bruce (previously the head coach at Newcastle United) became West Bromwich Albion’s first “manager” since Tony Mowbray left more than a decade ago. A fortnight earlier, the Pozzo family, who had appointed 13 head coaches at Watford since sacking Sean Dyche in 2012, decided to go down a different route with Roy Hodgson.

“I had the feeling I’d be given the title ‘head coach’, to be frank,” Hodgson said, shortly after being named Watford’s first manager in the Pozzo era. “That goes to show how much that aspect interests me. I’ve had lots of titles (around the world) but as long as the people above me see me as the man they are entrusting to look after the team, the coaching and tactics, and prepare the team for games, as far as I’m concerned I really don’t care.”

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Some do care — a lot. Ego is a word that quickly crops up in a conversation on this subject with someone who has worked alongside the biggest names in the game. The idea that the job is significantly different depending on whether the person in the dugout is a head coach or a manager is dismissed almost in the same breath.

Instead, the talk is of the message that being a “manager” sends to the dressing room, about the perception the title creates within other areas in the club and, perhaps more than anything else, the impression it gives to the outside world that the person in charge has control and autonomy.

Mauricio Pochettino’s time at Spurs is an interesting case study, bearing in mind he started as head coach in 2014 then changed to manager two years later. “We are agreed that it would be good, for myself, for the club, for all,” Pochettino said in 2016, reflecting on his new status. “It’s true that ‘manager’ is a word that means different things than head coach. Maybe I was always manager, from the first day I arrived here, and maybe it describes my job better.”

There is a strong belief that Pochettino had pushed for that recognition and was rewarded because of the progress that the team made under his watch (Spurs did something similar with Martin Jol many years before). But did being a “manager” really make any difference? A new title went up on Pochettino’s office door, yet on the face of it there was no discernible change to his role.

In fact, three years later, on the back of a victory over Real Madrid in pre-season and a growing sense of exasperation with Tottenham’s activity in the transfer market, Pochettino snapped and said that his title should go back to head coach.

“I am not in charge and I know nothing about the situation of my players. I am only coaching them and trying to get the best from them,” he said. “Sell, buy players, sign contract, not sign contract — it is not in my hands, it’s in the club’s hands and (chairman) Daniel Levy. The club need to change my title and description. Of course I am the boss deciding the strategic play, but in another area, I don’t know. Today, I feel like I am the coach.”

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Four months later, Pochettino was neither manager nor head coach.

Mikel Arteta (Arsenal), Dyche (Burnley), Patrick Vieira (Crystal Palace), Frank Lampard (Everton), Brendan Rodgers (Leicester), Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool), Pep Guardiola (Manchester City), Ralf Rangnick (Manchester United), Ralph Hasenhuttl (Southampton), Hodgson (Watford) and David Moyes (West Ham United) make up the Premier League’s managerial XI.

“The only thing I would say is that you need to look under the skin of what the manager is there to do,” Mike Rigg, who worked for Burnley as technical director before holding similar positions at Fulham, Queens Park Rangers and Manchester City, tells The Athletic. “Because we could end up getting caught up in the semantics of the title, rather than clarity on the actual roles and responsibilities. They might call him the manager because the British are besotted with ‘We need the manager!’.

“In Germany, they’re called trainers. Around the rest of Europe they’re called coaches — that’s what they want them to do, come in and get the best out of the team: be on the pitch and coach.

“But what’s happened here, historically, is we’ve grown up with this world of the manager, which has been revered and loved by media and fans alike. We’ve almost had this desperate need for this individual hero leader — one person who comes in and sorts out all the problems.”

Although that narrative still exists to an extent, it is simply impossible for a manager to run a football club from top to bottom in the modern era — not that it stops people from trying.

“I have worked with a few people who have gone, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to have to worry about all these other things in the club, the academy, recruitment — I want to be responsible for working with the first team and getting the best out of it’,” Rigg adds. “I’ve also had the opposite where they’ve come in and said, ‘I want to be the manager of the club and have control over everything’, and it’s become a conversation about power and control. But this isn’t about power and control — this is about doing the best thing for the club.”

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What is clear now is that there is an expectation from owners, chairmen and sporting directors that the manager or head coach (the title is irrelevant on this point) will be out on the grass every day, rather than leaving training sessions largely to his backroom staff.

The role has evolved in that respect, yet some old habits die hard. There are owners and chairmen in England who still attach great significance to the title of “manager” and for that reason alone would not consider appointing a “head coach”. That the manager has little or no control over transfers and contract re-negotiations, or anything else away from coaching and picking the first team, is neither here nor there.

A senior figure at one Premier League club talks about tradition (from a broader as well as a club point of view) playing a large part in that kind of thinking and also the idea that the title of manager will give whoever is in post more authority. He also makes the point that managing the players day to day is as important as coaching them on the training pitch. On top of that, there are staff to manage too — and not just the manager’s inner circle.

In the case of Watford and Hodgson, it is understood that part of the reason for his job title was, quite simply, to show that he is the man in charge. Gino Pozzo, the owner, is the ultimate decision-maker at Watford but Hodgson, so the theory goes, will be able to run things his way. The proof will be in the pudding on that one.

For others in and around the game, and certainly those who knew exactly what the job entailed in the past, it is hard not to be sceptical about the word “manager” these days. “A manager is someone who involves himself in almost everything that is going on at the club. That is finished now,” David Pleat, the former Luton, Leicester, Spurs and Sheffield Wednesday manager, tells The Athletic.

“I was a manager at Luton, 100 per cent. I did everything at Luton, it was a small club and I knew everybody. They relied on me. And they were decent to me as well. But I don’t think there are any ‘managers’ now, are there? Maybe Klopp.

“Dyche might be a little bit (too), because he’s ingrained and he’s English and he’s eight years there (at Burnley). He would probably attend board meetings. Some of these coaches wouldn’t attend board meetings. ‘What’s that got to do with us?’.”

In September 2020, Arsenal released a story, and a video interview alongside it, to explain why Arteta’s job title had changed from head coach to first-team manager. Unai Emery, Arteta’s predecessor, had previously been appointed head coach — a shift in the wake of the departure of Arsene Wenger as manager as Ivan Gazidis, the chief executive at the time, continued to usher the club towards a more continental structure. But Arsenal were about to go back to what they knew.

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After praising Arteta for steering the club through “probably the most challenging nine months in Arsenal’s history”, the chief executive Vinai Venkatesham said that the Spaniard “was doing much more than being our head coach from the day he walked through the door”.

Accordingly, Arteta would now be called the manager. “That’s recognition of what he’s been doing but also where we see his capabilities. He is doing a great job of coaching the first team and that’s his primary responsibility, but there is so much more that he can bring and that’s why we’re making this change, in recognition of his capabilities and also the job that he’s doing already.”

Venkatesham went on to explain how Arteta would work in partnership with Edu, the club’s technical director, to manage other areas of the football operations at Arsenal, including analysis, recruitment, high performance and medical. “They’ll also together be responsible for our technical recommendations, whether that’s players that we’re going to buy, whether that’s players that we’re going to sell, whether that’s players that we’re going to loan,” Venkatesham explained.

It was — and remains — an intriguing development, not least because of the growing realisation that Arteta has power and autonomy to go with the title. Although Edu leads negotiations on transfers and player exits at the club, the message from those close to those talks is that everything has to be deferred to Arteta, so much so that some wonder who is in charge of who in that working relationship.

The decision to revert to a manager, rather than retain the head coach model, came about shortly after Raul Sanllehi left his position as head of football, and although the extent to which Arteta pushed to be given a new title is unclear, it is understood that he was enthusiastic about the change.

Senior figures in and around Arsenal, including Sanllehi, were known to be surprised by that decision and, in some cases, had major reservations about Arteta taking on the role, largely because they were concerned that it would leave him exposed and place greater responsibility on his shoulders than necessary.

Arteta, however, seems to have embraced the fact that he is now operating from a position of greater strength when it comes to his influence across a club where the owners (the Kroenke family) are renowned for delegating power to those on the ground.

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The manner in which Arteta handled Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s exit, including his comments on Wednesday in response to the striker’s remarks about him — “The way I see myself in that relationship is the solution, not the problem”, the Arsenal manager said — felt telling.

What works for Arteta or the Kroenkes at Arsenal will not, however, work for managers and owners everywhere else. Rigg makes the point that little about the way football operates is one-size-fits-all and that is especially true when it comes to job titles, which can be nothing more than some letters on the front of a door.

Indeed, it is quite plausible that a head coach at one Premier League club could have more control and power than a manager at another. “One hundred percent,” Rigg says. “It’s all to do with clarity of purpose with what the owners want.

He smiles. “The devil is in the detail.”

(Top image: Sam Richardson for The Athletic)

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