What is a manager?

MADRID, SPAIN – AUGUST 29: Head coach Jose Mourinho of Real Madrid reacts during the Supercopa second leg match betwen Real Madrid and FC Barcelona at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu on August 29, 2012 in Madrid, Spain.

A more appropriate interrogative question might be ‘Who is a manager?’, but let’s leave that aside for a while. Let’s talk about what exactly constitutes a football manager? What is his contribution to a team? What is his importance in this game? Is he the sun in a heliocentric system? Or is he just a Gucci clad man hired to attend all the press conferences and receive the blame for a bad game or season? What exactly makes Jose Mourinho ‘the special one’ and what makes most people classify Andre Villas Boas as a dud? The manager is no doubt a very important figure in a club, but are his contributions truly irreplaceable?

In support of managers, one can say that Inter Milan‘s and Chelsea‘s fortune’s changed completely with the removals of Jose and Andre. While Inter went from a Champions league winning team to a team that was in the middle of the league table, Chelsea went from a 3- 1 deficit against a rather unfancied Napoli to the team that claimed the Champions League after emerging victorious against the likes of Barcelona and Bayern Munich. The change in managers could be called a catalyst, correct? Incorrect! Whatever happened to teams with good managers that are still languishing in the middle of the table? Inter Milan had Rafael Benitez, a manager who is among the world’s best, but he had led them headfirst down to the 6th position, right? Porto finished at the top of the Portuguese league under Andre Villas Boas, so he can’t be an idiot either.

So to analyze the importance of the manager, this writer first delved into the very role of a manager, and figured out that it wasn’t the easiest of tasks to carry out. Each team’s manager played a very different role. Some managers are heavily involved in the team, with the money completely at their disposal, and each change in the team directly linked to a change of their fickle minds, while some managers aren’t there to call the shots, instead they are just a good looking face (while some lack that quality too!) present to address all the press conferences and take the blame for a bad patch. Some managers like Sir Alex Ferguson are as good as a second owner, while other owners are as good as a manager themselves.

Every team’s dependency on a manager’s shrewdness varies as well. While some managers adapt to survive, other managers are synonymous with a thought process, a flash of idea, if you can call it. For example, Barcelona didn’t go for any changes in their strategy, nor did they go for a major change in their formation ever since Pep Guardiola made one drastic change of making them kick the ball around till their opponents died of boredom. Neither did Chelsea try anything other than parking the bus last season after Di Matteo took over the reigns, although they are now trying to play a more attractive brand of football with more forward runs.

So perhaps, what each manager brings to a club is a new outlook, a new, radical idea from their own experiences. They might ask their owners, or take the initiative themselves to bring in players more suited to the strategy they wish to apply. They bring in coaches with more expertise in whatever skill they wish to polish and highlight. And some manager’s have strategies that are more suited to a particular crop of players or the in breaking through defences of the league their clubs are playing in. But a few managers have strategies that clicked well with a single club and don’t gel well with the other teams, resulting in personal failures.

At the end of the day, after the execution of all the strategies, after an adrenaline pumping session of clashing cleats, it’s all down to the players’ personal performances. Strategies might matter more than anything else in a game like chess. However, when football is concerned, nothing replaces the good old lungs and legs, no manager can ever program a Fantasy IX team that would win each game on the field as easily at it would appear on paper. What do you think?