Management (eBook)

Chapter One

The Master Race

How the pits, the shipyards and the mean streets created football’s great managers

Fear is one of the first things that comes to mind. The fear of being on the receiving end of a Fergie hairdryer. The fear, just as awful in its own way, of losing Busby’s approval and sensing you had disappointed him. The fear of being injured and knowing that you were no use to Shankly, to the point that he would ignore you if you passed him in the corridor. You didn’t exist to him until you were fit again. The fear of getting a Smith stare in the Rangers dressing room and feeling the temperature drop a few degrees. The fear of Stein, full stop.

The great Scottish football managers have never done hugs and kisses. They’ve never done touchy-feely, holistic, New Age or alternative therapies. Or, if they ever did, they frightened their players into keeping their traps shut so we didn’t find out about it. They’ve never shrugged their shoulders when their team’s been beaten. They’ve never put up with a player talking back to them. Never understood or sympathised when a referee made a mistake which hurt them. Never thought it was a fair point when a journalist criticised. Never written anything off as a bad day at the office. Never felt sorry for themselves. Never backed down. Never, ever, been good losers.

The great Scottish managers have come to represent something in football. They have become the epitome of the tough, aggressive, no-nonsense gaffer. Disciplined, strict and controlling. Hard as nails. Old school. Not to be messed with, not to be crossed, streetwise and armed with every trick in the book. They love hard graft. Their hair is short, their clothes neat, their shoes polished, their posture straight. Ready for anything, be it pinning a player against a dressing-room wall or psychological warfare against opponents, officials, the press or anyone who might constitute ‘them’ against ‘us’. They stand up for themselves, their players, their club and their supporters. They simmer after a setback. They boil. Their temper explodes. Around them, anger management has a different meaning entirely.

And all of that is only a part of the picture. The great ones also innovate. They inspire, they experiment, they take calculated risks. They can charm the birds from the trees or crack a line which makes a room dissolve into laughter. They know football inside out and are also informed by a wider, worldly intelligence. They have an eye for a player. Their judgement is as close to flawless as any managers can get. They see things that others don’t. They are knowing and well-connected, with armies of informants quick to lift a phone and whisper in their ear if one of their players is spotted in a pub or nightclub. But they aren’t always intimidating men who rule with an iron fist. Their genius has often graced the game with the lightest of touches.

For the greatest of them all, genius is not too strong a description. In 2007 The Times published a comprehensive article on the all-time top 50 managers in world football. These sorts of lists are great newspaper material: highly subjective and guaranteed to provoke a row and a reaction from readers. This one was better than most: impressively researched and confidently presented. The top 20 made for compelling reading. It comprised a couple of Englishmen, a couple of Italians, two Dutchmen, two Spaniards, two Brazilians, and one representative each from Germany, France, Argentina, Austria, Portugal and Hungary. That accounted for 16 of the 20.

And then there was the country which made up the rest. The country which produced the most managers of all, twice as many as any other. The country with the smallest population of any of the nations represented on the list. No prizes for guessing which one. Four of their twenty greatest football managers were Scots.

Neglecting to include Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and Sir Alex Ferguson would have reduced the poll to a comedy item. Those four head a field of Scottish managers who have shaped, dictated and dominated football – occasionally in Europe and almost continually in Britain – since day one. It goes without saying that along the way they collected a mountainous haul of trophies in Scotland, England and Europe.

The volume of silverware gathered by Scottish bosses at club level is breathtaking. The European Cup has been lifted by a Scottish manager’s hands four times. Stein was the first from Britain to hold it with Celtic in 1967, and a year later it came into the possession of Busby at Manchester United. Ferguson brought it back to United in 1999 and then became the only Scot to win it twice, with another triumph for the club in 2008.

Ferguson, this colossal personality, is the most successful manager in the history of the European club competitions. He also has two European Cup Winners’ Cups and two Super Cups to his name (winning each trophy with both Aberdeen and United). Europe has not limited him: he has an Intercontinental Cup and a FIFA Club World Cup success too.

Ferguson, Stein and Busby are among six Scottish managers to have won the big European trophies. Willie Waddell and George Graham took the European Cup Winners’ Cup for Rangers and Arsenal respectively and Shankly delivered the UEFA Cup for Liverpool.

For a country with a production line of managerial excellence it was predictable that there would be these spikes of high achievement on the continent. But it is the hold Scots have had on British football which has confirmed a mastery of the skills required to assemble, organise and inspire hugely successful teams. For decades the domestic trophies within Scotland itself were harvested only by home-grown managers. Men like Celtic’s Willie Maley (who was born in Northern Ireland but moved to Glasgow at the age of one and played at international level for Scotland) and Rangers’ Bill Struth ruled Scottish football from the 1890s to the 1950s. These two giant figures of Old Firm history won 60 leagues and major cups between them.

With Maley, Struth and other natural, charismatic leaders who emerged at clubs like Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen, Dundee United, and Motherwell, it was little wonder that for almost a century Scottish club chairmen hardly saw the need to appoint an English manager, let alone one from overseas. Few non-Scots have managed in Scottish football. Only in the 1990s did it become fashionable to begin appointing men like Liam Brady, Wim Jansen, Dick Advocaat, John Barnes and Martin O’Neill. Up until then the frequent conquering of England by Scottish managers seemed to amount to compelling evidence that there wasn’t much to learn from anyone else. The country has always regarded management as a serious business. It was a Scot who invented the manager’s dugout, an idea which spread around the world.

Scooping up all the trophies in their own back yard could never have given Scottish managers worldwide respect. The country is too small for its domestic scene to be regarded as a major stage or proving ground. Scottish managers had to broaden their horizons and follow the money. That meant moving south of the border. They did so at the very beginnings of the professional game – the first paid ‘manager’ in the world was a Scot, George Ramsay, appointed by Aston Villa in 1886 – and the drain of talent became relentless. It continues to this day. Oddly, the migration usually extended only as far as England: with only a few notable exceptions, Scots have tended not to take charge of European clubs. Of the four giant figures, Busby and Shankly never served Scottish clubs as either a player or a manager and Ferguson gained full recognition only when he began to deliver trophies for Manchester United. Stein is the exception to the rule: the one manager who achieved full international respect and status for what he accomplished while working only in Scotland.

It is what Scots achieved in charge of English clubs that truly marked them out. By the end of the 2010–11 season England’s top division had been won 65 times by an Englishman and 40 times by a Scot. Given that the population of England is ten times greater, that is a mighty level of overachievement for the wee country.

The most successful manager in English league history is a Scot. The most successful manager in FA Cup history is a Scot. No Englishman has won their League Cup more times than its most successful Scot. The big four clubs in English football were all shaped to varying extents by Scottish managers. The only managerial legends in Manchester United’s history are Busby and Ferguson. Shankly is the most popular and iconic boss Liverpool has ever had. Arsenal’s first manager was a Scot. So was Chelsea’s.

When the 2009–10 season ended the Champions League was 18 years old and only three men born in England had ever been the manager of a club in its group stages: Ray Harford, Sir Bobby Robson and Stuart Baxter (who is the son of a Glaswegian, spent much of his childhood in Scotland and doesn’t mind being described as a Scot). Three managers in 18 years? In the 2008–09 tournament Scotland had three managers in a single Champions League group: Ferguson, Gordon Strachan and Bruce Rioch.

These statistics are trotted out not to belittle the achievements of English managers – men like Herbert Chapman, Bob Paisley and Brian Clough were outstanding leaders who stood comparison with anyone – but to provide a context for the staggering contribution Scots have made in their own country and in the more demanding arena of their larger neighbour. Busby, Shankly, Stein, Ferguson and a supporting cast including George Ramsay,...