A few years ago, around the same time people started getting extremely animated by things such as net spends and expected goals, there came a school of emerging thought that challenged the traditional narrative of footballing performance, arguing – in effect – that the influence of a manager was vastly overstated. Matches are won by the best players, so the hypothesis went, and the best players cost money, and thus a club’s wage bill was a far more reliable predictor of success than whichever bloke happened to be sitting on a padded car seat in the dugout.
In this reading, the era of the all-powerful manager – the patriarchal visionary who oversaw everything from tactics to contract negotiations to the temperature of the away showers – was gone, if it ever really existed. Football’s centre of gravity had shifted away from the manager’s office towards the sporting director, the medical department, the boardroom and the fund markets. And so the game’s enduring fixation on managers – talking about them, listening to them, hiring and sacking them – was an outdated affectation, a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game itself functioned. Austere and exhaustive academic articles were commissioned on the subject. Long, boring data-heavy books were written and occasionally even purchased.
