Managers are profiles too.
Is the way we view managers completely wrong? I think so and I'll breakdown my viewpoints why.
Let’s get right into it and set the tone from the off. Back in 2020, Pep Guardiola was asked by a reporter if he's the best manager in the world, Guardiola said: "What is the best coach? I never felt like I am the best.
"Never in my life. Even when I won six titles in a row and won trebles. Never felt that.
"I won because I had extraordinary players at big clubs. The incredible managers don't have these players. They don't have these clubs.”
And this is the overriding thought I have. Managers are the very same as players where nothing is linear and they have a skillset that can only work in certain environments. Categorising the skillset of a manager is hard because some of them will undoubtedly overlap one another but the five categories I ended up settling on were Floor raiser, Ceiling raiser, Steady Eddy, Talent advantage and Idealist.
Floor raiser: A coach that has the ability to raise the collective’s ability and turn a meh team into a good one.
Ceiling raiser: A coach that has the ability to turn either an underperforming good team into a great team. This can overlap with having a talent advantage.
Steady Eddy: Does par for the course, slightly more sometimes but a safe pair of hands.
Talent advantage: Needs the top players in his league to play the only way he knows how to.
Idealist: Football only has their way of playing and perhaps winning games and player development is secondary if his style of play isn’t implemented.
Football is not just as simple as the best managers can manager anywhere, because who are the best managers? is it the ones that win trophies? or is it the ones who consistently over-perform their talent level and budget level?
Take for example Watford in the 2020 Championship season. Vladimir Ivic is no question a better manager than Xisco Munoz. You could see that pretty clearly. But it was Xisco Munoz who got Watford promoted because he has the ability to get good players playing well. What happens when you take good players away from him? He doesn’t have a scooby and has failed everywhere since. Ivic? has been successful bar Watford everywhere he’s been coaching nearly teams to better themselves. Watford were arguably the big dog in the division and It didn’t need restrictions within that, It needed someone to be simple as the players were obviously a lot better than the other 95% of the league.
Young managers also need time to show you what they’re truly about. And when I say time, I mean a minimum of two seasons. Unless your team is rapidly underperforming, there’s no reason to change if you’re just fine under a new coach. If the base level performance is pretty good in their first season of management, you have to stick to that person because one of three things will happen; your team improves, you get good money for your manager or they get sacked. They’re exactly like players in that they also develop coaching skills with the more games they get and the more they manage against high level coaching for the level. You can apply that to managers in general as well, development isn’t linear. Carlos Corberan went from a relegation battle with Huddersfield to the playoff final in a year — that’s quite an extreme example but you get the overriding point.
This is the fun part, now attempting to put current Championship managers into said categories; some will be harder than others due to it being their first managerial gig, so I’ll leave them out along with new managers coming from a different country.
Floor raiser: Danny Rohl, Marti Cifuentes, Ruben Selles, John Mousinho, Chris Wilder, Mark Robins, Liam Manning.
Ceiling raiser: Michael Carrick, Daniel Farke, Tony Mowbray.
Steady eddy: Gary Rowett, John Eustace, Alex Neil, Paul Heckingbottom.
Talent advantage: Scott Parker, Frank Lampard.