The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders

by Carson, Mike

  Control the controllables and quickly move on

  One of the key features of managers who take responsibility is their focus on what they can control. The line McCarthy took with the press after the Macedonia match is typical: ‘As usual we now are in the play-offs, playing against Turkey. I can’t do anything about last night – that’s done, so we’ve got Turkey to play. Yes, we should have won – it was a bad goal to concede, but is me crying about it going to change it? If I talk about it for the next 20 minutes, are we going to be in the European Championships? So I’ll go and watch Turkey now and get on with that. I will deal with the things I can.’

  In a very similar way, Carlo Ancelotti learns lessons then moves on to where he does have influence – which is usually the next match: ‘We have a problem today. We lost a very important game last night. But today is not a time to regret, to think about what happened yesterday, the last game ... Instead, we have to focus for the next game. That is the only way you can do.’

  There is an old proverb that goes: ‘The past is a thief – it steals the present and the future from us.’ Leaders who dwell too long on their – or others’ – mistakes find that they lose their mastery of the present.

  After a defeat, no matter how big, McCarthy refuses to dwell in the place of pain: ‘Once I’ve seen the players on Monday and we’ve trained, I’m back at it. So Monday might be a dull day, and I think it is for any of us that have been beaten, but it doesn’t carry on for the rest of the week. I’d have the staff in early and we would sit on the static bikes and watch on the big screen. So we are watching and at the same time we get an hour’s exercise on the bike and chat about the game – four of us generally, five with the analyst. So I might arrive on a Monday morning, badly beaten and thinking we were crap. But when I’ve watched it, I’ve got it clear in my head and I’ve taken the positives. We’ve got a lot right, and we’ve analysed that. Then we move on. We’ve lost that game. No point crying over that one, let’s get on to the next one. The only way we can prepare for the next one is getting over that one.’ Leaders must get the subtle blend of learning from their mistakes without becoming defeatist or despondent.

  Go back to your belief wall

  Warnock’s response is not to dwell on thoughts of victimhood and injustice. He picks himself up quickly, and self-belief cuts in. What goes through his mind is something like: ‘I’ll show them. I’m not done yet.’ And even when his next club after the Sheffield episode, Crystal Palace, went into administration, the self-belief was strong enough for him to continue, and he moved on to QPR.

  Self-belief is a critical part of an elite athlete’s make-up – and it’s essential for a leader also. Olympic gold-medal swimmer Adrian Moorhouse, writing with performance psychologist Professor Graham Jones, defines it as: ‘An unshakable belief in your ability to achieve competition goals’. They suggest it is all about understanding the unique qualities and abilities that make you better than your opponents. Many elite sportspeople use the concept of a ‘belief wall’ – a mental construct built of the bricks of undeniable achievement. Thus a runner might look left and right to his opponents in the starting blocks, and say to himself ‘I have beaten every one of you over this distance before.’ That is a brick from his wall. The stronger and more solid your wall, the more powerful your self-belief and the more it takes to knock you off balance.

  Choose optimism

  One of the most powerful characteristics of a football leader is optimism. This is not a Pollyanna-style refusal to accept reality. It is a rational, almost forensic approach to charting the best possible route. Warnock’s approach is an almost dogged version of this. He admits he is a man for whom hurts remain. He is not the best at letting go. But he does lift up his eyes and set his jaw: ‘I do look back at QPR and think, “Two years of my life to get where I wanted to be, taken away.” It is unfair, but my philosophy has been when one door does close it’s a new opportunity and a new part of your life. Exciting things are often just round the corner – and it’s not very often that they crop up when I’m low. I know what I’m good at – I enjoy management and I love making people happy. So I look the world in the eye, and never give up.’

  Ancelotti shares this approach: ‘I am optimistic in life. It is very important – especially in football. I prefer to wake up in the morning and think about the good things and the sunshine – to wake up with a smile. I think sometimes people create problems, but for nothing.’ Optimistic leaders do not ignore reality – but they are careful not to exaggerate existing problems or to invent new ones.

  Look for the win

  Perhaps the most powerful of all the strategies is to apply the aikido principle. In most martial arts and other combat sports, the main idea is to block what your opponent does and then punch back. In negotiation, this is equivalent to saying: ‘No – you’re wrong. This is how it’s going to be.’ However, in aikido the philosophy suggests you take the punch your opponent is offering and use the energy to your own advantage – and to others’ benefit also. In negotiation, this is like saying: ‘Now that’s interesting! I wonder where it might lead us?’ Applied to the arrows of life, this is the difference between painful resistance and open-minded enquiry.

  Except for the extraordinary Anfield dynasty of Shankly, Paisley, Fagan and Dalglish, British football history is not littered with examples of successful transitions from assistant to manager. After Souness left Rangers, the chairman turned to Walter Smith whose task was made even tougher by new UEFA rulings. But Smith saw the situation as an opportunity: ‘Looking back on it, UEFA’s introduction of a “three foreigner” rule actually helped me. The majority of our “foreigners” were English, but they still ranked as foreigners – so we had to change the staff quite a bit. Graeme and I had been planning to do that in the summer anyway, and everybody at the club from owner down knew it was going to happen. We were going to be allowed a couple of seasons domestically to make the change, but we knew the time was now – no doubt influenced by our European prospects. After winning a couple of titles in a row and heading for a third one, you really wouldn’t want to make that many changes – but I knew we had to do it. In the end, it went very well. We had one or two disappointments at the start – normal when you’re changing and trying to form a new team – it takes a little bit of time for them to settle in. We had two or three months of up-and-down results and then we settled and went on a fantastic run.’ Smith’s positive mindset had resulted in a neat aikido move – taking the problem and turning it to his advantage. He now had a team that he could call his own.

  Put the setback into context

  The past may well be a thief, but this can be true of the future too. An optimistic view of the future can be powerful, but a leader who faces the future with fear will find it hard to overcome the challenges in front of him. The key is to avoid catastrophising – the sort of thinking that says: ‘This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to anyone, now it will all go downhill and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ José Mourinho has a good way to re-frame defeats: ‘I always say a defeat must not be a start of a period; it must be just the end of a great period. So when the defeat comes you cannot think this is the first of some, but just the end of a period of victories and good moments.’ This theme recurs time and again among good football leaders.

  McCarthy took over at Sunderland in the final quarter of a campaign to avoid relegation from the Premier League. ‘My start at Sunderland was terrible. I lost the first nine games because we had to play to win every game – draws wouldn’t be enough for us to avoid relegation. I’m not sure that filled everybody with confidence in a manager who’d never been in the Barclays Premier League. We actually played well in many of the games, but we weren’t good enough. Worse was to come – I lost the first two games in the Championship, 2-0 to Notts Forest and 1-0 to Millwall. So by now I’d lost the first 11 games on the bounce, and we were playing Preston away who had a great home record. If we’d have had a loss we
’d have got the record for the most consecutive defeats, and we went and played great and beat them 2-0. We finished third that year, lost out in the play-offs.’ The Preston victory enabled McCarthy to recover his naturally positive mindset.

  Wenger’s Arsenal travelled to Manchester United in August 2011 and were beaten by the startling scoreline of 8-2. Even Wenger was shocked. ‘We were titanically bad, but we managed to get the boat over the iceberg. We come back to values and ideas, because nobody can predict a football game. I’ll give you a recent example. If you go to 100 people and ask them before the semifinals what will be the 2012 final of the Champions League, most of them would have said Barcelona against Real. But it was Bayern Munich against Chelsea. That shows you the unpredictability of a game and you have to accept that as a manager as well. And therefore at some stage you cannot base your career on the way you see the game and on individual results. You have to base it on ideas and values that are important. When I go through a difficult period, I think how can I improve the results – but my checklist is more, “Am I in line with what I think is important in my job?” That’s why I think it’s important to not just think about winning the games, but also think about what is important to me in this job, in the way I see the game. Because when you go through crisis periods, that is what will help you survive.’

  David Moyes’ career low point came during Everton’s European campaign of 2005–06: ‘We had lost to Villarreal in the Champions League that year and dropped into the UEFA Cup. We went to play Dynamo Bucharest in Romania. I think we were 1-0 down at half-time and we weren’t doing a lot wrong – then we lost 5-0. For me that was probably as bad as I’ve felt because we were out of the European competitions that we had worked so hard to get into. I didn’t question myself, but I did need someone to help me get going again. I don’t know that there is anyone that every now and again doesn’t need someone to give them a pick-me-up and get them going again.’

  Moyes did well not to feel sorry for himself. In his recollection, he doesn’t dwell on what could have been: he doesn’t bemoan his fate, he doesn’t beat himself up, he doesn’t catastrophise. Instead, he puts it into context: ‘I don’t think there was anything specific that I could identify to work on. With the quality of the players we had, we should have been good enough to get through. Maybe the disappointment of losing the Champions League game, which would have got us into the group stages, had a big effect on the players that night. Either way, we just got caught out. It wasn’t for lack of preparation. People who are leaders of companies will always know there will be days when – for whatever reason – it all goes wrong. It’s how you recover and how you get back on track that counts.’

  Return to the source

  Finally, it is valuable for a leader to have some place of refuge – either physical or mental. Moyes simply says, ‘I have an inbuilt thing in me that I know where I have to go when it’s not going well.’ For him, it’s about personal foundations, something akin to a belief wall: ‘It’s very difficult to turn to other leaders in the sport because it’s a competitive world. My staff were helpful, but in the end it was inside me that I found the drive to go back out on the training field and carry on. That night certainly was a test for me.’

  Staying Centred in Success and Adulation

  Dealing with setbacks is no fun; dealing with success can be just as difficult. The world watches how a leader responds, and generally does not appreciate anything that looks like arrogance. The common theme among the great football leaders is to enjoy the moment, then return to the task at hand. Glenn Hoddle contrasts his experiences of success as player and as manager: ‘When I was a player I would bask in it a fair while. As a manager I would have the night. The next day I would get the recognition and the congratulations, then two or three days later that’s in the history book and you are actually planning for your next season, or your next goal.’

  McCarthy’s approach could best be summarised as pride where justified, but always softened by humility: ‘Probably my greatest moment in football was as a player. Quarter-final of the World Cup in Rome, captaining the team. I don’t think I’m eloquent enough to describe how it felt. I would say it’s fantastic, amazing, brilliant, but it’s better than that: the pride, the emotion, the hairs tingling on the back of your neck. Being on the pitch in Rome – Mick McCarthy, in the quarter-final of the World Cup in 1990 – no way! What was I doing there in the first place? Everybody told me I wasn’t good enough and I couldn’t play, well b******* to that! I had the captain’s armband on, leading them out, and it was just amazing, and it was wonderful. Even when we lost and I walked off that pitch in tears, I was full of pride. Franco Baresi came after me to swap shirts. I admired him so much – even more so when he ran up to swap shirts with me!’

  Alex McLeish recalls with deep satisfaction his Scotland side’s 1-0 away win over France in a World Cup qualifying match: ‘We were pretty sure that they would go 4-4-2 with Claude Makelele and Patrick Vieira in the central midfield. We opted for a 4-1-4-1 formation – James McFadden up front with support from Darren Fletcher and Barry Ferguson – to cover our bets. It worked really well. France had a lot of possession, but rarely threatened our goal, and James scored the famous goal and it was brilliant. Great memories. But we didn’t paint the town tartan that night – we came back home. Work to do.’ In the final analysis, Scotland failed to qualify for the World Cup finals, despite the victory.

  At club level, McLeish’s high points have been even more poignant. ‘The highlight in England to date would have to be the Carling Cup final [with Birmingham in 2010] – winning that, and coming ninth in the league the season before. A few guys said, “You should have lost the last few games because you made a rod for your own back – the directors will expect you to finish higher than that next season.” It’s not in my nature to lose a couple of games! It’s in my nature to win every single game. So we got the Carling Cup, and then for many reasons we end up relegated. I went from an extreme high to an extreme low, and believe me in football the highs and the lows are absolutely massive.’

  For David Moyes, the greatest team performance of his career so far came in qualifying for the Champions League in 2005: ‘The night that we played Manchester United, we needed to win to get into the Champions League – and we did. Everton’s got a tough football club image and I think that night it matched that. The night – the level of the game – matched what Everton stands for, and we had to play probably the best team in the country and we were able to get a result against them. It was a night where the football club itself showed what it stands for and what it’s made of.’ It’s as if Moyes and his team didn’t do anything extra special that night. What they did was bring together all they had, stood up for what they believed in and played with passion. And Moyes did not get carried away. Wisely so: despite this memorable achievement, their painful Champions League exit came only six months later.

  For Hope Powell, it was the night in France when England’s women qualified for the 2007 World Cup: ‘We had to at least draw the game, we hadn’t qualified in 12 years. We went to France with a crowd of 19,000, we came away with the result and we qualified for the World Cup. That was great.’ But she takes equal delight in the 2011 World Cup campaign: ‘We wanted to top the group, we had a strategy, the players implemented it, we weren’t expected to beat Japan [the eventual champions] and we won the game. There were some really good performances – players owning [our philosophy] and delivering.’

  All of these managers admit to great elation at the point of triumph. And all of them are quick to put it into perspective, to remind themselves of what needs doing next and get back to business as usual. This is a key behaviour for the successful leader – both in football and in business.

  Not Passing on the Pain

  More than half the battle in dealing with setbacks is within the leader. But once he has understood his own reactions and has chosen his response, his next challenge is how he will impact his team. This is
an area where leadership is at its most visible. In the heat of battle, a ship’s company look to their captain. When a team loses – especially when it is a heavy or unforeseen defeat – the players look to their manager for clear leadership. At that moment, the manager is probably dealing with deep emotions – anything from regret, inadequacy, failure through resignation and despair to anger and resentment. The watching public – and especially angry and upset fans – can sometimes feel that the manager takes things lightly and moves on too fast. In reality, this is rarely the case. When McLeish describes his ultimately unsuccessful battle to avoid relegation from the Premier League with Birmingham City, the pain is palpable: ‘Relegation hit me really hard – as hard as anything has ever hit me before. It was a real horror.’

  The leader’s question then is around how much to share. Integrity says share everything. The vulnerable leader has a particular power and, in any event, keeping back information from the team can feel in some way dishonest. But courage can sometimes demand that the leader deal privately with pain that would only adversely affect the players.

  After the 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford, Wenger centred himself as he always does, by taking the long-term view. Then he connected with the players: ‘At that moment you come back to the team and say that is important for us, that is our culture, that is us, so let’s come back to what we are good at and what we want and that sometimes helps get the team back on track. Unfortunately, at this moment, you have to begin in the emotional place. When you go out of a game like that you know that now you face a storm. The storm is in the media, the fans, the disappointment that you will have to stand up to. That’s the moment that you have to show leadership qualities and show that you are strong and show that you don’t panic. So basically I don’t say anything profound to the team like that on the day because they are hurt, and I am as well. Anything you say in that moment could be even more detrimental. I try to get them to pick up, individually I speak to them, and give them two days off and come back on Monday and we start fresh again.’ The weekend then allows everyone to be a little more calm and long-term focused: ‘The drama is strong enough at the weekend that you don’t have to add any more to it, you do not need to say they were absolutely disastrous, they know it. And I believe as well that the big results don’t have that much significance in the long term. They have an emotional significance, but no great footballing significance. Against Manchester United we conceded four goals in the last 20 minutes, we were down to ten men and we had played three days before at Udinese. Of course, people don’t want excuses, but I can put it into context myself, and I know that this team is not as bad as the result was.’