The Art of Managing to Preserve Your Job

Article From: www.nytimes.com
Exact Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/sports/soccer/20iht-SOCCER.html?_r=2&ref=soccer 

By ROB HUGHES Published: May 19, 2009

If there are any safe seats in the fast and feckless world of soccer team management, they are occupied by Alex Ferguson and Josep Guardiola.

Their clubs, Manchester United and Barcelona, are already multiple trophy winners this season. Both teams combine style with success, but when they meet in Rome next Wednesday, only one can carry off the sport’s ultimate club prize, the Champions League cup.

Ferguson’s rise was tempered by an apprenticeship in the Glasgow shipyards, and he has managed soccer teams in 1,907 games over 35 years.

Guardiola, less than half the age of Fergie, came through Barcelona’s academy to play in one great era for the club, and accepted the chalice to coach the team’s collection of world stars last summer.

One is the grand-daddy of team managers, the other is still shedding the title of novice coach.

The distinction between them is that Ferguson manages not just the team but the club. He makes the decisions on who United hires, from schoolboy talents to multimillion-dollar star players.

Guardiola, in keeping with the way that sports outside Britain appoints coaches, is precisely that: the coach of the squad of players put at his disposal by others.

Ferguson and Guardiola both have more job security than, say, Claudio Ranieri. He was fired as head coach to Juventus this week because his team, with two games left in the season, is struggling to hold third place in the Italian league.

In Europe, as in the United Sates, that winner takes all.

“Managing change is the most difficult part of the job,” Ferguson said. “We have 18 nationalities in our club now, and I have reached a situation where I have two full-time scouts in Brazil, one in Argentina, others in Germany, France, etc. I’m dealing with different cultures, and find that very interesting from a management point of view.”

He has steered United to 25 trophies in 22 years, and managed the transition through different epochs during which the coaches, and, of course, the players, have become multimillionaire cult figures.

Guardiola has stepped instantly, but not effortlessly, into that world.

His team has just won the double of the Spanish league and cup, but when Barcelona’s own Web site tried to pin on the coach the accolade of being the driving force behind those achievements, Guardiola demurred.

“The only reason is the talent and commitment of the players,” Guardiola said. “I’m sure that with other players we wouldn’t have won the league. Yet with a different coach they might have done so.

“The key is their talent, humility and appetite for hard work in every single game. Soccer is about players. We coaches set out the rules and give some ideas for them to follow. All the rest is them, just them and they have done a great job.”

The modesty belies the taskmaster that Guardiola has become. His team plays with the discipline, the hunger that was his own mark as a tenacious midfield soldier in the successful team coached more than a decade ago by Johan Cruyff.

Guardiola is right to say that a team without talents cannot be champion, and certainly not in the style that Barcelona holds dear.

Yet in Germany there is no doubt that modest Wolfsburg has been transformed by the team-building and coaching of Felix Magath.

His achievements are on a par, at least, with those of Ferguson and Guardiola.

Two years ago Magath took on dual responsibility to manage and coach Wolfsburg.

It was a basement team when he arrived; it is now one match away from winning the Bundesliga for the first time in its history.

Magath did not shoot a goal or invent a movement. But he chose the men who do — the strikers Grafite and Edin Dzeko and the midfield creator Zvjezdan Misimovic. They could all move on, as coach Magath is doing to Schalke, and Wolfsburg has to be grateful and count the profits and the victories.

Strange that while Real Madrid and Chelsea search for a coach, nobody suggested Magath.

The talk, instead, is of Carlo Ancelotti, blamed by his paymaster Silvio Berlusconi for A.C. Milan’s failings, going to Chelsea.

The coaching carousel has Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard, former A.C. Milan players, eager to hop aboard. It has Inter Milan’s owner Massimo Moratti praising coach José Mourinho for doing exactly what his predecessor, Roberto Mancini, was fired for last season — winning Serie A but getting nowhere in Europe.

“Mourinho will invent something next year too,” Moratti told Il Corriere Dello Sport. “The coach has helped the players find great motivations as well as professionalism.”

Is that coaching, or management? Is Guardiola right to praise players, or Moratti correct to presume that the coach conditions all?

Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers head coach, once said in one of his more expansive comments: “The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.”

Ferguson is a veteran at that. Guardiola seems to have mastered it instantly. Whatever he says to build players’ self-esteem, his Barça is more disciplined than the one he inherited.

Word is out that even Arsène Wenger, after 13 years of managing Arsenal and giving the club a style it lacked, is growing restless.

The club’s board once backed him to the hilt, but is currently in a tug of war between acquisitive shareholders from Russia to the United States. Wenger hints that if Real Madrid would still like to tempt him, now might be the time.

Meanwhile, Eric Cantona, player turned character actor, said this week: “If I am to return one day, it will be as a coach and because I can bring something new.

“It will be in England, with the national team, or Manchester.”

Eric the arrogant thinks managing is just another role.

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Soccer games: The World Cup qualifier Argentina 4-1 Chile Gonzalo Higuain three balls

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