David Moyes And Glasgow Football

Why Does Glasgow Produce The Best Managers?

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In the last winter of the second world war, a British soldier named Matt Busby received a letter from Manchester United’s chief scout Louis Rocca. It said, vaguely: “I have a great job for you if you are willing to take it on.” The job turned out to be manager of Manchester United. On February 19, 1945, Busby showed up in Manchester in his army uniform and signed his contract.

It wasn’t really a “great job.” United hadn’t won a trophy since 1911, the club was penniless, and the German Luftwaffe had blitzed Old Trafford. But Busby rebuilt United. In 1968, his team won the European Cup. Later, Alex Ferguson took the club back to the heights. And this season, David Moyes is charged with the mission Busby took on in 1945.

There’s something these three men have in common: They are all from the poor city of Glasgow, or its surroundings. So was Jock Stein, manager of the Celtic team that won Britain its first European Cup in 1967. So was Bill Shankly, who made Liverpool into a great club. And so was one of Shankly’s most noted successors, Kenny Dalglish. In fact, Glaswegian managers have dominated English club soccer. The only Englishman who can compare with this tribe is Brian Clough, winner of two European Cups with little Nottingham Forest. Why has the west of Scotland bred such superb managers? And what does this tradition tell us about perhaps its final exponent, Moyes?

When you land in Glasgow, it doesn’t quite feel part of Britain. It’s poorer, the Mars bars are deep-fried and the beer and whisky flow in spectacular quantities in the pubs. And though most of the locals are almost excessively friendly, you are always half on the lookout for what’s known here as a “Glaswegian kiss” — a headbutt.

Life expectancy for men living in Glasgow’s rundown inner city is just 54 (Iraqi men live more than a decade longer). The other Glaswegian peculiarity is football: Though the town has just 500,000 inhabitants, and the entire metropolitan region just 1.7 million, it's the only city in Western Europe with three stadiums that can each hold over 50,000 people.

"Glasgow is incredible,” marvels Mark Wotte, the Dutchman who is performance director of the Scottish Football Association. “Rangers last season were playing in a semi-pro league, the Scottish third division, and they still had 45,000 fans at their games. Celtic has 50,000 fans every week.''

Football has perhaps always been taken more seriously in Scotland than in England, where the game is chiefly about fun, ritual and glamour. Think of Shankly’s most overused quote: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” Those lines make the most sense in their Glaswegian context.

When all these managers were growing up, practically every boy in the west of Scotland played football. Ferguson (below), Dalglish and Moyes all learned the game playing for the Glaswegian boys’ club Drumchapel, where young Ferguson was managed by Moyes’ father. Scotland was then an international force, routinely qualifying for World Cups.

In those days, working-class men in the region still typically worked down the mines or in the shipyards. Busby, Shankly and Stein had all been miners before becoming professional footballers. Ferguson’s father worked as a shipbuilder in the docks, and Moyes’ dad was a draftsman for the same company.

It’s hard now to detach the reality from the leftist nostalgia that has grown up around this lost world, but it does seem that working-class collective loyalty was strong in industrial Glasgow. Together underground, miners were expected to save each other’s lives if the ceiling fell down. As the ex-footballer-turned-author Eamon Dunphy wrote in his biography of his former boss, Busby: “The team ethos that was supposed to exist in soccer really did exist among miners…. You depended on each other.”

There was class solidarity, too. Both Ferguson’s parents were union representatives. Ferguson himself became one, too, as a 19-year-old toolmaker’s apprentice. Left-wing politics were almost a given in Glasgow. Both Ferguson and Moyes have campaigned for Britain’s Labour party (Ferguson had then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s mobile number on his phone) while Shankly said, “The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life.”

These ideals shaped a leadership type that you rarely find in more consumerist, individualist, right-wing England. As Ferguson has written, “Any success I have had in handling men… owes much to my upbringing among the working men of Clydeside.” Wotte says: “I don’t believe that Scots have a better understanding of soccer. It’s more to do with personality. They tell it to you straight, and I think soccer players respond well to that. These aren’t managers who do blah-blah. Scottish managers usually are basic: Don't overreact, and keep things simple.”