Soccer Coaches: Are Ex-Players Still The Best?

Why Soccer Stars Aren't Getting Jobs As Coaches

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In spring 2005, Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea met Frank Rijkaard’s Barcelona in the Champions League. It was a bad-tempered affair. Chelsea accused Rijkaard of cheating, Barcelona fans jeered Mourinho as “The Translator” (his initial job during his years at the Nou Camp) and things deteriorated from there. Mourinho admitted that if you compared himself and Rijkaard as players, “His history is fantastic; mine is zero.” But as managers, added Mourinho, “He has zero titles and I have a lot of them. He just can’t be compared to me.” Indeed, over the two legs, Mourinho out-thought Rijkaard, and Chelsea knocked out Barça.

There are two types of manager: ex-players like Rijkaard, who learned the game mostly on the field, and schoolteachers like Mourinho, who learned it on coaching courses. Today the schoolteachers are ousting the ex-players. Last month, two managers with great playing careers, Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea and Mark Hughes at QPR, were sacked in favor of two guys who’d never done much as players, Rafael Benitez and Harry Redknapp.

Or look at two other “schoolteachers” who were on Mourinho’s staff that night in 2005. After Chelsea had sealed victory at Stamford Bridge, an assistant of Mourinho’s, another Portuguese non-player, then just 27 years old, swaggered up to Barcelona’s bench and taunted Rijkaard. The young man — Andre Villas Boas — ended up squabbling with Barcelona’s striker Samuel Eto’o. Today, Villas Boas manages Tottenham. Yet another of Mourinho’s staffers at the time, Chelsea’s then-youth coach Brendan Rodgers, now manages Liverpool, where he recently replaced the legendary ex-player Kenny Dalglish. Even Roy Hodgson, manager of the England team, peaked as a player in Crystal Palace reserves. The schoolteachers’ revolution is the latest sign that English soccer is becoming clever.

For decades, it was an article of faith that only someone who had played professional soccer himself knew how to manage a team. Players who had been leaders on the field were particularly favored. When the great England captain Bryan Robson turned manager in the mid-1990s, Middlesbrough immediately handed him a fortune to spend on transfers. Roy Keane was similarly fast-tracked, and after Glenn Hoddle got off to a good start as manager, he was appointed England manager at just 38 years old. Abroad, the same principle applied: the untried coaches Marco van Basten, Steve Staunton, Jürgen Klinsmann and Diego Maradona were put in charge of their respective national teams.

The idea was that there was something mystical about managing a team, something that “schoolteachers” and the rest of us mortals could not grasp. The great former players liked to make that point. Once in the 1980s, when Dalglish was in his first spell managing Liverpool, a journalist at a press conference questioned one of his tactical decisions. Dalglish deadpanned, in his almost impenetrable Scottish accent: “Who did you play for, then?” The whole room laughed. Dalglish had come up with the killer retort: If you didn’t play, you couldn’t know.