A look at clubs such as Manchester United after Sir Matt Busby and Dynamo Kyiv after Valeriy Lobanovskyi shows that it can often take more than a decade to recover from the departure of extraordinarily successful managers

The question isn’t even “if”. It isn’t even really “when” any longer: it’s who comes next. Perhaps an FA Cup defeat at Shrewsbury on Monday would have ended Louis van Gaal’s reign at Old Trafford this week; perhaps a Europa League exit against Midtjylland on Thursday night will. But nobody really thinks Van Gaal will still be Manchester United manager next season.

Even if there is face-saving silverware in the FA Cup or the Europa League, even if United put an unlikely run together and drag themselves into fourth and Champions League qualification, this will have been three inglorious seasons since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson. The pattern is not unfamiliar, either in football or more generally: replacing a long-term leader is never straightforward.

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United are a club who, since the construction of Old Trafford in 1910, have enjoyed significant financial advantages over many of their rivals. As the most successful team in English history in terms of league titles won, they have made the most of that. And yet only three managers have ever led them to the league title.

This is not a problem many football cultures face. There aren’t many places where a manager is invested with such power, where he has such control over the philosophy of the club. One of the major reasons for Swansea’s recent rise has been a devolution of power away from the manager so that when he leaves – whether because he has been lured away by an ostensibly more glamorous proposition or because he is perceived to be failing – he can be replaced without great upheaval.

Yet the British culture still seems to yearn for a manager who will build a dynasty: everybody wants their Shankly, their Busby, their Revie. Even José Mourinho in his second spell at Chelsea spoke in terms of 10-year plans. The ideal is always for a group of young homegrown players, committed to the club and with a mutual understanding built up over years, supplemented by signings. When that works, the result can be spectacular – as they were for Matt Busby and Ferguson, as they continue to be for Barcelona and Bayern. The problem, though, is what comes next, what happens when the leader who implemented that system disappears.

Case study: United after Busby

After the European Cup had been won in 1968, where else was there to go? With his third great team, Busby had achieved the greatest prize available to Manchester United, one that took on greater significance because they were the first English club to win it and because of what had happened in pursuit of that dream at Munich 10 years earlier. In January 1969, he announced his intention to retire at the end of the season. He was only 59, but he’d been manager for 24 years and the trauma of the Munich air crash had worn him down. “I feel it is time,” he said, “for someone in a tracksuit to take over the players out on the training pitch. As it is, United have become rather more than a football club.”

He seems to have envisaged acting as some sort of sporting director with a head coach acting under him. The man chosen was Wilf McGuinness, who had come through the youth ranks and then become a coach after suffering a broken leg. McGuinness’s first season began slowly but United rallied to finish eighth, getting to the semi-finals of both cups.

But the following season, as George Best became less and less focused on football, a League Cup semi-final defeat to Third Division Aston Villa compounded miserable league form. Back-to-back home defeats to City and Arsenal left United 18th at Christmas, with widespread rumours of dissent and cliques in the dressing room. McGuinness was relieved of the job on 28 December and moved back into his previous job of reserve-team manager before quitting the club a fortnight later.

Busby took over again and, with Best returning to form, United recovered to finish eighth. “Not everyone, sadly, would play for Wilf,” the midfielder David Sadler told Eamon Dunphy is A Strange Kind of Glory. “The side as a whole did not give one hundred per cent effort for him. It was as simple as that. As soon as Sir Matt returned to the scene, it changed at once.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matt Busby had overseen such success at Manchester United that it became hard for Wilf McGuinness to assert himself as manager. Photograph: PA/Empics

Part of the problem was there had been no clear demarcation of roles. McGuinness, Busby said, was “too close” to the players, which may have been true, but the process of establishing a sense of authority was made far harder by the constant presence of Busby, who had a seat on the board, had the final say over transfers and played golf with a group of senior players.

In the summer of 1971, United turned to the Leicester City manager Frank O’Farrell, who insisted on taking the manager’s office at Old Trafford that Busby still occupied. With Best in the final sparkling period of his career, United won 14 and lost two of their first 20 games of the season. Even with three draws in a row over Christmas, they were top at the end of December. But United lost 3-0 at West Ham on New Year’s Day, the first in a run of seven straight defeats as Best went off the rails again. United finished eighth.

The poor form continued into the following season as United won only one of their opening 12 league games. With O’Farrell believing Busby was blocking his attempts to move on certain players, notably Alex Stepney and Willie Morgan, his relationship with Busby frayed. Matters came to a head after a 4-1 defeat to Tottenham in October at the club’s annual dinner dance when Busby, having had a few drinks, spoke to O’Farrell’s wife Anne, saying her husband was “an independent sod” and asking her to try to calm him down. The following Monday, the manager asked his predecessor what he had meant. Busby said he thought Bobby Charlton shouldn’t have been dropped and that Martin Buchan was playing poorly. For O’Farrell, that was blatant meddling in team affairs.

A 5-0 defeat against bottom-of-the-table Crystal Palace in December proved the final straw. O’Farrell was sacked and replaced by Tommy Docherty who, after relegation in 1974, had the club back near the top of the First Division and had won the FA Cup when he was sacked in the summer of 1977 after announcing he was moving in with the wife of the club physio.

Busby always denied direct interference, but many felt his presence undermined his immediate successors. In his 1973 memoir Soccer at the Top, Busby directly addressed those who felt he should have stepped aside completely. “How,” Busby asked, “could I leave the place? How could I walk out of a club I built on the ashes of war and rebuilt after the mass tragedy of Munich, a club I love dearly, a club I have nearly killed myself for?”

Perhaps he couldn’t, but perhaps that was the problem. The contrast with Liverpool’s treatment of Bill Shankly, banned from the training ground after his retirement in 1974, is perhaps instructive.

Case study: Dynamo after Lobanovskyi

Perhaps the figure most analogous to Ferguson in world terms is Valeriy Lobanovskyi, who ruled Dynamo Kyiv from 1973 to his death in 2002 with two hiatuses: 1982-84 and 1990-97. He was enormously successful, winning 12 league titles, nine cups and two Cup-Winners’ Cups, and establishing the hard-pressing approach almost as the default Soviet style. Following him has proved a hugely difficult task.

Serhiy Rebrov is the eighth man to try (Jozsef Szabo and Yuri Semin both holding the position twice) and, at last, seems to be leading Dynamo out of their post-Lobanovskyi stagnation. Dynamo tried continuity with Oleksiy Mykhaylychenko, who had played under Lobanovskyi before becoming his assistant. He won two league titles and a cup before being ousted in 2004 after a 2-1 home defeat to Trabzonspor in the third qualifying round of the Champions League.

“It has become clear,” said the club president Ihor Surkis in announcing the decision, “that there are some processes within the team that hinder Dynamo’s development and progress. I am not talking about physical fatigue. The problem is more about psychology, morale. We saw it in the match with Trabzonspor. Last year 80,000 fans gave us a standing ovation after the victory over Arsenal, whereas now all I hear is, ‘Disgrace!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Valeriy Lobanovskyi, the legendary Dynamo Kyiv manager, was another near-impossible act for others to follow. Photograph: Sergey Supinsky/EPA

Dynamo stuck to former Lobanovskyi players, which was understandable; after all, there weren’t many high-profile Ukrainians in football who weren’t former Lobanovskyi players. But as Shakhtar grew, Dynamo struggled. Szabo, Leonid Buryak, Anatoliy Demyanenko, Szabo again, Oleh Luzhny as a caretaker … four years of flux that brought a single title, unthinkable by the standards of Dynamo’s previous domination.

Anybody approaching Dynamo’s stadium, which is named after Lobanovskyi, had to pass in front of the statue of him, perched anxiously on a bench. Eventually it began to be asked whether memories of him might not be proving a distraction. Szabo admitted that in times of crisis he asked himself: “What would Valeriy Valentinovich have done?” Trying to second-guess a dead man is hard (and unhealthy) enough anyway, but part of Lobanovskyi’s genius was to keep evolving, which is how he remained successful for almost three decades.

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So, in December 2007, Dynamo broke with tradition and turned to an outsider: Yuri Semin, a Muscovite with no direct link to Lobanovskyi. He won the league in his first full season in charge, but then was tempted back to Moscow by his former club, Lokomotiv. Another Russian, Valery Gazzaev, was appointed to succeed him, but he never really settled. Another former Lobanovskyi player, Alyaksandr Khatskevich, took over as caretaker, then Mykhaylychenko was given another month, before Dynamo appointed Oleh Blokhin.

He was probably the ultimate former Lobanovskyi player, a true believer who had spent 19 years as a forward at Dynamo. He was also cussed, stubborn and hugely unsuccessful as a coach. In April 2014, after 18 months in the job, he was regretfully deposed.

Dynamo had tried appointing from within and they’d tried appointing from without, and neither had brought anything like the sustained success they’d had under Lobanovskyi. They turned to Rebrov, who had been a key part of Lobanovskyi’s last great team, the side that had reached the Champions League semi-final in 1999, but who had also played in England, Turkey and Russia. He had been Blokhin’s assistant, but he was also outward-looking, shadowing Jürgen Klopp at Borussia Dortmund. He won the league at the first attempt and, while it’s true he was helped by Shakhtar’s difficulties with the conflict in eastern Ukraine, performances in Europe suggest there has been real progress.

The anxiety of influence

In both examples, the biggest problem is perhaps the looming presence of the authority figure: in Busby’s case literal, in Lobanovskyi’s metaphorical. Everything McGuinness and O’Farrell did was viewed through the prism of Busby: were they following his line or going against him? Successive Dynamo managers, aware of the cabal of former players ready to explain any poor result as being caused by a deviation from the one true path, found themselves trying to do not what they thought was right, but what they thought the veterans thought Lobanovskyi would have thought was right.

That manifestly is not conducive to clear thinking and in the case of Busby it was made even worse by the fact that he played golf with certain players O’Farrell would have liked to have sold. Van Gaal, you suspect, is unlikely to be cowed by Ferguson’s glowers from the stand. David Moyes, perhaps, was.

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The ongoing influence of former leaders is a fraught issue – after all, why would you not look to utilise their wisdom and experience? It was a subject that fascinated the anthropologist James Frazer, who begins The Golden Bough with a description of how the priest of Diana at Nemi gained the position by slaying his predecessor in a trial by combat. Frazer cites what he sees as numerous other variants of this, in many of which the ritual murder becomes a form of ritual humiliation. What’s vital is that the new incumbent in some way proves his greater worth for the role than his debased predecessor.

An election or a revolution neatly fulfils that function in political life – although the Tory wrangling over how Margaret Thatcher would have voted in the EU referendum suggests it is not entirely effective (would it perhaps have been different had Thatcher lost a general election?), Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” against Stalin in 1956, decrying the cult of personality he had fostered, both outlined the problem and successfully addressed it.

In the cases of Busby, Lobanovskyi and Ferguson, though, it’s as good as impossible. Even if somebody did wish to discredit them, they retired or died after significant recent success. Liverpool’s brusque treatment of Shankly, heartless as it may appear in retrospect, was perhaps in the best interests of the club: in English football, nobody has managed the transition better.

The Boot Room tradition became a structure that allowed the crown to be passed on, from Shankly to Bob Paisley to Joe Fagan, aided by the fact that Paisley had so little desire for public acclamation: no personality cult could ever have grown up around him.

Power vacuum

The issue, though, is not simply of the autocrat in the background: it’s what replaces him. In a vacuum, other forces emerge, which can lead to the sort of small-scale ill discipline that undermined McGuinness and O’Farrell – or worse. History is replete with examples of strong-man leaders whose removal leads to civil war.

There is a danger that this is where United are headed now, in part because the chief executive David Gill stood down when Ferguson did.

There is a clear divide between the club’s newer, more commercially-minded directors and the older football men, who seem broadly to be supported by the Class of 92.

Ed Woodward, as a representative of the former, has overseen a scattergun transfer policy that has left an incoherent squad. The regular whispers about big-name signings suggest a policy based on not much more than being rich. It’s that side that favours the appointment of Mourinho: a superstar response to Manchester City’s appointment of Pep Guardiola, whose record is one of consistent short-term success.

The football side appears opposed. Some have suggested that is on behavioural grounds, that United simply don’t want a manager who can be guaranteed to generate controversy. There’s the fear that when Mourinho departs – as he habitually does during or at the end of his third season – he leaves a legacy of emotionally exhausted players.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest There remain doubts over the suitability of José Mourinho as the man to lead an Old Trafford revolution. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA

But there is perhaps something greater at stake. Appointing Mourinho does nothing to solve the structural problems at the club. There would almost certainly be further expensive signings, which, if conducted in the manner of the past three seasons, is good news for agents but bad news for coherence. The youth set-up, which underlay both United’s great periods of dominance, has been neglected since the Glazers bought the club; nothing in Mourinho’s past suggests he is the man to rejuvenate it as Ferguson did when replacing Ron Atkinson in 1986.

Rich clubs will always buy their way to a trophy here or there but sustained success requires something more.

Liverpool in the 70s and 80s, perhaps, offer the model of how to move from one manager to the next – although their downfall is salutary. External events can always intervene. It is true that Kenny Dalglish, in signing John Barnes, Peter Beardsley and Ray Houghton in 1987, had moved away from the traditional model, but it produced stunning football in 1987-88.

Perhaps that would, anyway, have been a final flowering but it may be that signing three major players and moving to a more creative model was a necessary evolution. As it was, Hillsborough and its aftermath overwhelmed the club: a shattered Dalglish resigned and Liverpool, understandably looking inward, didn’t take advantage of the commercial possibilities of the Premier League in the way that United did.

It’s still early to claim that Rebrov has restored Dynamo’s fortunes, but his way of going about his work seems to offer a reasonable model. He acknowledges the greatness of Lobanovskyi, whose principles remain the principles of the club, but he is not imprisoned by his dogma. He is forward-looking and eager to seek information and ideas elsewhere. He is standing on the shoulders of a giant rather than living in his shadow.

The worry for United is, it has taken Dynamo 14 years to get to that point.