Row Z – Why aren’t English football managers more intelligent?

Today’s Row Z feature is provided by James Hamilton, a writer and former sports psychotherapist who blogs at More Than Mind Games. For his first Dabble, James examines a question we must all have pondered, shaking our heads in disbelief at the post-match witterings of coaches from  Ron Atkinson to Steve Bruce, namely: Why aren’t our football managers more intelligent?

“I’ve done lots of interviews with overseas players and managers and invariably they were always smarter and brighter and more analytical than their English peers.” (John Sinnott, BBC Sport).

Instead of choosing management, the brightest football people in England have taken charge of the sport’s new support industries – reporting, broadcasting, stadium development, market expansion, catering. As a result, England’s Premier League is the richest in the world. Our international team lags behind.

Of course, the English, a nation with great schools and universities, a vast publishing and broadcasting industry, a plethora of Nobel Prizes and Radio 4, don’t go to football to be intelligent. They go to football to take a break from intelligence, and anyway, as scholar-cricketer Ed Smith has said, “A lot of people in sport pretend things are very easy.” Football is a complex game, but these are complexities that, as a nation, the English do not care to contemplate.

There is a history in the game of scorn for intelligence, even intelligence of a very English kind. Walter Winterbottom, pioneer coach and England’s first manager, didn’t impress Bobby Charlton. “He didn’t know how to handle players, how to talk to them. He spoke too well, too precisely, like a schoolmaster. Walter had this impeccable accent, whereas football’s a poor man’s game: players expect to be sworn at. A bit of industrial language”.

The arrival of state secondary education was the crucial turning point in the nature of football and football management. In 1901, the football Maximum Wage of £4 per week was enough to allow players to save for their education, and a surprising number were able to move on from playing into the church, the law and medicine. It was enough to persuade men who were already in white collar jobs to go professional, like Cunard and Everton’s John Cameron.

By the time Bobby Charlton was at grammar school, white collar opportunities for working class boys had expanded. Footballing wages no longer impressed. Intelligent, talented young sportsmen were being encouraged away from the playing field and into white collar careers. Brian Clough’s captain, John McGovern, was bound for university and a very different kind of life when Old Big ‘Ead intervened.

This educational creaming-off of players had a severe knock-on effect on management, because by the 1950s, it was assumed almost without question that a manager would have played, preferably at the top level. Bill Shankly believed that a good coach needed first to have been a good player.

Shankly was a Scot, but his English contemporaries – Don Revie, Alf Ramsey, Malcolm Allison, Bill Nicholson, Bobby Robson, Brian Clough, and Terry Venables – were the last who could cite missing out on education after age 14 as a shared experience. Every last one of these articulate, passionate, original men could have counted on a university place under modern conditions. Which is where you might look for the men who would otherwise have been their successors, for, pace Roy Hodgson, they have had no successors.

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About Author Profile: James Hamilton

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10 thoughts on “Row Z – Why aren’t English football managers more intelligent?

  1. Gaw
    September 15, 2010 at 10:01

    Another particularity of the game in this country is the tendency of players to get married early, at least according to Usain Bolt. He remarked in a recent interview, quite sensibly, how crazy it was for a player in his early-twenties with lots of money – and hormones – to commit to one partner. The temptation is bound to be too great for many (hello Wayne!). Like anti-intellectualism (pace Bobby Charlton), it seems to be an aspect of English working class culture.

  2. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    September 15, 2010 at 11:02

    He may be ill educated, incoherent, surly, lean towards violence and comes complete with an 80% proof nose but nobody, I say nobody can chew gum like Ferguson.
    As for post match verbal rubbish, not confined to football, ever heard the yachties conversation to microphone after a round-the-worlder?

    It could be said that the lack of an intellectual aura among the managers is matched by the sports gaffers, Ashley being a good example, barrow boy done good.

  3. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    mahlerman
    September 15, 2010 at 11:05

    Well, to answer the question, the obsessive route to managing a team in England seems to be through playing the game well, and ‘giving it a go’ when your playing days are over – hardly a recipe for success. And when that moment arrives at, let’s say 30 years, all that this individual has done for the past 20 years, is kick a pig’s bladder around a park, and ‘have a laugh’ with his mates.
    The academically bright ones (Coppell/Dowie) probably always had an eye on the day when the boots went into the loft; the casually intelligent ones, were well aware of what can happen, in our culture, if you try to be too clever. Le Saux took a dreadful kicking, and all he did was read the Guardian. Fowler (another bright spark, but with a dark side, has made a £30M fortune out of property) rather summed it up with his antics toward Le Saux, mooning him in front of his family, and later performing that coke-sniffing stunt on the pitch.

  4. bugbrit@live.com'
    Banished To A Pompous Land
    September 15, 2010 at 16:32

    “Football is a complex game, but these are complexities that, as a nation, the English do not care to contemplate.”

    And I am the first to admit that those complexities are far too subtle for me to even comprehend.

    To hoof it up the park or not to hoof it up the park?

    (Ducks)

  5. Gaw
    September 15, 2010 at 16:47

    You sound well-qualified for football management, BTAPL. That is indeed the key question with the former typically being selected in England. Shame you never played professionally.

  6. bugbrit@live.com'
    Banished To A Pompous Land
    September 15, 2010 at 16:54

    So very true Gaw.

    If it hadn’t been for this gammy leg of mine English football might have followed a very different course these last 30 years.

  7. Worm
    September 15, 2010 at 18:09

    Gaw – “Another particularity of the game in this country is the tendency of players to get married early…it seems to be an aspect of English working class culture.”

    As far as I was aware, this early marriage thing is not cultural at all, but part of a concerted effort by managers like Ferguson and the player’s agents. They deliberately corral the players into getting hitched as young as possible, because it means from a footballing point of view that they are more likely to stay at home and not be out partying every night, and from a PR point of view, it means they’re less likely to be implicated in ‘roasting’ scandals and the like, and also a celebrity couple has a higher intrinsic value when it comes to marketing their ‘personal brands’.

  8. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    September 15, 2010 at 20:13

    Had a footie manager as a neighbour in the early eighties, at least he became a manager, of Blyth Spartans, didn’t last long, became a salesperson for the Golfing Times, he was the classic piss artist, couldn’t work out why his door key wouldn’t fit into our lock, played for Newcastle under McGarry who hated him, not surprised, the tosser.

    ‘By the time Bobby Charlton was at grammar school, white collar opportunities for working class boys had expanded. Footballing wages no longer impressed. Intelligent, talented young sportsmen were being encouraged away from the playing field and into white collar careers. Brian Clough’s captain, John McGovern, was .’

    Hmm, why do I, as an ex WCB find that effing patronising.

  9. wrp1@cam.ac.uk'
    dearieme
    September 17, 2010 at 10:15

    Dunno. Why do you, as an ex-WCB, find that patronising?

  10. wrp1@cam.ac.uk'
    dearieme
    September 19, 2010 at 14:16

    “Why aren’t our football managers more intelligent?” Or your players – Simon Kuper in today’s FT writes under the headline “Why England fails: Hiddink sees a lack of footballing acuity”.

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