Jesse Marsch in the arena

It’s tough aiming for rueful in a world of memes. “I hate my job,” works as a bit when your t-shirt is still soaked through from the touchline on Tyneside, you’ve segued from one post-match press conference into the next pre-match one, journalists are asking you about stress, and with your hair sticking up and a wry smile and a chuckle, you can say a point against Newcastle isn’t a relief and get a laugh from the crowd in the room. “No, it’s always stressful,” said Jesse Marsch. “It’s like I hate my job, but I have to keep going. I try to enjoy the moments and try to be there for the team for what they need. But I hate the stress.”

But it’s 2023 so a Premier League manager has to be cautious about how announcing “I hate my job” will look if it’s refracted from the soft smile of its delivery and plastered across a photo on the internet. This is a reckless world now where context is deemed excess and the headline is taken for enough. Marsch has named 1) attention on transfers and 2) mid-table teams being really good as some of his biggest surprises since moving to the Premier League, but 3) media attention has had mentions too, and he doesn’t seem able to crack the format. A relaxed chat about leadership for a podcast listened to by sports executives? Like comfy slippers to Jesse. The relentless pre- and post- and pre-game again barrage of invasive queries? That’s not him.

The problem is when pillars of his management style are translated into soundbites. Marsch relies on messaging, whether in the signs around the training ground, the quotes he reads out to the players, or the themes he concentrates on in the press. But his attitude towards stress doesn’t reduce well to soundbite. It needs the context it came with.

“They [the players] know me pretty well,” he went on. “They know that I’m pretty open. One of the things with the way that I manage, and the openness I have, is sometimes people think they can almost use that against me, or to think that my openness means weakness.”

Openness, to Marsch, is a strength, and that includes the strength to be open about the stress. He will tell you what he hates about his job, because he wants Jackie Harrison, say, to be able to say the same thing to the boss or the players around him. Openness, honesty. Leadership councils, player input. If there is stress, and it is spoken about, its sources can be found, and changed.

Experiencing stress is not the same as struggling with it, or suffering from it. Some jobs are inherently stressful: you don’t meet, or want to meet, many chilled out air traffic controllers. Top level football management is, ludicrously given it’s a game, one of those vocations, and stress is part of the challenge. I’ve written before about Howard Wilkinson, seeing in photos of himself the toll that promoting Sheffield Wednesday took on his physical and mental health, swearing never to let football do that to him again. He didn’t quit the game; his hunger for soccer success stayed strong. But when Leeds won promotion at Bournemouth in 1990, he let the players ride the team bus home without him, and headed for a friend’s house in the New Forest, where after a relaxing night with some good wine he could wake next morning to sunshine and bird song. Two years later, when Scum’s defeat at Anfield confirmed United as champions and ITV’s Elton Welsby got Wilkinson on the phone from his home, there was shocked silence when Howard said he hadn’t been watching. He’d deliberately organised a Sunday roast with his family, permitting updates from his son in the other room but otherwise occupying his mind with anything but football. Wilkinson founded, and still chairs, the League Managers’ Association, precisely to support other managers towards the same goal: not removing stress, but managing it.

That said, I do wonder about Marsch choosing his rueful, wry, reflective tone on an afternoon when he could, rain and all, have been elated by a hard-fought point that was built on the defensive foundations he’d worked hard to install during the winter break. Wasn’t this a day to love his job, not hate it? It was New Year’s Eve, so perhaps he was feeling the inevitable melancholy that comes with a calendar swap, and some of the press questions were directing him that way. But it wasn’t the first time in December that I’d heard Marsch sounding as if, perhaps, the stress of Premier League management is not the best thing for him. Not in the sense that he can’t handle it, or he’s cracking up, but that there are other things he might feel better by doing.

Speaking with former Everton and USA goalkeeper Tim Howard, on NBC Sports, Marsch was asked, ‘What do you do that makes you happy?’

“For me, it’s travel and experiences. That’s the number one thing I love, and it has a lot to do with people. Even when I took this trip around the world with my family [in 2013], people asked what were the best, favourite countries? And I said, Nepal, Laos and Jordan. And it was because of the people. They’re very friendly and generous and open, and you can share things. And so, like, the shared experience we have as human beings, like going — you know, when I went to Machu Picchu a few weeks ago, this was incredible, life altering, like educating yourself in that moment in time, how people choose to live and what they value, and what was important, and adding it to you as a person. So yeah, I’m a people person, for good and for bad.”

And he’s a person who, as a Premier League manager coaching weekend-to-weekend, will not get the opportunities to go to Machu Picchu very often, to achieve his bucket list target of travelling to 100 countries. He’s in the mid-seventies now, but the passport stamps have been slow coming since the round the world trip of ten years ago that he often refers back to as the foundational experience of his post-playing career. Another thing he’s objected to in the Premier League: 4) the intensity of the fixture list.