Proposal: abolish football managers

Sometimes, I'm in favour of sacking Daniel Farke, but sacking him alongside every other football manager and abolishing managers altogether as a category, because it would be nice to shift the attention back to the most interesting people in football, the players. And shift the responsibilities, too.

A lot of older football fans want to take the game back to the '80s, and so do I — like, the 1880s, or any time before the 1930s when managers started becoming responsible for more than paying wages and posting out tickets. Back then, football manager was an administrative role. Trainers were the ones who kept the players fit and taught them the finer points of the sport. Then eleven of those players went out on the pitch and, under instruction from the captain, played the game alone. There were no substitutions. For decades, until the 1970s, it was against the rules for anyone to give instructions from the sidelines. If a tactical change was needed, the players had to see it and make it. A game was about the players who played it, whether they be stars or chumps. 

Now, though, too many games are merely ChampManified data points in an ongoing argument — a 'narrative' — about the manager's contract and whether to end or extend. It's human resources as entertainment, because sport itself is somehow no longer enough, if it's even still anything. And because the odds are stacked against managers — only one team can lift the cup, and every manager gets sacked eventually — this focus is predisposed to negativity, the relentlessness of which becomes toxic. Blame is swift, and misdirected. A manager's game plan can work for ninety minutes, but one player's mistake in one second of play can bring it all crashing down — on the manager, not the player.

Farke's problem this season is that, somehow, he's failed to build up the necessary credibility to rebut the focus on his job. 90 points aren't enough, 27 wins aren't enough, 81 goals aren't enough, the second best defence in the league isn't enough. It's not only that the team has finished 3rd instead of 2nd, but that it hasn't been entertaining enough at 1.76 goals scored per game. It's true that Farke has the team playing cautiously and relying on individuals, but you can compare that to Pep Guardiola (as I did in this space recently) and his demand for "20,000 million passes" before his players give the ball to Kevin De Bruyne. But before deciding that Farke's football is 'boring' we need to think about how it is being interpreted by the players.

 Marcelo Bielsa once said that if players were robots he'd win every game. Against Southampton on Saturday, United's full-backs showed why humanity is a problem for football managers. It's clear that Farke tells his team to be careful when building attacks from the back. But different players understand risk differently, or have different capacities for it. Junior Firpo loves a risky run forward, over and underlapping with Crysencio Summerville, getting close to his winger for shorter, more incisive passing chances, without worrying too much about the space he leaves behind him. Sam Byram, however, has his injury record to think about, so is more cautious about releasing Wilf Gnonto down their wing, in case the ball comes back and he's stranded. When Connor Roberts replaced Byram, the right wing became a zone of playfulness, as Roberts kept pushing the ball to his winger then running into the penalty area. Three full-backs in one game plan, with three different ways of playing their role.

It's not only the full-backs. The lack of attacking contributions from midfield has been highlighted this season and left for Farke to answer for. Since becoming a regular first team footballer in 2017, Glen Kamara has scored six goals and created twelve. Ilia Gruev, in two senior seasons before joining Leeds, had one goal and one assist. It's possible that the reason these players haven't scored or created more for Leeds is that they are quite bad at those things, and it's possible that the team scored 81 goals this season anyway, the 4th best record in the division, by working with that fact rather than trying to make the midfielders something they're not. I'm inclined to think about Bielsa here, who after working with Eddie Nketiah for a while concluded his education at Arsenal had been spent learning an incompatible style of play, letting him go back after five months trying unsuccessfully to change him.

It's also worth remembering Angus Kinnear's pre-season complaints about midfielder Gustavo Hamer — "on our target list" — choosing to join Sheffield United instead of Leeds. In the Championship for Coventry Hamer scored five in his first season, then three, then nine. In the last five seasons, Glen Kamara has taken a grand total of 43 shots. Gus Hamer took 342. One has shooting and scoring in his game, and the other does not. I suspect, had Hamer ended up in the Leeds squad this season, Farke would have told him to shoot as much as he liked.

To linger on El Loco for a while, I was already worried, in the months before he was sacked, that Elland Road was already forgetting some of what he tried to teach. On one hand he proved that, with coaching, a team could go from 13th to top in a few quick months. He always pointed out, though, that he couldn't make players do things they couldn't do. His work was about taking their existing abilities to higher levels. He couldn't make Nketiah play like Pat Bamford. But he could make Bamford play more like Bamford than he ever had before.

The other thing Bielsa tried to instil was that football will always be football, and that a team must be prepared to have a brilliant season and win nothing, and have it mean nothing. That first season, Leeds were in the top two for 34 of 46 matchdays, finished 3rd, and lost in the play-offs. That season Leeds United played some of the best football I have ever seen and it won nothing, no trophy, no promotion. Which is normal. Every division in every football league in the world is full of teams playing good football, winning lots of games, scoring lots of goals, and getting nothing for it. You take your league place and you take another ticket, and you try again. 

This season Leeds have won more games than in Bielsa's first season, and scored more goals, and conceded fewer, and finished in the same place. A lot of fans don't like this team anywhere near as much as they liked Bielsa's team. On the surface that is about style, and perhaps a little deeper it's about purpose, because Bielsa brought football to believe in, something more than something to watch — and that takes us back to the argument against ever sacking him. 

But ultimately it's about winning, because if Bielsa hadn't got Leeds promoted in his second season, I doubt there would have been murals or appreciation or tearful farewells. We saw in the Premier League, once his team stopped winning, that football to believe in became much less important than football that got results. A lot of fans wanted Bielsa replaced with someone who would keep the team scoring lots of goals while combining it with a more pragmatic, careful approach that would stop the games being so open. Well, he's here, and people still aren't happy.

Which can get tedious. The joy of football is of 22 players kicking a wind-filled size five around on some grass, and seeing all the different ways they can make something so simple so fascinating, watching footballers using their abilities to express their personalities while creating incredible moments that thrill us in the moment and keep giving us pleasure on endless repeat. The death of football is relentlessly demanding that the manager is held 'accountable' when this organised chaos does not deliver perfection. Perhaps we don't need to abolish managers as a category, and can still allow them to coach during the week, to give the players frameworks and plans. But maybe we should ban managers from the actual games, cut off the media's access to them, and focus instead on how footballers, for ninety minutes, are out there together on their own. ⬢