What went wrong for Javi Gracia?
Javi Gracia says football is not about miracles, but miracles still have a better rep in some boardrooms than science, because so many are attempted each season that a few will come off and make the idea, of miracles, stay tempting.
I’ve been trying all season to work out what a football manager does in the Premier League now and how much it matters. My feeling is that the attention on their work far exceeds what they’re able to influence. They’re the only people contractually obliged to speak to the press and their fragile job security feels like a consequence of that availability. In American sports, players are willing to talk to reporters in locker rooms after games, so accountability is not so invested in one person. For example, if he played baseball, Illan Meslier would probably have answered questions about his form over the past few weeks. In the Premier League, it’s up to the manager to answer to the press for him, and in the eyes of the fans his job is to sort his goalie out or get fired.
The singular attention inflates coaches to miracle workers. What was Frank Lampard supposed to do at Chelsea, a week before they played Real Madrid? What is Sam Allardyce supposed to do for Leeds at Manchester City this weekend, and in three games in three weeks after that? Leeds United’s board, apparently, have been concerned that Javi Gracia is not enough of a motivator, so that’s why Big Sam is in, but how does this work? Last weekend the players were not motivated. This weekend, with Allardyce, they will be motivated. The players are still the same leaden bunch so this must be alchemy, which must be why it’ll be worth £3m to Allardyce if it works and Leeds stay up. And £500,000 to him if it doesn’t.
Looming over all this at Elland Road is Marcelo Bielsa, coaching’s greatest argument, the man who took six weeks to turn Paul Heckingbottom’s static Leeds into three years of forward motion. Is he simply a genius? It’s possible. Pep Guardiola’s comments about him say something for that. “Give him my Barcelona and you will see how he will win titles,” he said a year ago. “Give me Leeds, with all due respect to the Leeds players, but I would still be in the Championship.” But I wonder if this doesn’t say more about what Guardiola thinks a club needs. There’s little doubt that Guardiola is as close as anyone to being the best coach in the world, so why wouldn’t he succeed at Leeds in the Championship? Because building a club is about more than choosing one coach. At Barcelona, Guardiola benefited from the years of work at La Masia, the youth academy that gave him a team. At Manchester City, he’s had seven years of state funding from Abu Dhabi tailoring the organisation to his every need. If he can’t be the coach he is without the structures that give him Lionel Messi or Erling Haaland, how much of a game is then down to the coach, and how much due to the brilliant players?
That’s why putting Michael Skubala in charge of Leeds felt like an interesting experiment this season. No philosophies, no unifying ideas, no grand theories. Just the basics: prepare the players for the next opponent and send them out to do their thing. Would this work, simply plugging a coach into the existing organisation, like in the pre-war days when a trainer did the bidding of a board and a selection committee? Well, maybe if the organisation at Leeds hadn’t been such a bin fire, we’d have discovered something more about that. Skubala at Manchester City would be an interesting experiment. Skubala at Leeds was only going one way.