In early 1958, Mohamed Boumezrag, a retired professional soccer player, began traveling around France to recruit players for a new team. He met in secret with top professional players throughout the country. One after another, the players agreed to quit their current teams, including the national team, and join his. They were to disappear, all at the same time, and travel to Tunisia. There, they would announce that they were forming a soccer team to represent the nation of Algeria. Boumezrag had convinced the players, all of whom had been born in that French colony, that they could use their soccer talent as a weapon in the war for their country’s independence.
Boumezrag was born in Algiers in 1921. His family was very politically active: his grandfather was an imam from the town of El Asnam, in the interior of the country, and had spent decades in prison because of his resistance to French colonization. During the time Boumezrag was growing up, a vibrant set of political movements in Algeria had criticized the colonial order and demanded more political rights for Algerians. He was interested in politics, but he also had a passion for soccer, playing with teams in Algiers and elsewhere. As a teenager, like many other players from North Africa, he moved to France and began playing for some of the country’s best professional teams. He was recruited by the Girondins de Bordeaux, and during World War II played for L’Union Sportive de Mans, where he also served as the team’s manager, before retiring from soccer in 1946. When, in the early 1950s, a new and more militant anticolonial movement developed in Algeria, led by an organization called the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Boumezrag joined the underground.1
In 1956, Boumezrag began to dream about creating a team for Algeria. There were many players from Algeria at the top levels of French soccer, a number of whom were supporters of the FLN. Among those he successfully recruited, the biggest stars were Mustapha Zitouni, who played for Monaco, and Rachid Mekhloufi, who had helped his team, Saint-Étienne, become champions of France the preceding year. Mekhloufi and Zitouni had been recruited to play on the French national team in the 1958 World Cup: as colonial subjects, they could represent the French empire on the international stage, as many players, including Raoul Diagne, had since the 1920s.2
Boumezrag’s pitch to Mekhloufi, Zitouni, and other players was simple. For four years, Algerian insurgents had been fighting for independence. The war had become increasingly brutal, and countries around the world were interested in its outcome. In a time of rising movements for independence throughout the globe, the FLN was seeking recognition from foreign governments. But most nations still viewed the group as an internal rebel movement that France had the right to repress. What could legitimize the FLN’s claim to represent a nation? Boumezrag thought he knew: a soccer team. Therefore, he was asking his recruits to do more than just play. He was asking them, by playing, to declare that Algeria was their nation, and that they were willing to represent it on the international stage.
It was a difficult choice for the players, most of whom were married to French women and many of whom had children. They were well-paid professionals, beloved in the towns where they lived and played. Mekhloufi, unsurprisingly, made a plea regarding the timing of Boumezrag’s plan, asking him, “Couldn’t we leave after the World Cup?” But Boumezrag convinced Mekhloufi that it was precisely by depriving France of his services as a player that he could make the strongest statement.3
Boumezrag had an eye for the theatrical, and understood well how attached French fans were to their soccer teams. He wanted to do something dramatic to increase awareness of the Algerian conflict in France. He asked all the players he met with to simply disappear, without announcing their intentions in advance. This was necessary in part so that they wouldn’t get stopped and arrested by the French authorities, who were actively working to suppress pro-independence activists in France. It also, however, would hurt teams in a particularly vivid way. On match day, some of their star players would simply not show up. People would wonder, where had they gone? And then would come the answer: They had joined the fight for independence. They were now playing for their own country.
It worked. All but two of the recruited players made it out of France and to Tunis, and their action was front-page news. In a collective statement, the new team declared that because France was “fighting a merciless war” against the people of Algeria, they refused to support “French sport” in any capacity any longer. Together, they now officially represented the FLN, and the Algerian nation in the making, in the world of soccer. They immediately began organizing games with other countries. FIFA, which was dominated at the time by European members, declared that any country that agreed to play with or against the Algerian team would face sanctions. Morocco and Tunisia, recently independent nations that were not yet part of FIFA, agreed to play the FLN team. So did a few other countries in the Middle East—and eventually in Southeast Asia and the Soviet bloc—that were part of FIFA, which ultimately did not follow up on its threatened sanctions.4
Arranging games, of course, was one thing. Winning them was another. Boumezrag was not just a political organizer, however, he was also an experienced coach with a group of deeply talented players. Although few had played together before, they immediately clicked, playing what the historian Michel Nait-Challal describes as “intelligent, twirling” soccer, driven by a “flamboyant and inspired attack.” In some countries, the team’s first games were sparsely attended, but once word spread about how amazing they were, crowds tens of thousands strong thronged to see them play. Wherever the players went, they sang the Algerian national anthem—written by an FLN prisoner—and hoisted the flag of the independence movement. They traveled to Southeast Asia, where they were hosted by the North Vietnamese and met Ho Chi Minh and General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the commander who had defeated the French armies at Dien Bien Phu and secured independence in 1954. The FLN team defeated all the Vietnamese teams they played, including the national team, and Giáp good-naturedly offered a kind of transitive theory of revolutionary victory: “We defeated France, and you defeated us, so you will defeat France!”5
He was prophetic. In 1962, Algeria won its independence from France. The victory had come on the battlefield, but also through diplomacy, and the FLN soccer team had played a key role in transforming the image of the movement. As they toured around the world, they became highly visible representatives for the cause of independence. They drew massive crowds because they played beautiful soccer, but in the process they shared the story and symbols of the Algerian struggle. With the war over, Mekhloufi—who had kept in touch with his French teammates during the 1958 World Cup—returned to play for Saint-Étienne. Other players remained in Algeria. Boumezrag did as well, continuing as the manager of the national team, which joined the Confederation of African Football and became part of FIFA in 1964. He had been able to do something that no other manager can claim: he’d not only created a soccer team, but he had helped create a nation in the process.6
Boumezrag had created a team out of nothing, gathering his players together and providing them with a common goal that inspired them. Though his political contribution was unique, his accomplishment exemplifies the multifaceted role played by the manager in soccer. Unlike the roles of the players, which are relatively well defined, a manager’s job is less clear, and there are many different ways of both doing it and talking about it. The manager is a recruiter, a trainer, a tactician, a theorist, a psychologist, an artist, and even a spiritual leader.
In formal terms, the manager is the rough equivalent to a head coach in basketball and American football and the manager in baseball. Yet soccer’s uninterrupted flow and continuous clock leaves the manager with relatively little power in the course of a game. Unlike coaches in American football, soccer managers don’t organize or call plays as the game progresses. Unlike coaches in basketball, they cannot call a time-out to settle things down or reorganize. They can’t do anything to stop the clock, in fact, which rushes relentlessly forward. They can yell, of course, notably at the referee, who polices the sideline near them and sometimes polices the managers, warning them to stay in their area. During the game, the only significant decision a manager can make is which players to substitute on, and what instructions to send on with them. This is a relatively limited power, since the manager can usually only substitute three players over the course of the entire game. He mostly has to sit—or stand—and watch, just like the rest of us, never knowing what is coming next.
The manager’s real work happens before and after games, in the in-between time that defines what happens on the pitch. In contemporary soccer, managers are seen as essential, and are the focus of intense observation, criticism, and speculation. Yet their power can be, and often is, overestimated, for they have devoted themselves to trying to control what is ultimately uncontrollable: the game of soccer.
In his analysis of soccer, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offers a useful way of thinking about the manager’s role. He argues that, on a soccer team, the distinction between rights and duties, often seen as separate in political philosophy, essentially become meaningless. Each player has a function on the team, and his duty is to fulfill that function to the best of his ability, because in doing so he enables other players to also fulfill their functions. At the same time, each player has the right to expect that every other player will fulfill his duty for the team. That is because any “particular movement, pass, or feint” taken by a player only gains its meaning in relation to “the use made of it elsewhere in the undertakings of other members of the team.” The sum of these actions only becomes meaningful through its relation to a common goal, which is pursued through the totality of all the actions on the part of the team. The act of playing, then, is a form of “creative freedom in the common individual”: a player is free, and creative, in the sense that he decides how to carry out a specific action, but his individual choices only matter to the extent that they are part of the common team effort. In the flow of a game, which involves “the perpetual reorganisation of the field by the players,” what matters is the constant “reshaping of the group by the group.” Each specific action aims at a kind of transcendence, a hope that it will gain meaning through a series of other actions that will ultimately lead to a goal, and a victory.7
The manager’s role is best described as a kind of mediation. The manager has to represent the group to the group, making clear the common goal and how to achieve it, and explaining to each individual on the team what the group needs. Managers often inherit a group of players when they are brought onto a team, but they also are sometimes able to help constitute the group by recruiting certain players. In doing so, however, the manager has to figure out how a new player will fit into the team and play a particular function in a way that will elevate the team as a whole. Doing so successfully means absorbing and analyzing a swirling series of factors: not just the technical abilities of given players, which can be known only through their past performance, but also their future actions, and precisely how they might impact the alchemy of a team. In all of this, psychology plays a central role, for the ability of a team to succeed depends on the players’ sense of being a group, of sharing a common goal, at any given moment. One of the more fascinating things to witness in soccer is the moment when a team begins to disintegrate psychologically, when individuals lose their sense of a common goal, when their bodies seem to slump, the players no longer look at each other, and a kind of resignation sets in. At moments like that, a manager can do little but watch, and try to figure out what happened and how to fix it for the next match.8
Each day, managers struggle to assert their authority, attempt to figure out what tactics to use and how to explain them to players, and hope they won’t get fired if the team loses the next game. Like other aspects of the culture of soccer, the role of the manager emerged slowly. Initially, there was no manager or coach at all. Whoever created a team, such as the heads of a factory or the committee of a local club, picked players and organized training sessions. It was, in the words of historian David Goldblatt, a “working environment that was more like an artisanal craft workshop than a factory floor.” It was Herbert Chapman, the Arsenal coach and developer of the influential WM system that transformed the tactics of the game starting in the 1930s, who was what historian Jonathan Wilson calls “the first modern manager.” Chapman was “the first man to have complete control over the running of the club, from signings to selection of tactics to arranging for gramophone records to be played over the public-address system to keep the crowd entertained before the game and at half-time.” It was a role that brought together what we associate with the general manager in American football, baseball, or basketball with the work of a coach who directly trains players and decides tactics. Early in his career as a manager for Northampton Town, Chapman noticed his players arguing about a card game during some of their downtime outside practice. He decided that there were probably more useful ways for the players to spend their time, so he instituted regular “team talks” that included extended discussions of tactics. This seems natural today, but was innovative at the time. With Arsenal years later, Chapman expanded this and had his players “gather round a magnetic tactics board to discuss the coming game and sort out any issues hanging over from the previous game.” He involved the players in the discussions, having them debate their ideal positioning on the field every week. Chapman was, as one journalist at the time noted, “the first manager who set out methodically to organize the winning of matches.” His dream, one that has been shared by managers since, was that data, analysis, and planning could increase the probability that a team would win in any given match and over the course of a season. His success with Arsenal suggested he was right.9
Chapman consistently scouted out opponents before games, so that he could tailor his team’s tactics specifically to take advantage of weaknesses on the other side. He did this too obsessively, in the end. On January 1, 1934, he “caught a chill” during a game. Rather than staying home to rest, he decided he had to go scout out Arsenal’s next opponents and then some potential players during the following days. The famous manager caught pneumonia and died a few days later, at the age of fifty-five.10
Chapman’s model of leadership, however, lived on in English soccer and beyond. Managers took on pivotal roles in defining the tactics of teams and recruiting, evaluating, and training players. Beyond the clubs themselves, however, managers were relatively unknown. Only in the 1970s, with increasing media coverage of soccer and the expansion of televised matches, did some managers become widely recognizable figures. One of the icons of the era was Bill Shankly, who managed Liverpool from 1959 to 1974. He was a working-class Scot who had not received formal training, but obsessively oversaw everything from travel to innovative training methods. As Goldblatt writes, “He established a model of team-building rooted in his early years in a small mining community in the west of Scotland.” His vision was one of “simple football.… Pass the ball to someone else in red and then take up another position in which you can receive it.” It was a vision that “prioritized team over individual performance.” He brought a “profound sense of solidarity” to the club, notably by keeping the players’ wages relatively equitable to avoid a sense of hierarchy among team members. At one point, he likened soccer to socialism, “everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards.”11
Shankly was extremely successful. He brought Liverpool out of England’s second division and turned it into a club, as Goldblatt writes, “with a truly global profile, a byword for its own distinct tradition of playing and supporting football.” Journalist James Corbett explains that Shankly led Liverpool “like a revolutionary leader, casting his personnel not just as footballers but soldiers to his cause, and became a folk hero to the fans.” He was also, Corbett notes, “football’s Muhammad Ali, a charismatic maverick whose utterances had an unexpected, undeniable poetry.” Shankly crystallized his philosophy in a quote that has become one of the most famous in soccer: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”12
During the same period, other managers pioneered “scientific” approaches to running a team. One of the most influential was Russian manager Valeriy Lobanovskyi, who was in charge of one of the USSR’s greatest teams, Dynamo Kyiv, for nearly two decades starting in 1973. He also coached the USSR national team. Lobanovskyi studied engineering and computing at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and this shaped the way he saw the game. As Wilson explains, he saw soccer as “a system of twenty-two elements—two subsystems of eleven elements—moving within a defined area (the field) and subject to a series of restrictions (the laws of the game). If the two subsystems were equal, the outcome would be a draw. If one was strong, it would win.”13
The Russian manager focused on the fact that “the efficiency of the subsystem is greater than the elements that compose it.” Soccer was “less about individuals than about coalitions and the connections among them.” Lobanovskyi’s close collaborator Anatoli Zelentsov, a scientist and professor at the local university, captured the idea through a powerful natural metaphor. “Have you seen a hive of bees fly? A hive is in the air, and there is a leader. The leader turns right and the hive turn right. It turns left and all the hive turn left. It is the same in football. There is a leader who takes a decision to move, say, here. Every team has players who link coalitions; every team has players who destroy them. The first are called on to create on the field, the latter to destroy the team actions of the opponent.” The role of the manager was to make sure that such coalitions and connections were constantly being made by the players. This meant making sure the players were capable both of reading the game well enough to know what to do in a given situation and of using their technical abilities to carry it out.14
Working together, the two Russian coaches trained their players to focus on what they called “coalition actions,” such as offside traps and overlapping runs on attack. “The most important thing in football,” Lobanovskyi once said, “is what a player is doing on a pitch when he’s not in possession of the ball, not when he has it.” That was because it was the actions taken by the coalition of all the players that determined what was possible for the player with the ball. As in Total Football, Lobanovskyi cherished a certain “universality” in his players, the ability for all of them to both defend and attack. This would enable them to work as effective “elements” in the system they created for the team.15
Part of his success depended on an extremely sophisticated method for gathering data about games in order to analyze what had happened and improve the tactics of his team. Lobanovskyi created a complex mathematical rubric tracking the various actions carried out by his players—passes, tackles, shots on goal, runs with the ball, interceptions, defeats of opponents—and posted the results on a bulletin board after every game. This gave him a kind of power, probably at times overbearing, over his players. If he criticized a player, he backed up his criticism with empirical data that the player could see and could not dispute. He considered himself the master of this data, and the only one who could really understand and analyze it. If a player tried to respond to a criticism, saying, “But I think…” Lobanovskyi would shout back, “Don’t think! I do the thinking for you! Play!”16
There is a struggle in the heart of most managers between different visions of their relationship to players. Some truly see themselves as the pivotal figures in a team’s play, those who determine the tactics and train players to carry them out. These kinds of managers see their role as very clear-cut: they are supposed to deploy players in such a way as to win games, using whatever tools they have at their disposal. The manager Alan Durban, angry at journalists who criticized the way his team Stoke City was playing, famously told them to look elsewhere if they were looking for something pretty. “If you want entertainment, go and watch clowns,” he said. Other managers emphasize their desire to create something entertaining and beautiful for their fans, focusing more on the creativity and independence of players, and on creating an environment in which players can ultimately thrive because they feel free to experiment and express themselves on the pitch. That was the case of the Russian coach Eduard Malofeev. He sought to infuse his players with joy and love of the game. Asked once in an interview what he did each morning, Malofeev replied “that first he thanked God he was alive, then he got out of bed and jumped up and down to celebrate the fact.” His goal was to create what he called a “sincere football,” and he wanted to make sure his players were able to express their individual styles of play. Most managers try to navigate between these various approaches. They understand that they have to guide the fitness and training of players, and develop a good set of tactics for games. Yet they also seek to create a space where players can thrive as individuals and express themselves joyously and effectively on the pitch. In this sense, they have to struggle with the broader debate over tactics within football, between playing to win and playing fluidly and beautifully. For managers, of course, this is far from a theoretical debate, since their jobs are often on the line.17
Managers sometimes describe what they do by comparing it to the work of various kinds of artists. Arrigo Sacchi, manager of one of Italy’s top teams, Milan, as well as the Italian national team of the 1990s, declared that the goal of soccer should be to strive to create a great work of art, to offer “ninety minutes of joy to people.” He explained, “I wanted this joy to come not from winning, but from being entertained, from witnessing something special.” “Football is born in the brain, not the body. Michelangelo said he painted with his mind, not with his hands.” If the pitch was Sacchi’s canvas, players were his colors, and he expected them to be intelligent so that they could follow his broader plan. Not content with merely comparing himself to Michelangelo, in another context Sacchi also described himself as a conductor: “I didn’t want solo artists. I wanted an orchestra. The greatest compliment I received was when people said my football was like music.” In another interview, he reached for a different artistic metaphor: making a film. “A good manager is both screenwriter and director,” he said. “The team has to reflect him.”18
As all three metaphors used by Sacchi suggest, he saw himself as the only one who could really see the big picture and therefore create a beautiful work of art out of the constituent parts of his team. “Many believe that football is about the players expressing themselves,” he explained. “But that’s not the case,” at least “not in and of itself. The player needs to express himself within the parameters laid out by the manager. And that’s why the manager has to fill his head with as many scenarios, tools, movements, with as much information as possible. Then the player makes decisions based on that.” The players he sought out were those who could understand their role in the bigger plan while having the skills and talent to work out what they were meant to do within it at any given moment. “I didn’t want robots or individualists,” he said. “I wanted people with the intelligence to understand me, and the spirit to put that intelligence in the service of the team.”19
A manager wields great power, determining the prospects of a player, opening up possibilities or closing them down. There can be a ruthlessness, even cruelty, to this process. Sacchi, for instance, could be withering in his assessment of players. He recalls his work late in his career at Real Madrid, evaluating young players being trained in the team’s soccer academy. In these academies, which most professional teams now have, young players who show promise are given intensive training by staff, with the hopes that some of them may end up being stars on the team when they are older. “We had some who were very good footballers. They had technique, they had athleticism, they had drive, they were hungry,” Sacchi said. And yet they were not quite good enough for him. “They lacked what I call knowing-how-to-play-football. They lacked decision-making. They lacked positioning. They didn’t have the subtle sensitivity of football: how a player should move within the collective.” Sacchi doubted that some of them could learn these skills. While “strength, passion, technique, athleticism” were all important, according to Sacchi, they are only a “means to an end, not an end in itself.” They only have meaning in relation to the goal of “putting talent in service of the team, and by doing this, making both you and the team greater.” There was a difference between being a “great footballer” and “a great player.” Sacchi’s vision was perhaps best exemplified in a style of training session he held with Milan. As one scout from an opposing team described it, “They played a game with a full eleven on a full-sized pitch against nobody and without the ball!” As Sacchi recounted, “We would line up in our formation, I would tell players where the imaginary ball was and the players had to move accordingly, passing the imaginary ball and moving like clockwork around the pitch, based upon the player’s reactions.”20
The Argentinean manager Marcelo Bielsa—who since 1990 has led Argentinean and Chilean national teams as well as professional teams throughout Latin America and Europe—gets his players to a similar level by using what he called repenitización. The term comes from music, where it is used to describe sight-reading, or “the practice of playing a piece without having rehearsed it first.” Applied to soccer, the term conveys both improvisation and urgency. Repenitización is a key to Bielsa’s philosophy as manager. As Wilson describes, “It demands players repeatedly do things for the first time, a paradox that perhaps suggests the glorious futility of what he is trying to achieve.” Bielsa put it differently: “The possible is already done. We are doing the impossible.” There can be something overbearing and abstract, of course, about the vision of the manager. “If players weren’t human,” Bielsa declared at one point, “I would never lose.” Here Bielsa, like Sacchi, portrays himself as a kind of all-seeing mastermind of the game, seeking out players to fulfill an ideal perhaps only ever truly achieved in his own head.21
Managers sometimes have difficulty conveying their ideas to players, especially if they develop too many fancy new terms to describe the act of playing. Cláudio Coutinho, a former military officer who managed the Brazilian national team in the late 1970s, made much of the fact that he was going to transform the way his players approached the game by insisting that they embody “polyvalence.” Although all this meant in practice was that he wanted his players to be flexible and versatile, moving between different positions as needed, describing this through a new term was part of his attempt to position himself, notes Roger Kittleson, as someone offering an “ultra-modern technical approach.” When they first heard the term, however, many of the players responded with confusion, saying “Poly… what?” One player recalled a session where Coutinho was trying to explain a play using his newly developed technical jargon. He told one of his players how to combine with another player, the great Brazilian midfielder Roberto Rivellino, like this: “Rivellino is going to retreat to the penalty box arc, right next to the zone of reason, then you immediately look for the right flank, giving preference to open spaces. Then you overtake him at speed, trying an overlapping towards the future point, and that way you receive the ball in front of the goal.” When Coutinho asked the player if he understood, the player replied, “I only got ‘Rivellino.’”22
Other managers explain their aims more simply. Pep Guardiola, who came up through the ranks in the Barcelona academy as a player and later became legendary as the team’s coach, articulated his philosophy in this way: “In the world of football there is only one secret: I’ve got the ball or I haven’t.” It was fine for other teams not to want the ball, Guardiola quipped, but “Barcelona have opted for having the ball.… And when we haven’t got the ball we have to get it back because we need it.” In part because he had been trained at and played for Barcelona, Guardiola was one of those who excelled at embodying and communicating a particular style of play to his team, helping Barcelona to become the reigning club in Europe under his leadership from 2008 to 2012.23
The stress involved with playing at the highest levels of soccer is intense. Sometimes, the most important thing a manager can do is just try to keep players calm and ready to focus on the game. Pia Sundhage, the Swede who managed the US Women’s National Team from 2008 to 2012, once explained at a press conference that sometimes, when her players were getting too stressed before a match, she would pull out her guitar and play a song for them: Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy,” with its classic opening lyrics: “Slow down, you move too fast.” Sundhage’s song offered a reminder that, in the end, what might be most critical for an elite team’s success was serenity and confidence as they approach the game, knowing they can’t ultimately control the outcome, but can still seek both victory and a kind of transcendence by enjoying their time on the pitch. Later, when Sundhage announced she was leaving her position in the United States to coach Sweden’s national women’s team, she sang Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You” as she bid farewell to her players.24
Today, managers of national teams as well as professional clubs operate in an extremely high-stakes and high-pressure context, endlessly scrutinized, viciously criticized, and only occasionally lavished with praised for their achievements. In professional soccer, the financial stakes have skyrocketed in recent decades, largely as a result of increasing revenues from broadcasting rights. For instance, in the case of the English Premier League, probably the most watched league on the planet, such revenue makes up about half of teams’ total income. Another quarter comes from stadium gate receipts and concessions, and the rest largely from corporate sponsorships and selling licensed products such as team jerseys.25
The English professional soccer teams are not franchises like sports teams in the United States, including Major League Soccer. They are rooted in a location from which they cannot be moved. The more apt comparison to US sports might be to college sports, since those teams are tied to institutions. English clubs did not start as businesses, but as associations located in a particular place. This “old theatre of English football,” writes Goldblatt, was only gradually turned into a “globally attractive television spectacle.” This involved a process he describes as “a modern institutional enclosure.” This is a reference to the seventeenth-century process through which English elites took over lands that had previously been held as commons—used freely by a community for grazing and logging, for example—and put them in private hands. So, too, clubs began as a kind of common property of a locality, and their growth—notably through the construction of stadiums—was often sustained by public money. In the past decades, however, in England and elsewhere in Europe, a process of “stealth and legal maneuver” has moved most of these teams into “private hands in the forms of holding companies.” The money that comes into clubs depends on a brand that only has meaning because of its history in a specific location and the accumulation of support by generations of fans from that place. Yet, today the most famous of English teams are also truly global brands. This means that they attract significant financial investment not so much because of the potential profits but because of the “status and glamour” associated with such symbolically powerful institutions. Clubs in England can receive “massive capital injections,” as they increasingly do from foreign investors from the Middle East, Russia, and the United States.26
English soccer, like that of other European nations, is organized around a system known as “promotion and relegation.” There are four divisions, and teams can move between them. The top three teams in any division at the end of the season are “promoted” into a better division, while the lowest-ranked teams in each division are “relegated” downward. The gains that come with promotion, particularly to the top division, the Premier League, are huge, because a team gets much more money from broadcasting rights when it is in the top division. This money, in turn, can be used to recruit better players and therefore be more competitive. Teams in the Premier League compete for the biggest prize: the European Champions League. The top four teams of the Premier League get to compete in this continental championship, which gives teams even more global visibility, and therefore access to larger streams of money.
Of all the participants in a professional team, it is the manager who is usually seen as most deserving of praise, or blame, when it comes to the fate of a team in this system. The place where the manager has the most control is in player recruitment. Team academies play a crucial role here. Lionel Messi, for instance, was trained from a young age in the Barcelona academy before becoming a star player on the team. Yet most players on the wealthiest teams are recruited from elsewhere through something known as the transfer market.
The way the transfer market works is, on the face of it, relatively simple. When a player is under contract with a given professional club, he can only move elsewhere if his current club gives him permission and releases him from his contracts. “Transfer fees” evolved as a way of facilitating these moves. A team might not want to let a player go, but for a bit of money they might change their minds. Early on, transfer fees were quite modest: the first recorded one, from 1902 in England, was one thousand pounds. By the 1960s, the sums had increased dramatically, to the hundreds of thousands of pounds. Diego Maradona set a new record in 1984 with his transfer to Napoli from Barcelona, which cost five million pounds, about seven million dollars at the time. But this was just the beginning. In 1995, the Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman won a case he brought to the European Union Court alleging that the rules—in place at the time in a number of countries—that limited the number of foreign players who could be recruited were a violation of the laws of the EU. After that, player movement within Europe became even easier, and as a result the transfer fees expanded exponentially. In 2001, Zinedine Zidane was recruited by Real Madrid from Juventus for forty-five million pounds. By 2009, when Real Madrid recruited Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United, they paid a record eighty-nine million pounds. The numbers continue to go up and up, vertiginously. In the summer of 2017, the French team Paris Saint-Germain, bankrolled by Qatari investors, paid a jaw-dropping transfer fee to acquire the Brazilian star Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior from Barcelona—253 million euros, about 300 million dollars. Each summer, soccer fans intensely track the news of potential moves, hoping their team will gain a star player, or fearing they will lose one. While transfers take place between continents, with promising Latin American and African soccer players being brought into Europe, the biggest amounts are exchanged between the wealthy soccer clubs of Europe, particularly the Italian, Spanish, French, German, and English leagues.27
The vertiginous expansion in transfer fees has reshaped the global economy of soccer on many levels. Today’s global soccer economy is in many ways structured around the transfer market, with lower-division teams and less prominent leagues in places like Belgium and Switzerland acting as feeders to more prominent, richer teams in other European countries. Such teams train players in their academies and also recruit promising players, often from Africa and South America, offering them relatively low-paying contracts. Most of these players do not succeed at the professional level, but all it takes is one among dozens to get a significant offer from a wealthier club for the feeder club to make a windfall through a transfer fee. The smaller team can then use this fee to recruit better players and improve its standing and perhaps move into a higher division, which might bring higher revenues from television rights and increased visibility as a global brand.28
It is a high-stakes game. In their withering economic analysis of the many mistakes made by clubs and managers in the transfer market, journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski single out Arsenal coach Arsène Wenger as a manager who has been markedly clever in navigating this system. Nicknamed “the professor” because of his degree in economics and the fact that he is “addicted to statistics” about players, Wenger has been the manager at Arsenal since 1996, a remarkably long tenure in today’s soccer world. He was viewed with skepticism by at least one player when he was first hired. Tony Adams, who was then the captain of the team, recalls thinking, “What does this Frenchman know about soccer? He wears glasses and looks more like a schoolteacher.” Having previously coached in Japan, Wenger criticized the English diet. “I think in England you eat too much sugar and not enough vegetables,” he declared. There was, notes David Kilpatrick, always “a touch of xenophobia” in criticisms of Wenger. Not only was he a nerdy-looking Frenchman, but he also voraciously recruited foreigners, to the point that he could frequently field an Arsenal team without a single English player.29
What Wenger understands, Kuper and Szymanski argue, is the fundamental truth that in modern soccer “you need data to get ahead.” Wenger is particularly interested in information that can help him decide which players to acquire for his team. He knows that past performance tends to be overvalued, meaning that clubs “pay fortunes for players who have just passed their peak.” While he keeps his defenders on the team longer, Wenger transfers midfielders and forwards from the team at a younger age, often making a tidy profit in the process. Again drawing on empirical study, Wenger also emphasizes factors that shape the success or failures of players, including diet and psychology. Perhaps his greatest recruit was Thierry Henry, a talented French striker of Caribbean descent. Henry came from Juventus in Italy, where he had “languished,” and Wenger converted him into what Kilpatrick describes as “the English Premier League’s most lethal and poetic striker.” Over his eight years at Arsenal, from 1999 to 2007, Henry scored 174 goals, many of them breathtakingly beautiful.30
Wenger has led his team to seven victories in the Football Association Cup, a competition open to all professional teams in England, the most of any manager in history. During Wenger’s first year in charge of the team, 1997 to 1998, Arsenal both won the Football Association Cup and was the number-one ranked team in the Premier League. He repeated this feat in 2002. In 2003–2004, Arsenal played the entire season without ever losing a game in the English Premier League, earning the title “the invincibles.” It was not just an unprecedented feat; it was done in style. Arsenal under Wenger, effuses Kilpatrick, plays with “aesthetic brilliance,” seeking victories but also carrying out “the even more noble pursuit of inducing a sense of ecstasy.” In 2009, Wenger explained that he was proud of having cultivated a “philosophy, a style of play and a culture of how you want to play the game.” Though recent years have been frustrating for Arsenal and Wenger, with many vocal fans calling for his ouster, the team owners have kept him on, seemingly believing in his project. Kilpatrick, both a devoted fan of the team and a philosopher, expresses his admiration by claiming if the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were alive today, he would certainly root for Arsenal. For Nietzsche, soccer could only be “justified as an aesthetic phenomenon,” and therefore must be played “artistically—in a creative, imaginative, and positive manner—with a sense of the game’s potential for beauty.”31
Modern managers like Wenger manage not only players but, as Goldblatt writes, also an increasingly large staff that includes specialized coaches, psychologists, “scouting and computing departments,” and even “acupuncturists, faith healers and translators.” Directors of football and the executives of teams, meanwhile, have taken over some of the financial roles once held by managers. Perhaps the biggest shift, notes Goldblatt, is that “the balance of power between coaches and players has shifted.” The increased pay and mobility of players have decreased the authority of managers. This makes their job complicated. “Operating inside a network rather than a hierarchy,” a team manager must, writes Goldblatt, be “a manager of complexity, consensus and coordination.” The question of how a manager relates to a new star recruit, for instance, can play a decisive role in how a team does in a given season. As a result, fans follow and are fascinated by managers, finding their “dilemmas and problems” in some ways more interesting than those of the players. With the rise of social media, as well as an expansion of sports commentary on radio and television, the decisions of managers are constantly analyzed, critiqued, and dissected. Fans who fancy themselves better qualified than managers to make such decisions have an outlet in fantasy leagues, where they get to create their own teams by recruiting players, starting with a given budget. These dream teams compete against each other in virtual leagues based on how the players do during the season. The actual performance of players in their games determines how well these virtual teams do, because players earn points for goals scored, and defenders and goalies earn points for preventing the other team from scoring any goals. The manager, however, is gone—replaced by you.32
What makes for a good manager? Kuper and Szymanski criticize the way clubs choose them. Men’s teams almost never consider hiring a woman as a manager, and as a result overlook a significant pool of potential talent. Instead, again and again, they choose a white man “with a conservative haircut, aged between thirty-five and sixty, and a former professional player.” They argue that the tendency to hire former players overlooks the fact that “playing and coaching are different skill sets.” As they note, the manager who can probably be considered the most successful in soccer’s history, José Mourinho, who has coached Real Madrid, Chelsea, and Manchester United, barely played professional soccer. Once asked about this, Mourinho replied sardonically, “I don’t see the connection. My dentist is the best in the world, yet he hardly ever has a toothache.” Failed players, Mourinho went on to suggest, might be better coaches in part because they have had “more time to study.” Sacchi, who had never been a professional soccer player, explained it this way: “A jockey doesn’t have to have been born a horse.”33
For managers to have a real impact on a team, they need to be in their position over the long term, the way legendary manager Alex Ferguson was at Manchester United from 1986 to 2013, or the way Wenger has been at Arsenal. This kind of longevity, however, is growing rare. In the hypercompetitive and fluctuating world of contemporary soccer, managers have become as itinerant as players, hired and fired at a startling rate. On average, managers only last a year and a half in the Premier League, and the majority of first-timers are fired between six months and a year after starting. Even as their authority and influence has decreased, managers have seen their wages go up dramatically. Wenger and Zidane, who now coaches Real Madrid, each make about eight million pounds per year, while Guardiola now makes a record salary of fifteen million pounds per year coaching Manchester City.34
As certain professional teams have become global brands, their managers have become media stars alongside players. In the 1990s, the field of play in soccer was altered for the first time since the 1920s, to add a “technical area” for the coach to stand in. This was originally meant to contain them, keeping them from getting too close to the pitch. Yet, as Goldblatt notes, the managers now have a “stage all of their own,” a little box by the side of the pitch where they can stand close to, but still a few steps away from, the game. This “grassy podium” becomes an “invisible cage,” where the manager’s “tics and neuroses are given center stage.” This makes the manager’s curious role all the more visible. He is on the pitch, in a way, but he is not part of the team that he leads. In fact, his “zone” is policed by an assistant referee who often is in conflict with managers who “persistently escape the narrow compound” in moments of celebration or rage, providing entertainment for fans in the stands and viewers at home. Every once in a while, a manager gets sanctioned and sent away from the pitch, having to watch the game from some seat or box up in the stands, even more distant and powerless than usual. Some managers—including, often, Wenger—eschew the box and remain seated on the bench, whispering with their assistants, accepting their basic inability to do all that much to influence the course of the game.35
Watching managers’ expressions of delight or despair, the ups and downs of their emotions, can be one of the most entertaining parts of the modern soccer spectacle. Mourinho takes notes on a little notepad, and you want to know, what is he writing? Manager fashion is also a good topic of discussion. At which boutique in Barcelona, you wonder, does Guardiola shop to get those hip suits? Silvia Neid, the manager for the German women’s national team from 2005 to 2016, had an intense serenity that seemed to channel energy to her team, and her artsy German T-shirts added an element of intrigue to her presence on the sidelines. Watching the furrows in Wenger’s brow, along with his inimitable, tight-lipped expression of exasperation, is a spectacle in itself, and the joy in seeing him smile, as he does every once in a while, is contagious. Watching Zidane as a coach may not be quite as spectacular as watching him as a player, but once you get used to seeing him in a suit rather than a jersey, the same intense gaze and, occasionally, beautiful smile that punctuated his presence on the pitch shapes his presence on the sidelines.
Managers are asked to understand, and try to control, all the factors that go into preparing a team to go onto the pitch and win. When they are good at what they do, their efforts can pay off. And yet they are also reminded continually that, in the end, soccer cannot be controlled. Once the whistle blows and the game begins, the manager mostly watches—surprised, disappointed—along with the rest of us. During the game, the manager might see with satisfaction that something is actually working according to plan, but she can just as easily witness her team fall apart, unable to respond as a game slips from her hands. The manager lives at the heart of the mystery of the game.
Reflecting on his career on his sixty-seventh birthday, Wenger imagined trying to explain his way into heaven. “If God exists and one day I go up there and he will ask: ‘Do you want to come in? What have you done in your life?’” Wenger admitted wryly that “the only answer I will have is: ‘I tried to win football games.’ He will say: ‘Is that all you have done?’ And the only answer I will have is: ‘It’s not as easy as it looks.’”36