Forget players: real football game is between managers

WE have come to see football as a battle between managers. The players have a useful but clearly subsidiary role.

Jose Mourinho

A NEW football season has begun. It lies all before us. So let's call in the ethologist from Mars for her - many of the great ethologists are female - considered views on the behaviour of the human animal in the context of sport.

As it happens, one of her research students is doing her PhD thesis on the human passion for individual sports. It is, of course, about football. If you read about football, if you study football broadcasts, if you listen to football conversations, it is impossible - at least for a Martian - to avoid the conclusion that every football match is actually a duel between two middle-aged men.

Read the headlines in The Times. Two big football matches: one headline name-checked Jose Mourinho, the other Arsene Wenger. The Chelsea-Aston Villa match report centred on a disagreement between Mourinho and his opposite number, Paul Lambert. The Fenerbahce-Arsenal match report was about the relief the result gives Wenger.

We have come to see football as a battle between managers. The players have a useful but clearly subsidiary role. Every team is an extension of the manager's will, an expression of his personality. Chelsea is tough, confrontational, calculating, pragmatic: Arsenal is delightful, insubstantial, a bit dreamy. And on and on. This season is especially fascinating because Manchester United has a new manager.

Since the Premier League began in 1992, United has provided a study in management. The actual players have changed and changed again, but two things have been constant: success and the manager, Alex Ferguson.

This has inspired a thousand myths. One of these is belief in something called Fergie Time: the period when, late in a match, a Ferguson team magically gains additional time to turn a draw or even defeat into victory with late goals. His dressingroom talks could turn you or me into Pele.

Belief in Ferguson's quasi-mystical powers is so widespread that people think that Ferguson was responsible for Andy Murray's first grand-slam tournament victory in New York and played a big role in his subsequent triumph at Wimbledon.

The fact of the matter is that the manager is not the only person involved in a football match. Football matches are played with humans, rather than chess pieces. However, significant contributions of individual players are generally put down to the manager's understanding of humanity and the strength of his desire for victory.

There is also an extensive non-playing staff at a leading football club: coaches, directors of football, directors, owners, scouts, medics. We don't pay them much mind, though; we prefer to concentrate on the personality and the decisions of the manager. The manager is only one member of a large and complex organisation, but it's him we talk about, him we praise and him we blame.

This doesn't happen in other team sports in this country. We know that Andy Flower is the England team director and that Darren Lehmann is the somewhat beleaguered coach of Australia, but we don't see the Ashes series as Flower v Lehmann. The Times headlines gave them no mention. We are more inclined to stress the captains, Alastair Cook v Michael Clarke, but mostly we see the play for what it more obviously is: a series of duels between batsman and bowler.

Managers exist in both codes of rugby, and they are interviewed and their tactics are praised and criticised, but we don't believe Wigan Warriors are all about Shaun Wane any more than we believe that the central issue in the England team is the personality of Stuart Lancaster. It's football that centres on the individual.

L'equipe c'est moi. Each Premier League manager is Louis XIV. He knows that everything begins and ends with him. The team is the manager. Even refereeing decisions are affected by his power and influence, which is why managers make such a big deal of them. Games are changed forever by the words the manager speaks at half-time. The great stress on the manager appeals to us on a narrative level. Every unfolding story needs meaningful and memorable characters; that's how you write a novel. You can't do it without a hero, no matter how flawed.

When we turn to real life, our stories read more easily when we base them around the nature and doings of individuals. Politics is a better read if it's about David Cameron v Ed Miliband, while World War II was a duel between Churchill and Hitler. It's a better movie that way.

The cult of the manager is the Great Man Theory unfolding before us as live action. Every football season is but a chapter in the ghosted autobiographies of great men, as Thomas Carlyle almost said. History is a better yarn as a series of tales of heroes: a football season reads better when considered as the doings of a series of remarkable individuals.

History can be better understood as a study of social changes and cultural shifts, but that really doesn't leap off the page. Nor does analysis of football tactics, discussion of the nature of an entire squad, precise evaluations of the backroom team and accurate medical bulletins of every player. All these things are deeply relevant to the outcome of a football match, but they don't make a tale.

There is a further point. Boys want to be George Best or Lionel Messi, but there comes a point when all of us who are neither Best nor Messi realise that this is not going to happen. We could, I suppose, come to terms with our mediocrity, but where's the fun in that? After all, you can be a manager.

Anyone can. Neither Wenger nor Mourinho could play for nuts. We are all great managers: the fantasy is gloriously accessible, especially to a male past his prime.

So managers play a role as fantasy figures. They don't, of course, actually do anything. They represent pure power. A manager is a kind of king, waging symbolic warfare week after week for the benefit of his subjects.

But there comes a time when the manager must play another role. He is like one of those kings of ancient times whose rule was absolute and unquestioned but entirely dependent on results.

When the crops fail, the king must die.

Football is complex and involved, but it suits us to make it a duel of personalities, just as it is easier to view history and modern politics as a straightforward mano a mano business. It doesn't represent reality, but you know how it is. Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Even in football.

THE TIMES