Soccer: Power struggle beyond empowerment

When player empowerment becomes player power, everyone is in trouble.

Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri is tha latest to lose control of his players

A few years ago Google decided to abolish all managers. The board had read about the importance of “empowerment” and the dangers of “autocracy”. They wanted to liberate their engineers to take decisions and to be creative. The plan didn’t work.

As the psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer wrote it in their book Friend & Foe: “Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin conducted what they thought would be a revolutionary experiment: they eliminated managers and created a completely flat organisation. The experiment was indeed eye-opening but only because it was a failure.”

The lack of hierarchy created chaos and confusion, and Page and Brin quickly realised Google needed managers to set direction and facilitate collaboration. Even Google needs some hierarchy.”

I am guessing fans of Chelsea might sympathise with this example. For all the talk in football about giving players more freedom and inviting them to take ownership, it is perhaps useful to recognise not just the possibilities of such an approach, but also its limitations. When player empowerment becomes player power, everyone is in trouble.

The Kepa Arrizabalaga incident is, in this sense, merely the latest manifestation of a slow draining of authority from the Chelsea head coach.

When the goalkeeper refused to be substituted during the League Cup final at the weekend, it was not only a sign of his immaturity, but a symptom of the impotence of manager Maurizio Sarri.

How can a manager, even one with a questionable tactical approach, hope to sustain control when the owner, Roman Abramovich, is absent due to visa problems and has historically sided with the players in any power struggle?

What we have at Chelsea is not empowerment but mutiny in episodic form. We saw it with the bust-up between Diego Costa and the previous head coach Antonio Conte last season and we see it at other clubs whenever a manager is considered fragile and the players believe they can force him out.

The club becomes a crucible of confusion: the de jure boss (the manager) seeking to impose his will, and the de facto bosses (the players) seeking to impose theirs.

Hierarchies may not seem terribly fashionable these days but they at least express a crisp logic.

The first concerns the division of labour. The boss can keep an eye on the forest while the subordinates keep an eye on the trees.

The second is more fundamental: co-ordination. When there are lots of bosses, each doing their own thing, they are unlikely to harmonise. This is why I find the idea Kepa “misunderstood” the instructions from the bench rather unconvincing. Whatever was going on in his mind, it was crystal clear he should have left the pitch.

Sarri had the big picture. Perhaps he had calculated that back-up goalkeeper Willy Caballero was the superior penalty stopper. Kepa had a somewhat smaller picture. He wanted to be the hero if the game went to sudden death.

The dangers of weak leadership were revealed in a classic study of fashion houses. According to the Journal du Textile, fashion houses with more than one boss — “co-creative directors” — were significantly less successful than those with one. This pattern repeats endlessly, from joint company chief executives to shared commands on Himalayan expeditions. In the latter, more climbers die, not through lack of effort, but confusion over who is in charge.

But there are limitations with hierarchies that are too rigid. Indeed, one of the most refreshing things in football has been the emergence of managers who recognise that if players are disempowered they can be less effective.

When players are expected to mutely obey, they struggle to develop leadership skills, and become incapable of adapting when the opposition score early, helplessly looking to the bench.

Such managers also understand that creativity, particularly in the final third, requires players to take risks. As Pep Guardiola put it at Manchester City: “Once the referee has blown the whistle I stand there and wave my hands but it is down to the players.”

This column might, at this point, seem contradictory. Am I both praising hierarchy and its absence? Not quite.

The point about managers such as Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, England’s Gareth Southgate and, indeed, Alex Ferguson, is that they empower the players within constraints.

They do so only after gaining their respect and establishing primacy. For Ferguson at Manchester United, this took at least five years with plenty of mutineers sacked and many blasts of the hairdryer. Note the hairdryer was almost entirely absent for the last decade of his reign. He wanted his players to compete “without fear”.

Dictatorship is, in many ways, easy. Dominance is an ancient form of social organisation, common in all primates and, according to the psychologist Jordan Peterson, lobsters.

The real trick is to sustain the logic of hierarchy while providing players with the space to step up. It makes sense to have leaders on the pitch capable of adapting when things change, but always within limits. It is disastrous when they defy the manager.

Empowering subordinates is not easy, of course. It takes social intelligence well beyond the wit of chimpanzees (and lobsters). A leader needs to know when to delegate but also when to dial up authority. They also need to know they have the backing of the board, something rarely guaranteed in football, where fragility is baked into the job. It cannot be easy when mutiny can break out at any time from upstairs or downstairs, not to mention the stands.

As for Sarri, he confessed yesterday the puny fine imposed upon Kepa was not his decision but that of the board. When asked if he would take the decision to drop the goalkeeper for the next game, he said: “No, it will be a group decision.” Asked to clarify which group, he said: “The players.”

What is certain is that the predicament at Chelsea is not an indictment of player empowerment but of player power. These two things are not just different, they are polar opposites.

The Times