One of the problems with getting older is that you’re never quite sure whether it’s you or them. Is the world really changing, or is it just you, struggling to adapt? There’s a milestone in life, probably as you’re contemplating university or a first job, when you realise you’re watching a footballer who is younger than you. Then, 15-20 years later, you realise you’re watching a manager who is younger than you. And 15-20 years after that, especially if you’re watching the modern Premier League, you realise that almost every manager is younger than you.
At which you do two things: give thanks for David Moyes; and check to see whether it’s actually happening, or whether this is just the football equivalent of the policemen-getting-younger cliche.
It turns out it is true. Managers used to be ashen-faced men with nicotine-grey hair dressed in the sports jackets of grim experience. They spoke with a rasping melancholy of the depths of human fallibility and of fates that were not to be trusted. Now they’re trim, sprightly figures in T-shirts, convinced that analytics can explain the world.
There are fewer Premier League managers now aged 50 or over than at any point in the past 20 years: only four, and two of those have only just made it over the threshold. Moyes is 63 (three months younger than José Mourinho, which, like Aberdeen being further west than Bristol, is a fact both true and too counterintuitive to be worth believing). Then there is Unai Emery at 54, Oliver Glasner at 52 and Régis Le Bris at 50. Most Premier League managers are in their 40s, with the youngest two Matthias Jaissle, 38, and Fabian Hürzeler, 33.
This is not coincidence; rather it seems the result of two interconnected trends. Even at the turn of the century, when Mourinho was starting out, it was unusual for a manager not to have played the game to at least a reasonable level, which meant they were starting their managerial careers in their mid-thirties. That’s still the route many take – Andoni Iraola, Michael Carrick, Gary O’Neil or Álvaro Arbeloa, for instance.
But there’s also a recognition, to use Arrigo Sacchi’s phrase, that a jockey does not need first to have been a horse. Coaching is regarded as a job in its own right, requiring a very different skillset to playing. Hürzeler came through the youth systems at Bayern Munich, Hoffenheim and 1860 Munich but, aged 22, in part because of an ankle injury, decided to focus on coaching.
Jaissle was a member of the Hoffenheim side that soared through the divisions to win promotion to the Bundesliga before knee and achilles tendon injuries ended his playing career at 26. The early switch into coaching seems particularly common in Germany: Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann have similar stories.
That greater receptiveness to career coaches explains the wave of younger managers. But there are also fewer older coaches.
In part it may be coincidence: an experienced generation – Sam Allardyce, Tony Pulis and Alan Pardew – grew old together. That the process occurred just as many of their tactical characteristics – low blocks, direct play, a focus on set pieces – re-entered the mainstream may not simply be irony. The old must be cast out before it is reinvented as new; the modish cannot be represented by a 60-something football man.
But it’s also because modern management is exhausting. At Ipswich, Kieran McKenna would have his coaches present their plans to him for the day at 6am, altering anything he felt wasn’t quite right. That plan would be sent to the staff at the training ground to set up all the various pitches and drills. McKenna would then go to check everything was laid out properly. It was all extraordinarily detailed; everything was marked out, down to where players should stand when they weren’t directly involved and where water bottles would be placed.
During sessions, McKenna would walk between each unit, stepping in to offer advice and make amendments. After sessions, coaches would watch them back and report to McKenna on what could be improved before planning the next day’s drills to be presented at 6am the following morning.
During 11 v 11 practice games, McKenna would be the only one who coached. Over his five years at Ipswich, no drill was ever repeated in exactly the same form; repetition and possible staleness were to be avoided at all costs. Little wonder that after a third promotion in five seasons at the club, he felt exhausted, in need of a break rather than taking on an uneven fight in an ungrateful Premier League that could only sap his reserves further.
Brian Clough would take holidays during the season. He would turn up only infrequently at training. His input was sharp, erratic, impressionistic. Four decades on, a top-level manager is running a team of coaches and analysts that probably outnumbers the players with whom he has direct contact.
He cannot simply ignore the board until he needs money for a signing but has to manage up to whatever structure of sporting directors exists above him. He often will have little autonomy, although the success of Mikel Arteta, who has a more traditional role and seems to micromanage everything at Arsenal, may change that. And he is liable to be sacked after a month of poor form. The pressure is enormous, the margin for error minute.
That perhaps explains why so many top managers are now drifting into international football. Management, it’s commonly said, is a drug, but perhaps that fix is more palatable when it is delivered in five doses spread over a season, plus a major tournament every other year, rather than in the relentless drudgery of the club game. Carlo Ancelotti took his break from the club game at 66, Jürgen Klopp at 56, Tuchel at 50. None have demonstrated any great desire to return to the remorselessness of the league.
The Premier League may be the greatest stage in management. It may be where the best salaries are paid. It may be where every manager wishes to test himself. But it is an exhausting and capricious world that requires extraordinary reserves of energy, physical and mental. It is no theatre for old men.
