Directors of Football

What is a Director of Football and what is the point?

That is the question that is right now a cause of great concern for Harry Redknapp, the manager of Portsmouth. Since he took over as manager at Fratton Park, about two and a half years ago, Harry has done a magnificent, truly brilliant job; he has transformed the club, taken them into the Premiership and made them successful. But now, for some unknown reason, the club’s Serbian chairman and owner, Milan Mandaric, has appointed a Director of Football, Velimir Zajec.

This will precipitate the relegation of Pompey, as sure as the gathering of storm clouds overhead will lead to rain. Indeed, there is simply no club in English football that has been successful with a Director of Football.

At Exeter City, there has been nothing but mediocrity and failure since Steve Perryman arrived as Director of Football, about three years ago. The club has slipped into the Conference, several managers have come and gone, yet Perryman remains in his mysterious advisory role. He is often on local, Westcountry tv – usually walking along the beach at Lympstone, the glorious Exe estuary in the background – talking about his aims and stuff. I can’t remember what he said, except that he might go back to Japan at some point, when a great job comes up (he said that four years ago). But, what do they actually do, these directors of football?

Some say their job is to oversee the buying of players and sort of present them to the current manager as the raw product, something to work with. But this is a disaster. There is simply no way that any of the top managers would work in such a situation. It is like giving Ian Botham a baseball bat for the Ashes and telling him to get on with it.

There is the argument that a director of football overseas the youth system and, in addition to transfers, also overseas the wage structure. Indeed, it is possible that an unscrupulous manager - George Graham at Arsenal, even Ferguson with his son, Jason the agent - could use agents to cream off money from the club via the football agent, that must disgusting creature of modern football. It is possible, and the wage bill at Portsmouth is now about £20 million; there is no knowing how much of the transfer fees paid out have gone to agents. In this set up, corruption is easy.

Mandaric says it is all about 'having a ready-made system in place that any individual can turn his hand to'. But this is rubbish. All of the greatest and most successful clubs are a personification of their great managers: you think of Matt Busby (Man Utd), Bill Shankly (Liverpool), Jock Stein (Celtic), Ted Drake, Tommy Docherty and Dave Sexton (Chelsea), Herbert Chapman (Huddersfield and Arsenal) and so on... Jose Mourinho??? John Neal created success at Wrexham and Middlesbrough before arriving at Chelsea in 1983; each team failed when he left.

Brian Clough created success at Derby County in the early 1970s and when he left it vanished; the same thing happened after he left Forest in 1993. There was also Bill Nicholson at Tottenham, and Don Revie at Leeds. Even Alec Stock at Yeovil.

Arsene Wenger, at Arsenal, is famous for his astute judgement in the buying and selling of players; he has been very successful, not only in producing one of the finest teams that English football has ever seen, but also in generating a handsome profit. You think of Messrs. Marc Overmars, Emanuel Petit and others, all sold for fees in the double millions. His most successful players – in particular, Patrick Vieira – have been bought for very modest fees yet are now worth tens of millions.

The fact is that a Director of Football is a sort of meta-manager – a manager of the manager – and there is no way that it can work. This was shown by Jacques Santini’s early departure from Spurs, working under Frank Arnesen and Martin Jol, a sort of double Director of Football duo who have now formed their own coach-director relationship.

Dave Bassett was Director of Football at Leicester City, and they are now failures and he’s just been sacked by their new manager, Craig Levein. 'I've never worked with a Director of Football before', says Levein. Mickey Adams tried working under Bassett for three years but there was little success and attendances sank by a few thousand. The Foxes were most successful, in more recent times, when Martin O'Neil was in sole charge of the team, with no interference.

The only alternative to the English, managerial supremo system is the Boot Room philosophy, something used to awesome effect at Liverpool, in the 1970s and 1980s (from 1959 to 1998). The Anfield 'boot room' ethos - if it ever really existed - was a sort of bottom-up culture, unlike the top-down, director of football method. At Anfield, successful players - even unsuccessful ones, such as Roy Evans - became immersed in the dressing room culture and the training methods used at the club and stayed around to render assistance to the new manager, usually appointed from within the club.

It could be argued that Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan, two of the most successful managers in the history of English football, were part of a greater team set-up, a Boot Room team and methodology. There must have been a similar approach at Wimbledon, except that they called it a 'Crazy Gang' methodology; Dave Basset's greatest mistake was leaving Wimbledon.

Alternatively, the only double act that works in English football is a management duo, one where the manager appoints his own assistant. Brian Clough and Peter Taylor were the most successful, at Nottingham Forest, and there have been others. John Sillett and George Curtis won the FA Cup in 1987, at Coventry, in a double act. In this arrangement, one person is the more senior and sort of delegates some duties to his chosen side-kick. There is no room for ambiguity and the relationship works; if it doesn’t, then the senior one simply sacks the junior one.

Of course, this is not to say that a chairman should not have a good working relationship with his manager. It is little surprise that since Ian Ridley, the journalist and chairman, left Weymouth in the summer, the team has under-performed and his close associate - confidante, even - the highly experienced player, Steve Claridge, has since been sacked. This may have something to do with the creation of the Conference South, but it might have happened anyway. It's just a shame that Claridge's sacking didn't come one month earlier since he then could have become manager of Exeter City, before Alex Inglethorpe. Martyn Rogers is a successful supremo at Tiverton, one league below them.

Alex Ferguson likes to leave the coaching to someone like Carlos Queiroz, the Portuguese; Arsene Wenger allocates that same role to Pat Rice, it is said. But with the Director of Football, the whole set-up is a lot more uncertain. Often, the two will never have met before and it simply generates misunderstanding and resentment - this is the situation at Portsmouth.

That is why Good 'ole Harry will resign within two weeks, probably going back to Bournemouth or somewhere. If he goes to Dean Court (the 'Fitness First' stadium, alas) with a couple of million or so, he can run the whole show himself, being Director of Football, manager, owner and so forth.

This is what you might term the 'holistic' philosophy, once favoured by Ron Noades, at Crystal Palace. At Selhurst Park, he was owner, chairman, manager, all at the same time; it even worked for a while. Ron used to run the club and then enter the dressing room, before kick-off, to tell them how to play; he even ran the training sessions. To Bill Shankly's Chairman Mao, Ron Noades was Pol Pot (Shankly often made references to the 'Red Army' and similar, Chinese communist references).

This alien, continental system, is a bit like trying to impose Cabinet government and collective responsibility on a natural tyrant. The traditional English manager needs to be a Stalinist, or at the very least, a strong President. He needs to make all of the decisions without any interference whatsoever. Checks and balances does not work in English football management. Maybe the modern English manager needs to be Tony Blair, the new dictator, with no reference to HM Queen (the Director of Football of Britain).



The Boot Room Net, 'a celebration of that most famous of all footballing institutions, the Liverpool FC Boot Room'. Contains a list of the Chief Scouts (including Geoff Twentyman), First Team Trainers (including Reuben Bennet and and Doug Livermore), and Youth Development officers (including Tom Saunders). A brilliant, fascinating website, complete with biographies of the big five and a graphical chart of every single boot room member:
http://www.lfcbootroom.net/



Craig Levein, new Leicester City manager:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/l/leicester_city/3978279.stm

John Sillet and George Curtis at Coventry City:
http://www.cwn.org.uk/skyblues/jim-brown/2001/011019-managers-john-sillett.htm

The Observer: Stuart Barnes article on Harry Redknapp available:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/sport