As one walked out, another walked in.
“I know what you’re doing here!” said the manager who had just spent an hour or more huddled around his laptop with a couple of club officials who hadn’t bargained for a PowerPoint presentation.
“And I know what you’re doing here!” came the reply.
The two managers smiled and wished each other good luck, unaware that both of them were, ultimately, wasting their time: the job ended up going elsewhere.
It was a similar story earlier this year for a manager who arrived for a meeting with a Premier League club with a stack of lever arch files and was accompanied by a technical assistant to help him run through everything on the laptop. What the manager didn’t know about the team wasn’t worth knowing. But the club ended up choosing to go down a different path.
At least that manager could take comfort from the fact that he had given himself the best possible chance of being successful, unlike the former England midfielder who returned from a holiday in the Middle East and went straight into an interview in London for a Championship job with a suntan but without the name of the striker he rated so highly.
“The big lad up front is a good player,” he said.
Not surprisingly, a line was drawn through the candidate’s name as soon as he closed the door behind him.
An experienced sporting director, talking on condition of anonymity, sighs when asked whether he has ever experienced the same. “One hundred per cent. Absolutely unforgivable. You don’t expect absolute knowledge. But you do expect preparation.”
Marcelo Bielsa may have been taking that theme a bit far when Angus Kinnear and Victor Orta, Leeds United’s managing director and former director of football respectively, asked him in the summer of 2018 how much he knew about the Championship. The Argentinian promptly went through every formation that every Championship team had used the previous season.
Marcelo Bielsa had a detailed presentation when interviewed for the Leeds job (Photo: George Wood/Getty Images)
The managerial appointment process – which threw up its latest ‘victim’ yesterday, when Roy Hodgson returned (once again) to Crystal Palace – throws up all sorts of stories, and it doesn’t take long to realise what a wild and scattergun process this is at times.
“It’s like football – chaotic,” Ian Holloway, who has managed across all four professional divisions in England, says.
Increasingly, though, the decision-makers are trying to bring some order to it all.
Data is everywhere now, driving the way that clubs identify managers as well as players – and not just at clubs such as Brighton and Brentford, who have long been leading the way.
“It’s massively exploded over the past two to three years,” says Omar Chaudhuri, chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group, a company that provides consulting and technology services to help clubs gain a competitive edge. “We’ve been involved just this summer in half a dozen either head coach recruitments or ongoing surveillance processes.”
By ongoing surveillance, Chaudhuri means succession planning, which is often the first stage in recruiting a manager. Indeed, Chaudhuri has noted how more clubs are paying fees to poach managers rather than looking for out-of-work replacements — a shift that leaves owners and sporting directors feeling vulnerable.
“So they’ll try to get ahead of it and say, ‘Let’s get a list of 10 coaches who meet the criteria that we’re looking at,’” Chaudhuri explains. “And that’s where data plays a really important role, actually, because at that stage of the process you can’t start speaking to people because that sets hares running because it relates to your own head coach situation. So you need to have an outside-view process.
“What data allows you to do is look at the whole global database of coaches and narrow it down to a pool that ticks a lot of the right boxes. Usually, those boxes range from performance — impact on performance, performance against resources. Playing styles is a massive one, too — playing in a style that the club wants, but also suits the players they’ve got. And then things like squad management. So, to what extent do they give young players a chance? Do they waste new signings and sit them on the bench, or do they get the most out of them?”
Listening to Chaudhuri, it’s hard not to think about Brighton and the way they dealt with Graham Potter’s departure to Chelsea so seamlessly. Clearly, Brighton had a succession plan in place and data played a significant part in identifying Roberto De Zerbi, the Italian who has been so impressive since taking over.
“Absolutely,” Chaudhuri replies. “And you can see with De Zerbi, consistently the teams he’s coached have made pretty immediate performance improvements in the first six to 12 months. We have these charts (on what Twenty First Group call a World Super League) that plot over time (on the horizontal axis), and on the vertical axis you have a rating, so you can see how consistently the line of the coach goes up in terms of league positions or in terms of team rating.
“And then you can also see that he (De Zerbi) is changing playing styles — the team is becoming more attacking, or they’re keeping better possession of the ball in more difficult areas, and that’s all quantifiable.”
Realistically, the top clubs are operating in a very shallow talent pool when it comes to finding managers who are proven to be capable of delivering at the highest level. “But the moment you start getting down to the bottom half of the Premier League, the Championship and downwards, there’s a whole world of coaches out there,” Chaudhuri adds.
“Going way back to Southampton (a decade ago), (Mauricio) Pochettino was an inspired hire. But, again, you look at the data at the time and you had Real Madrid and Barcelona playing attacking high-press football. But then you had Espanyol — it’s like, ‘that’s interesting.’ And then you look at who the head coach was, and it was Pochettino, who was playing young players, and they were super efficient in the way that they were investing resources, and you could absolutely see why that was an attractive candidate for Southampton at the time.”
All the graphs and numbers have their limits, though. Chaudhuri talks about how data can “point you in the right direction” rather than answer all the questions, and is quick to stress how it needs to be used alongside other more traditional aspects of the hiring process.
In other words, clubs need to meet candidates face-to-face to try to connect with them on a personal level, to get a feel for how they coach and interact with players, and to understand the sort of structure that a manager expects to work in. Our friend with the lever arch files had some less-than-straightforward demands around recruitment.
“Because a head coach who has done really well in one environment might not replicate it elsewhere,” Chaudhuri adds. “Nathan Jones would be a classic case, where he’s done really well at Luton but less so at Stoke and Southampton.”
CVs are still submitted for managerial vacancies, albeit the digital world has changed the type of content that is included. Indeed, page numbers can often run into double figures with all the supporting documents.
“Nigel Pearson is a good case study,” says Dean Eldredge, who is an agent for Oporto Sports Management and has the Bristol City manager as one of his clients.
“What we’ve always tried to do is say, ‘You might think you know Nigel already, but we don’t think you do. You need to see a little bit more about him’. We’ve got a full page to do with his charitable work on there, we’ve got all of his qualifications, and we’ve got all the work that he’s done specifically at each club.
“So people will say, ‘He won a couple of promotions at Leicester, didn’t he?’ But we will include things like, ‘What he has done in terms of transfer values of players?’ ‘Which players has he managed and how have they improved?’
“Michael Appleton has a breakdown of each job he’s been at — all of those things I’ve just mentioned — but he’ll also talk about styles of play. We even embed links into the CV, so that could be an interview with a journalist or with The Coaches’ Voice, or videos.”
Agents, understandably, don’t want to leave a stone unturned. Yet it can still be tricky to get a foot inside the building, especially if people working within the club have their own agenda.
Nigel Pearson has an extensive CV that includes how he has improved players he’s worked with (Photo: Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
“A lot of chief executives know somebody already and they might push them,” Holloway explains. “It’s like the ear of the king, so to speak. You need to know someone who knows the king — the owner — to put your name forward.”
That can be frustrating at times. “I remember writing to people, ringing and leaving messages, and they don’t call back,” says Martin Allen, who managed Brentford, Leicester and Barnet among others.
“Then I’ve got another job and it’s a nice feeling when you go back and play them away from home and beat them, and then 20 minutes after the end of the game you walk into the boardroom and make sure that the first person whose hand you shake is the opposition chief executive or chairman who hasn’t returned your call. I’ve stared them in the eye and just nodded with a little grin and wished them good luck.”
For those who get a more favourable response to their interest in a job, an informal conversation is likely to be the next stage of the process. If the meeting is taking place in person, rather than via Zoom, the venue will be chosen carefully.
Discretion is everything, especially when you get higher up the ladder. Eldredge didn’t even tell his family where he was going when he disappeared off the grid prior to Pearson being appointed Watford’s manager in the Premier League in 2019.
Meeting at the club is a non-starter. Private rooms at hotels are often the solution but also viewed as risky. Some Premier League owners interview managers at their home. Others jump on a plane to the south of France, Paris or Como.
How the discussions are structured varies hugely from club to club and to an extent depends on the profile of the candidate. A former Barcelona coach was barely asked about football during a job interview last summer because his previous work provided a clear reference point. Instead, the questions focused on his understanding of the club’s identity, its values, and the working culture, to try to establish if he was the right fit off the field.
Another manager with less experience might be asked to give chapter and verse on their playing philosophy and analyse the team he would be inheriting.
Interestingly, one Premier League coach talks about owners wanting “objectivity and evidence-based ideas” because that aligns with how they operate in their other businesses. From the manager’s point of view, that means providing analysis of the team that is supported by statistics and not just a football eye.
Nothing is set in stone here, though, and often the onus is on the manager’s agent to establish the parameters beforehand, to ensure that their client is prepared.
“Some clubs will say to me, ‘We would like X to do a presentation,’ or I might have to ask if that’s what they require,” Eldredge adds. “Whereas another club might say, ‘Here’s the criteria’, and you’ve got a bullet-pointed list where they want you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current squad, what could have been done better last season, and even down to asking you to talk about recruitment, which for a manager or head coach is quite a difficult one.
“Do you list the players you would sign? Or do you list the profile of players that you would sign? What are they expecting? How much do you give away? Some clients will be quite reticent on that.
“If it’s a job where you think, ‘I should be getting this’, you might be less likely to do that. Whereas if you are, say, a hungry, young head coach and you’ve had success in the lower leagues, and a Championship club is willing to talk to you as one of five other managers, I think you’re going to go almost over the top.”
Leon Britton smiles as he thinks back to the reaction to one recruit for the Swansea hot seat. ‘I can’t believe you’re thinking of appointing an under-17s coach for a man’s game. It’s completely different,’ read one of the messages on his phone.
It was the summer of 2019 and Swansea were about to announce Steve Cooper, who was the England Under-17s coach at the time, and would be replacing Graham Potter as their new manager. Britton was working as an advisor to Swansea’s board and had spent the previous two weeks interviewing around 20 candidates alongside the chairman Trevor Birch at The Shard in London.
They shortlisted five managers for a final round of interviews, during which Alan Curtis, Swansea’s president and a highly-respected former player, provided another set of eyes and ears. By the end, the three of them were unanimous Cooper was the outstanding candidate and recommended him to Swansea’s owners.
“I guess a few eyebrows were raised,” Britton adds. “It was a gamble — it’s always a gamble with whoever you appoint, even if they’ve managed 500 games. But we looked at the all-round package and Steve stood out. We believed in him.”
Cooper knew that his lack of experience at senior level was the one question mark on his CV at that time. But he was determined that “it wasn’t the elephant in the room” when he was interviewed by Birch and Britton.
Swansea took a gamble in hiring Steve Cooper in 2019 (Photo: Alex Burstow/Getty Images)
“We had heard about Coops and his reputation as a fantastic coach,” Britton explains. “And when he came and presented it was so thorough in terms of the way he worked: ‘This is the structure I’d have in place. On Tuesday we’ll work on our defensive principles as a team on the low block, mid-block, high block. On the low block, here’s a clip and this is what we would be doing’ – he’d click on the laptop and show a clip of him coaching with England Under-17s.
“‘When we’re attacking in the final third, it’s all about third-man runs, combination play, one-twos’ – it was all linked together. You were like, ‘Bloody hell, this is impressive.’”
Birch and Britton had done their homework too, as any club should prior to an interview, and knew that Cooper was not just talking a good game. “Some people are academic coaches, good at presentations,” Britton adds. “But the people we spoke to said, ‘On the grass, he’s really good.’
“Also, I’m an ex-player and hadn’t long finished. I was looking at Coops and thinking, ‘I like what you’re doing here.’ I could imagine being in the dressing room before training, and then him delivering what he’s just presented to the players.”
On top of that, Cooper was well connected. He had won the Under-17 World Cup with England two years earlier and both Cooper and Swansea recognised an opportunity there. “We thought we could tap into that and use the loan market to benefit us,” Britton adds. “Coops knew Conor Gallagher, Marc Guehi, (Rhian) Brewster, (Morgan) Gibbs-White, and he could lean upon that relationship to bring them into the club. So that, again, was a big tick for us.”
In any interview, there is always the possibility of a curve ball being thrown — the sort of question that can tie you in knots because you are not totally sure what they want to hear in response.
Paul Tisdale found himself in that situation when he was interviewed by Exeter City in 2006, prior to becoming the manager for the next 12 years. Steve Perryman, Exeter’s director of football, asked Tisdale a question that he has never forgotten.
“Steve said, ‘Paul, we’ve got a trust-owned club, we want to develop our own players, we’d just like to know if you’re a win-at-all-costs manager?’”
Tisdale, who is looking to return to management and spoke to Celtic recently, smiles. “I thought, what a brilliant question that is — talk about a black-and-white answer. There’s someone who knows what they’re talking about. You’re cutting to the chase. If we’ve got 20 people we’re speaking to, let’s find out which two or three believe in what we believe in.
“I can’t talk that language – I can’t talk game management because, in my opinion, game management is ethically flawed. If I start talking about that, the players won’t believe me because I don’t believe it. You cannot sell an idea if you’re not authentic.
“Can I talk, ‘win at all costs’? I could have tried to predict what answer Steve wanted but I was honest. ‘No, I don’t believe in that. That doesn’t mean I’m soft. I want to win – don’t underestimate how much I want to win. But ‘win at all costs’ is not where I want to be.’”
As it happens, Tisdale and Exeter ended up getting along just fine without him compromising on his beliefs. Not only did he get the job but he ended up being the longest-serving manager in the Football League at one point and won two promotions along the way.
Forget the adage that no news is good news. “If you’re chasing them, he’s not got the job,” Eldredge explains.
Clubs are often reluctant to tell a candidate that they’ve been unsuccessful until the last moment, for fear of their first choice knocking them back or talks breaking down. After all, it is not a particularly good look when a manager is offered a position that he knows — and everyone else at the club knows — would have ideally gone elsewhere.
In the case of Tottenham Hotspur’s appointment of Nuno Espirito Santo in the summer of 2021, the Portuguese was fifth on the club’s list — at best. Mauricio Pochettino, Antonio Conte, Paulo Fonseca and Gennaro Gattuso were all ahead of him in the pecking order, and that meant Nuno’s authority was undermined from day one. The fact that his style of play wasn’t a natural fit for Spurs hardly helped.
Nuno Espirito Santo (Photo: GLYN KIRK/AFP via Getty Images)
For obvious reasons, clubs like to keep their pursuit of managers under wraps and avoid a running commentary in the media, but leaks are inevitable. One of the biggest frustrations, a senior Premier League figure says, is when an interview goes badly for a manager and his agent lets it be known via the media later in the day that his client is no longer interested in the position.
In some instances, it will be obvious to the manager that the interview was a disaster — the clues are there if a Premier League owner makes his excuses, gets up and walks out halfway through (that really did happen), leaving the rest of the panel to go through the motions.
On other occasions, it’s not always clear to the manager why they missed out, and that sometimes prompts the agent to ask why the club has chosen to go in a different direction.
“You might have really difficult feedback,” Eldredge adds. “But my view was, ‘I’m going to give them that. Because if I hide them from it, and they were to hear it elsewhere, they’d then say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ But also it’s all about improvement.”
Although the manager’s salary is unlikely to be a deal-breaker when the process is a long way down the road — remuneration would be one of the first filters for clubs — problems can easily arise in relation to backroom staff at a later point. In fact, an experienced sporting director describes staffing as one of the biggest stumbling blocks around appointments because of the expense and upheaval involved when managers want to bring in five or six people of their own.
The extent to which a manager digs their heels in over that, or any other issue for that matter, may well depend on who else they are up against for the role — which isn’t always obvious from the person they passed in the car park on the way in.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
