In the second of their chats about the psychology of football – read the first about players here – Johnny sits down with former F365 warhorse and now top London psychotherapist Al Tyers to talk about the psychology of managers and the managerial job.
JN: Let’s kick things off by getting right down to brass tacks. We love and we hate managers. The amount of emotion that bloke in the expensive mohair coat or cheapo tracksuit generates has always amazed me. What’s going on?
AT: It seems to me that one major function of the manager is to give the club someone to sack every now and again. The tension rises and rises, he’s lost the dressing room, the fans are calling for his head…and then the satisfying release as the manager is sacrificed.
JN: That makes it sound sexual. Arousal, release and satisfaction. Or in my case, guilt!
AT: You would absolutely be a lifetime’s clinical work, John. But yeah, might not be sexual in the intercourse sense but sure, in a primal mammal-brain drive sense, why not? The manager is a big beast, he must be brought down.
JN: There’s certainly often a sort of intimate emotional relationship between manager and fan.
AT: The fan has a profound relationship with the club: the club nurtures and sustains the fan. The club is the ideal mother. The manager is the dad, messing up the club, doing it wrong, upsetting the fan. It seems very Oedipal to me, that triangle. I appreciate this is a bit weird.
But you’ve got the loving bond the fan feels for the club, and then this bad man getting in the way. So naturally the fan wants to kill the father-manager, and live in bliss with the club-mother. The only way to do that is a sacking, and then the cycle begins anew. Maybe that’s why almost all managerial tenures end in failure.
There is a good bit in Fever Pitch where Nick Hornby explains how his dad left the family and George Graham sort of filled that space in his imagination. Maybe it’s because family units have changed over the last few decades, more single parent homes or blended family groups or what have you, but I think football managers can be a really significant male figure in some fans’ lives.
Obviously there’s a whole secondary industry/media narrative about the managers now: you think how people fixate on Mourinho, Klopp, Pep. They are major cultural figures with proper star quality. I definitely don’t remember football managers having that wattage when I was younger.
JN: When I was a boy, managers were characters – Shankly, Cloughie, Revie – they seemed impossibly old and distant but even then were sort of inspiring. Today, they’re marketed to us as a brand. Pep, Klopp, Brendan: all brands. So it’s no surprise they provoke such high emotion. I wonder what pressure that puts on them as people?
AT: It must be the most stressful calling, I should think: standing there on the touchline willing your team to do what you’ve been teaching them day in, day out and then a centre-back nods off at a corner for one second and that’s the match. Seems to me that football is almost uniquely difficult as well: like in, for instance, American Football, the game is in a series of self-contained phases so you could say “okay you run there, you overlap there, you pass” and that’s just a second or two. But in football the ball’s in play for so much of it, there are so few scores, and it’s just not the case that dominance leads to a victory.
If you saw a genuinely honest post-match interview I reckon they’d be saying something like “to be honest the whole thing’s a nightmare, I told them all to mark up a million times and then one wandered off like a zombie, you might as well try and herd cats”. You’d need significant self-belief, verging on delusions of grandeur, to even try it.
JN: There are so many cliches around the job. That whole “oh he’s so good at man management, he knows who to put an arm around and who to give a rocket to” business. That’s just normal human relations isn’t it? It’s not a special talent.
AT: It’s a very appealing idea, the wise older head who knows the exact combination of behaviours and words to get the best out of each character. A locksmith selecting the right key. On the other hand if you’re treating people differently and they start to sniff unfairness or favourites then that’s a massive problem, isn’t it? I noticed with the Frank Lampard stuff there was supposed to be an issue with some of the older players thinking he wasn’t giving guys a level playing field. That could provoke all sorts of powerful memories about parental favouritism, being abandoned, whatever.
If I can draw a parallel with therapy and managers, then as a therapist you’re working out that such-and-such an approach might work better with this client and not so with that one, which is sensible up to a point, but if you’re just all over the place with how you meet people then is that helpful? Obviously it’s not like a favouritism situation here but if you’re always tailoring how you act based on what you think the other person will respond to, I think people sniff out that sort of inauthentic behaviour pretty quickly in all areas of human relations. So if a manager is all pally with some but stern with another…I am not sure I buy it, really. The manager has to be themselves above all else, right?
I think it ties into something else with managers, a wish from fans that the gaffer has all the answers, that there’s this genius who has got it all figured out, from tactics to transfers to motivation. I think it’s similar to conspiracy theories, the cult of the manager: people would rather believe there’s a cabal of sinister dudes running the show, no matter how evil they are, rather than accept the more terrifying fact that life can be chaotic and random. To a greater or lesser degree, we all want to think that there’s a parent in charge, and that’s why managers are such compelling figures.
JN: That’s really interesting. It ties back to what you were saying about Hornby and George Graham. The role we demand of them is so much more than deciding whether to play 4-4-2 against Brighton.
AT: Getting people to see you in a different role and setting your boundaries is something we all have to do, and maybe that’s harder in some ways than it used to be, with a less formal society, blurring of public and private spaces with social media, connectivity. It takes time and discipline to establish those things. And it can be painful for the young manager I am sure, having to leave behind that persona and part of their life.
JN: Yeah. I can see that. It seems to me that the best managers somehow become symbiotic with the mentality of the players. He gets rid of those who don’t buy into his way of doing things, whatever that is, and works with those that do. That must be a large part of the art.
AT: Like I said, to some extent, we all use different tools for different people but that has to exist within a narrow band of who he is as a person. He can’t be bringing in a latte for the sensitive player while punching the emotionally repressed hard man defender in the face. He can’t blow with the wind. As a therapist, you’re tailoring your approach to suit each client but only to an extent. You still have to be the same person, consistent and authentic.
JN: Authenticity is an important word, I think.
AT: Crucial. The manager who is playing a role that isn’t really himself will be found out sooner or later.
JN: You have to be a strong character though because, in a way, you’re revealing a lot about yourself to the world, aren’t you? You have to feel confident about doing that.
AT: There’s something a bit King Canute-like about some of them, I think, desperately waving their arms around and pleading and trying to influence this swirling mess of random human error. It seems to be entirely logical that so many managers adopt that chippy “we’ve been robbed YET again” coping mechanism and focus on some easy thing to blame: lazy fancy dan midfielder, idiot ref, malicious VAR, Mercury being in retrograde.
JN: Okay, let’s talk about something which has always interested me: clothes.
AT: Well, you are a fashion icon.
JN. This is true. You can’t go wrong with trackie bottoms. Seriously, though, I’ve often wondered if how a manager dresses influences how he’s regarded by players. You’ve got Ancelotti in fine Italian tailoring looking like the boss of a designer fashion house and then there’s Tony Pulis who looks like every comprehensive school’s PE teacher.
AT: That is part of the personal branding, isn’t it? Revie and his coat, Big Mal, Pep with his smart jumpers, Dyche looking like a doorman who won’t let you in a club because you’ve got trainers on. It all helps create the mystique.
JN: What part does instilling fear into players have, do you think?
AT: Players who say they are frightened of the manager might be responding to the manager partly how they habitually responded to other male authorities figures in their life, or responding to ingrained cultural images of what a male authority figure is. In therapy jargon that’d be the transference: when the client unconsciously acts out their ingrained lifelong behaviour and responds to the therapist as if they are their mum, dad, whatever. And by understanding that you can understand how they’re set up internally, if that doesn’t make it sound too much like overlapping neurotic wing-backs or something. If the client is a bit late and is terribly apologetic and worried that you’re going to be horrible to them, then, well that tells you quite a lot about how they experience the world and other people.
JN: Maybe we forget how young some players are and how they’re actually still developing as people and need an older brother or father figure to help shape them.
AT: I was watching a post-match interview with Emile Smith Rowe the other day, and he was saying that he looked up to Mikel Arteta, and had obviously watched him play for Arsenal when he was a young boy. He didn’t seem awe-struck by Arteta, and nor should he be, but it seemed clear that Arteta was a major figure in his life and career. To someone of my age, let alone a man of your advanced years John…
JN: …at this point I’m contractually obliged to say that age is just a number, Al, which always struck me as a daft thing to say because what else could it be? It is literally a number. Sorry, go on…
AT: I was saying, to us Arteta looks like a polite if slightly annoying exchange student getting in the way with his backpack on the Victoria Line (or on the Gourock ferry, in my case – JN); but clearly a 20-year-old isn’t going to have the same reaction. The dad versus the older brother thing sounds plausible enough to me.
JN: There’s obviously a lot going on beneath the surface, but I go back to your idea of the Oedipal concept to explain much of what passes for normality in the hiring, loving, hating and firing of managers which within ‘normal’ society would be thought very odd indeed.
AT. Passing the ball, mothers and fathers: it’s all triangles, at the end of the day, Jeff.
Al Tyers is a psychotherapist and counsellor in London, and online, with a focus on anxiety and self-esteem issues in adults who might have had difficult experiences earlier in life. He was talking to John Nicholson.
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