Nearly 500 years after his death, Machiavelli’s leadership instruction that it is better to be feared than loved is quoted still, often as gospel. The line appears in The Prince, a work of political philosophy that caused tremors in the intellectual world of its time. Short quotes enjoy a longer life, naturally, but the full passage is more nuanced and interesting and ought to have travelled better through time.
“And here comes the question,” writes Machiavelli, “whether it is better to be loved rather than feared or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
Machiavelli might not have been thinking of Eddie Jones and Alex Ferguson and Bill Shankly and Brian Cody and Bill Belichick and Pep Guardiola, though the question he raised applies to them too. Did any of the greatest leaders in sport want to be loved, or did they need to be feared? And if it was always a blunt instrument, does fear still cut it now?
In his recently released autobiography Danny Care’s depiction of Jones’s time as England rugby coach is stunning in many ways. It is a tableau of psychological torture, targeted instability, bullying and heartlessness. His staff were routinely “belittled”, says Care, and sometimes stretched beyond their endurance.
The churn in Jones’s roster of assistants and backroom staff was staggering. In the four years leading up to the 2019 World Cup, he went through five sports psychologists; in his first six years three defence coaches came and went. One analyst was sacked in Faro airport on the way home from a training camp. The RFU stopped listing the names of his backroom team in match programmes because they were embarrassingly conscious of the turnover in personnel.
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Most of the time, players didn’t know where they stood. Dylan Hartley – who was Jones’s captain for three years – wrote in his autobiography that he “dreaded” going into England camp. Care describes Jones as a “despot” and being in the squad was like “living in a dictatorship”.
“Everyone was bloody terrified of him,” he writes. “Remember what it felt like when someone was being bullied at school and you were just glad it wasn’t you? That was the vibe.”
Care was dropped from the squad with a three-second voice message and when he looked for an explanation Jones shut him down. He waited four years to be recalled. Players were dispensable. Injured players were cast aside.
“Eddie took the same approach to rugby as Russia traditionally takes to war: just keep feeding men into the grinder, as long as we keep winning,” he writes.
The irony, though, is that Jones’s approach seemed to work, somehow, especially at the beginning. In 2016 they won the Grand Slam for the first time in 13 years and won every game in that calendar year; a year later they won the Six Nations title again; in 2019 he led them to the World Cup final. He won just five of his last 12 games in charge, but his overall win percentage was 73 per cent, the most of any England coach.
He wasn’t loved by his players and he behaved as if their love was worthless. Instead, he commanded feelings of fear, and in many cases, revulsion. From this sweat shop, Jones was a mass producer of results.
In the modern world, you must think and hope that Jones is a freakish outlier. The days when autocratic managers can rule effectively with an iron first are surely gone. Aren’t they?
And yet it would be foolish to believe that fear is an obsolete part of the equation. For any coach, the fear of exclusion is still the most potent weapon of all. The Kilkenny players felt that keenly in Nowlan Park at the height of their domination under Cody. He created an environment of kinetic instability.
Of all the great Kilkenny players, JJ Delaney was the only one who was never left out or taken off. The energy in their chaotic training matches came not from Cody, but from the players and their rabid desire to be included.
If you weren’t in Cody’s plans, John Tennyson said once, he might not talk to you “for three months”. He wasn’t looking for their affection; he was searching for elite performance. More than anybody in the history of the GAA, he got it.
With Guardiola it is a similar dynamic. Players desperately crave his approval. John Stones, for example, never seems to know where he stands. Phil Foden goes through spells on the bench and so does Jack Grealish. Kevin De Bruyne experienced that feeling last season.
According to Opta, Guardiola made 928 alterations in team selection in his first 300 Premier League matches. How does it feel being left out of the team? “F**king awful,” a source close to one of the players told the football writer Jonathan Northcroft. “It’s like you don’t exist.”
Guardiola is liable to rant at his players. Sometimes he does it as they’re leaving the pitch, mortifying them in public. Even Erling Haaland has been subjected to this treatment.
But, in general terms, the days when managers can roar and shout and bang tables and be abusive and behave like a caveman, are gone. The shock effect will only work once in a blue moon. Constant repetition is like taking an antibiotic for a cold: nothing is cured, and your system becomes immune to the pill.
On Friday night, Andy Farrell was asked if he gave the Irish players “a rocket” at half-time and he said no; he gave them the information they needed to correct the mistakes of the first half. On this occasion it didn’t work. It was still the right thing to do.
Johnny Sexton says that Farrell is the best coach he ever worked for: tough, tender. For the Irish players he has created a working environment that is challenging and stimulating and underpinned by emotional intelligence. Nobody dreads going into camp. Everybody is desperate to please him; not through fear, but respect and affection.
This week, though, some Irish players will worry about being left out and Farrell will tap into that energy too. In the modern dressingroom, that is the last fear that matters.
