Ken Early: Coaches are not as important as they once were

Frank Lampard could have been anywhere in the world last Saturday evening. Instead, somehow, he was sitting in the Molineux press room trying to explain why his Chelsea team had just lost 1-0 to Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Lampard diagnosed a general lack of aggression, speed, and confidence in duels.

“I’m here to help with that, this is not a stinging criticism,” he said.

Was anyone reassured? Nothing in Lampard’s coaching career to date suggests he will be able to help with any of that. Every reasonable expectation must be that his brief second coming at Chelsea will be like this, a series of increasingly irritable explanations of disappointments he had little power to affect.

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His return to the dugout is therefore a triumph of hope over experience, and on some level you have to admire his absolute refusal to admit, despite mounting evidence, that maybe football management isn’t for him.

Contemplating his vast irrational self-belief, you feel a shiver of the religious awe you might feel gazing upon a natural wonder like Niagara Falls.

He has been both the victim and beneficiary of a trigger-happy mood among Premier League owners that has produced a record number of sackings this season. There have been 13 managerial changes so far – with Bournemouth, Chelsea, Brighton, Wolves, Aston Villa, Southampton, Everton, Leeds, Southampton again, Crystal Palace, Spurs, Leicester and Chelsea again all replacing their coaches.

Why is this happening?

On Sky Sports, Gary Neville suggests “I think there’s an element of desperation, the fear of going down.”

But Chelsea and Spurs were never at risk of relegation and they’ve sacked three coaches between them. Nor does the widening economic gap between the Premier League and the Championship explain the many sackings in other major European leagues. There have been 11 managerial changes so far in France, eight in Italy, and seven each in Germany and Spain.

The Freiburg coach, Christian Streich, gave a further-reaching answer when he was asked last week why coaches in Germany are now lasting on average about a year in the job.

“The pressure is immense. But the pressure in society is immense,” he began, before describing how ‘neo-capitalism’ has destroyed the social bonds that used to give people a sense of meaning and direction.

Under neo-capitalism, Streich said, everyone from football managers to hotel cleaners is now expected to deal with more and more pressure, while receiving less and less support.

“Everything is individualised. There are hardly any chains of connections in many areas of life . . .The way things have developed, it’s extremely difficult. We have an incredible number of people with psychological problems. People have mental health problems because they are totally overwhelmed.

“They no longer feel any warmth. There are no more reference points, no connections. This is a problem for society as a whole. It’s scary . . . football has always been an expression of society as a whole. The sport directors are also under enormous pressure. It’s madness. Because the connections are missing. The club loses two, three games, and people lose their minds and spread things on social media, it’s terrible.”

Streich is the Bundesliga’s longest-serving coach, having been in charge for 11 years.

“Because [at Freiburg] we have continuity, because we have connections . . . In the areas where that is not the case, things are going downhill . . . The mega-corporations hardly pay any taxes and when they are supposed to pay taxes, they change countries and blackmail the countries. This is neo-capitalism. We live in neo-capitalism. And neo-capitalism destroys.”

Most people these days would admit that Streich is on to something – though you could quibble; it’s 175 years since Karl Marx defined the spirit of capitalism in the phrase “all that is solid melts into air”, so what’s really so ‘neo’ about all this?

There may be a simpler reason why coaches seem to have become more dispensable: they aren’t as important as they once were. Some of us still refer to them as “managers”, a term that dates back to a time when they really were managers in an overall sense.

They controlled not only matters to do with football and the first team – the selections, tactics, coaching, fitness training – but also buying and selling, hiring and firing, the scouting network, organising the youth system, public relations, doing sponsorship deals, dabbling in mind games and so on.

Now clubs employ dozens of people to handle nearly all of these areas. The difference is most obvious in the area of transfers. Great managers of the past were distinguished by their “eye for a player” – Bob Paisley, Brian Clough, Alex Ferguson.

Now it’s the sporting directors and heads of recruitment who make the signings, while the coaches are often the first ones complaining if new players fail.

Older generations of managers fought to keep control over signings, many of today’s coaches actively avoid having anything to do with it.

Coaching, analysis, fitness training, injury treatment and prevention, scouting and youth development are increasingly the responsibility of specialist staff, with the head coach not expected to get too involved in the granular details. Many of these staff constitute a kind of permanent civil service that remains at the club while the head coaches come and go.

Now that other people do most of the stuff the old-school managers used to do, what is left for the so-called head coach? Their job now is effectively to be the frontman for the club. Not only do you represent the club in interviews and press conferences, you are supposed to incarnate and project its spirit at all times. Coaches are expected to perform like actors on the sideline, reflecting and channelling the energy of the crowd.

Louis van Gaal used to annoy Manchester United fans by sitting and watching the game with a calm analytical air, holding his papers in a little leather case. They preferred it when he got angry and jumped up to do something unusual, like the time he threw himself to the ground in imitation of an Arsenal player’s dive.

Chelsea fans loved it when Thomas Tuchel became involved in that ridiculous handshake confrontation with Antonio Conte early this season. They despised Graham Potter for being too sensible to get involved in any such nonsense. This, more than anything, is why Potter failed at Chelsea. He never grasped the pro wrestling dimension of coaching a top club.

Like Potter, Lampard is too emotionally reserved to be a true showman of the technical area but, unlike Potter, nobody can question his essential Chelsea-ness. That makes him a plausible two-month option, and for Todd Boehly right now, that’s about as good as it gets.