Game Of The Century: The Sweat Merchants (I)

Take one strong-willed, intelligent man, add a talent for football and lace it with the ability to organise, select, reject, buy and sell other men, throw in a necessary gift for psychology, psychiatry and leader-ship – and you have a football manager. Football managers are the sweat merchants, the Svengalis of modern football. On the international stage, they take the cream of a nation’s players and attempt to weld them into a winning team – or accept the frightening responsibility of failure on their shoulders alone.

Before they even begin, they must have these talents and more. Yet when it comes to the crunch, the manager must sit on the sideline and trust his players to speak for him through skill and teamwork. When he has finished coaxing and cajoling his players and worked them up to key fitness and co-ordination levels, as well as forging an understanding as a unit, he allows them to wash away the sweat under a shower, while he goes away to sweat on his own. Of course, the most terrifying aspect of football management is that awesome gap between the touchline and the pitch when the game begins. No matter what he does or says, the manager is helpless, a true victim of his own doctrines.

True football management is much more than than a glorified trainer’s role with tracksuit, whistle, press-ups, a few laps around a pitch and a game of five-a-side. Because football managers are, truly, the sweat merchants.

Supremos of the Past

To illustrate the pressures, achievements, varied talents and weaknesses of great managers, we begin with a look at the most famous managers in international football history. The men who most merit attention are Vittorio Pozzo and Hugo Meisl of the 1930s, George Raynor and Sepp Herberger of the 1940s and 1950s, Alf Ramsey and Helmut Schoen of the 1960s and Schoen, Mario Zagalo and Rinus Michels of the 1970s. Each man faced very different problems. Factors such as the political climate of their nations and their era played a big part. The growth of player-power took its toll in Holland. The changing systems within the game threatened to make successful managers history teachers overnight.

Few managers in modern football history experienced more political pressure than Vittorio Pozzo, Italy’s commissario tecnico in the 1934 World Cup. A great authoritarian, he also became a revered father-figure to Italian football. Pozzo was shrewd, a good politician and an early-day football psychologist at a time when football managers were making the players and the ball do the work while they barked orders. One of his most successful ploys was his use of sleeping arrangements on away trips to crush internal arguments amongst his star players. Pozzo always made warring stars share the same room: the Juventus and Inter Milan prima donnas for example, players who often bickered away the hours – and their team’s chances of success – through jealousy. By the time they realised they were sharing the same room, petty squabbles died away and a better understanding was struck up. A small, sturdy man, Pozzo much admired the Manchester United team of that era and studied in Switzerland before travelling to England. He fell in love with England and for a while refused to go home. But political life in Italy was simmering and soon soared towards the explosion of fascism under Benito Mussolini. With Italy’s dictator using the World Cup as a political vehicle, Pozzo was under an obvious pressure to make sure the home side triumphed. They did, beating Czechoslovakia 2-1 in the final. Four years later, Pozzo repeated his triumph in France when his Azzurri beat Hungary 4-2 in a tremendous title game. What few people realise, however, is that with World War II breaking out, Italy were to hold the World Cup longer than any other country, for sixteen years from 1934 to 1950.

Pozzo’s friend. and fellow authoritarian was Hugo Meisl, who managed Austria in much the same way Pozzo managed Italy. Similar men in outlook, they shared a third-part friendship with the legendary Herbert Chapman of Arsenal. Birds of a football feather, they gave football an extra dimension by way of an ability to communicate with their players outside training sessions. Meisl, however, never touched the heights achieved by Pozzo. But then he did not have players of the same quality at his disposal, and the German political machine was rumbling louder and louder through his most influential years. Political climate was Meisl’s biggest drawback.

So much has been written about Brazil’s magical presence in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden that the host nation’s manager is often forgotten. From being reserve team trainer at Aldershot in 1946, George Raynor was catapulted to the position of manager of the Swedish national team. The players loved him, and he guided them to the Olympic gold medal in 1948. Italian clubs swooped to snatch four of his best players, but Raynor rebuilt his team with characteristic speed in time to give Brazil the fright of their lives in the World Cup final. Sadly, when he returned to England, Raynor found coaching on a comparable level hard to come by, apart from brief spells as manager with Skegness and Doncaster Rovers. He spent time working in a holiday camp before becoming President of the Doncaster and District Association of Football Coaches and deeply involved in encouraging football’s grass roots. With numerous titles bestowed on him by Queen Elizabeth II, the King of Sweden and others, he was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful national coach in the world.

The West German team of 1954 owed its unique style to one man – Sepp Herberger. He had the personality and power to make his players give more than they even knew they had. They relentlessly worked hard, never allowing opponents to build up momentum. Fit and disciplined, the Germans crept from the ashes of the Second World War to become world champions. Herberger’s immense air of authority and confidence gave his players an extra lift, but he also made sure their physical preparation left them lacking in no departments. When they had the ball, they were able to maintain what was then a very fast pace of play. Their tempo – set by Herberger – certainly swept red-hot favourites Hungary aside in the 1954 final, despite the fact that the Hungarians took a 2-0 lead early in the first half.

Following closely in the footsteps of these great men were many young managers who also achieved levels of success within their own nations. But few of them survived eras of change and political pressures.