English Managers

English football may be very popular and it has in fact seen many great coaches come and go over the ages. Sir Alex Ferguson is a case in point – and he is still coaching. But the recent departure of Jose Mourinho helps to highlight the fact that the game is being managed according to a different set of rules than was the case a few decades ago. To some modern English football managers the game has become a game that has to be played as if the lives of footballers depended on nothing but winning.

Bill Shankly was wise enough to have looked beyond such narrow goals, and his insistence that there was a lot more in the game of football than simply winning was refreshing and welcome. Today many people have dismissed Shankly’s way of thinking as being whimsical and tongue in cheek. Certainly the way that Mourinho got his players to play on the football field clearly showed that Chelsea footballers played without regard to anything but winning every trophy there was in sight.

Football coaches such as Shankly did not have to deal with the kind of pressures that coaches today have to deal with; he could see a world beyond the football field. Mourinho and his ilk come and go according to the whims of owners who seem to think that money can buy trophies. Is it any wonder then that footballers are only concerned about winning and care for little other than their bank balances?