Managing has never been more complex

Opinion

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This article was published 23/02/2024 (563 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call it stability, call it discipline. Ultimately, it’s all about control.

Granted, gone are the days when an all-powerful Sir Alex Ferguson-type figure could supervise the totality of English football’s biggest clubs. There are too many moving pieces nowadays, and too few larger-than-life personalities — nevermind what’s all at stake — for all that authority to be concentrated in a single person.

In a way, it’s actually made the job of first-team manager more difficult, what with administrative hierarchies to navigate and commercial relationships to nurture, or tolerate. It’s why the diplomatic Carlo Ancelotti, for example, continues to excel while someone such as Jose Mourinho, whose purely head-coaching acumen has never been his strength, is less effective than he was a decade or two ago.

Control — even the perception of it — has never been more tricky to impose at behemoth enterprises such as Chelsea and Liverpool. At the same time, it has never been as vital to on-field performance (as Ferguson’s former club, Manchester United, can attest). And it makes Sunday’s Carabao Cup final (9 a.m., DAZN) especially compelling, as its participants are at either end of the chaos spectrum.

Take Chelsea for starters.

Manager Mauricio Pochettino, in charge barely seven months, seems often to be “manager” only in name. The former PSG and Tottenham boss has used a staggering 31 players so far this season, and only twice has his matchday combination yielded successive Premier League victories.

The situation has become so frustrating that Isabelle Silva, wife of Blues defender Thiago Silva, has publicly called for change, while murmurs of discontent regarding the captaincy surfaced in December. Yet, Pochettino can hardly be singled out for the lack of direction at Stamford Bridge. If anything, he might even be overperforming with the bloated squad assigned to him.

Not quite 13 months ago, club owner and incompetently hands-on chairman Todd Boehly completed a winter transfer period that saw him acquire Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk, Noni Madueke, Benoit Badiashile and a few other names pulled from a hat for just short of £300 million. The wild expenditure continued in the summer, after which Boehly’s £113 million worth of new strikers proceeded to combine for — between the three of them — 11 goals as of Friday.

Chelsea, don’t forget, won the Champions League as recently as 2021, but at kickoff Sunday only Ben Chilwell will feature from the 23-man squad that lifted the trophy in Porto.

Somehow, some way, Pochettino has still been able to coax some recent results from a group that is rarely coherent enough to be called a team. Last weekend’s 1-1 draw with Manchester City followed a 3-1 win at Crystal Palace, and should they beat Leeds next week they’ll also be through to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup. Quite astonishingly, a domestic double remains a very real possibility at Stamford Bridge.

As it does at Anfield. An English treble in fact, with a prospective Europa League triumph to boot.

Where Pochettino has been unable, and largely prevented, from establishing the slightest semblance of control at Chelsea, Jurgen Klopp’s vice-like grip at Liverpool has never been more secure. The Reds are overwhelming favourites to prevail at Wembley on Sunday — a status they possess even though their squad is probably more uncertain than their opponents’.

Injuries are largely to blame for Klopp’s selection conundrum, but he can reasonably expect consistency in performance no matter his lineup. Against Luton on Wednesday, for example, he got a world-class showing from World Cup-winner Alexis Mac Allister, while all three of his forwards — none of whom would start under normal circumstances — found the back of the net.

Some of the control Klopp asserts is naturally down to the eight years he’s spent at the club (Chelsea have had 10 managers over the same period), but the fact remains that he’s an exceptional coach, an irresistible personality and a patented winner who compels buy-in from his players. He’ll be without at least eight regulars against Chelsea, including first-choice goalkeeper Alisson and playmaking full-back Trent Alexander-Arnold (Mohamed Salah is doubtful), but each stand-in can be confident that standards will be retained.

Klopp simply gets the most out of every position, which is essentially the sum total of a manager’s job description. That he does it while being a genuinely good guy only makes the control he enjoys that much easier to wield. Then there’s the ultimate mark of his, of any manager’s, authority: he’s announced he’ll be leaving the club at the end of the season — on his own timeline, on his own terms.

And likely atop a bus on parade with a trophy or two or three or four, when he hands back control of a club he’s taken from one success to another.

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