Can only bad players be great coaches?

Last season English football threw up more than the usual crop of surprises, not least on the managerial front. United legends Roy Keane and Paul Ince shared a huge number of headlines, with the Corkman walking out on Sunderlandnil and his former club-mate Ince raging about the injustice of being young, gifted and English.

At the other end of the scale, one-time average footballer Alex Ferguson won yet more trophies while the formerly unspectacular Arséne Wenger again put out some of the most exciting teams in the Premier League. All of these facts combined to apparently confirm the widely-held belief in English football that great footballers can never become great managers, and in order to be a top manager it’s better to have been average at best as a player.

But is this really true? Top managers win trophies, so the obvious place to start looking is the list of managers who have won the most prestigious club trophy, the European Cup. Rinus Michels, Johan Cruijff, Jupp Heynckes, Vicente del Bosque, Frank Rijkaard and Pep Guardiola fly in the face of this theory by being legendary players who have won Europe’s top trophy. Other winners who were pretty handy players include Jock Stein, Matt Busby, Ernst Happel, Bob Paisley, Brian Clough, Giovanni Trapattoni, Emerich Jenei, Artur Jorge, Fabio Capello and Carlo Ancelotti.

That leaves only about half the winners in the “average player” category. Problem is that that category does include the likes of Helenio Herrera, Guus Hiddink, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho and Rafa Benítez – who without doubt are top managers – whereas among the others there are one-hit wonders such as Rijkaard and Heynckes (only three major trophies each). Perhaps the theory is true after all.

From the list of UEFA Cup-winning managers a similar pattern emerges. Playing legends such as Dino Zoff and Franz Beckenbauer have won the trophy, alongside reasonably good former players such as Paul van Himst, Huub Stevens, Fatih Terim, Valery Gazzaev and Mircea Lucescu as well as the aforementioned Paisley and Trapattoni, and while the majority of the winning managers were average players, the category does include top managers such as Bill Nicholson, Bill Shankly, Bobby Robson, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Gérard Houllier and Dick Advocaat.

Having said that – although far be it from me to call these people one-hit wonders – legends Zoff and Beckenbauer do only have five major trophies between them, and by the same token Keith Burkinshaw, Klaus Ribbeck, Ottavio Bianchi, Luigi Simoni, Alberto Malesani and Bert van Marwijk were hardly world-beating managers. So we need to look at some more facts.

A look at the World Cup-winning managers simply confuses the issue. Of the seventeen winning coaches, eight never won more than that one trophy (although what a trophy to win!) and therefore it could be argued that they were not really top-flight career managers in the mould of Ferguson or Wenger. On top of that, at least three of the seventeen never played professionally, which shows that these statistics cannot be used in the same way as with the European trophies.

Just as an aside, it is interesting to note how many top managers especially early in the game’s development never played football but were seen as managers – possibly in the business sense – when they entered the game. Perhaps the most striking modern example of this breed of manager is Arrigo Sacchi, who never played the game professionally and indeed worked as a shoe salesman before going into football management.

The question of whether success as a player can be a help or a hindrance can also be looked at from a different angle, of course, that of top players rather than trophy-winning managers. Of the top seventeen names on the IFFHS list of best players ever – the top of this list at least contains more or less the right names, even if the order is eternally debatable – Zidane (you missed him out guys but don’t worry, I’ll stick him in for you), Pelé, George Best, Garrincha and Eusébio never managed while Michel Platini, Bobby Charlton, Stanley Matthews and Gerd Müller barely passed through a manager’s office. (Müller has never managed beyond second-team level while Matthews even oversaw the disaster of Port Vale’s being expelled from the league!) Maradona could also fit into the second category, as in effect he has barely had a chance to tell his assistant how he likes his coffee.

Of the rest, Alfredo di Stefano won five trophies – one of which admittedly was the European Cup-Winners’ Cup – but Zico’s five were harvested in Japan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Russia, Puskás’ four in Greece and Australia, Lothar Matthäus’ paltry two were won in Serbia and Austria while Ruud Gullit has a solitary F.A. Cup. Oh, and Marco van Basten only succeeded in annoying everyone as Dutch coach.

Maybe the key lies here. I have just mentioned the greatest players ever to have played the game, better even than the great names I mentioned at the start, and they have never achieved more greatness as coaches. And a quick look at the equivalent list for managers reveals the other side of the coin – the only playing legend in the top twenty-five is “Franklin” Rijkaard.

This is the stuff from which clichés are made – in-your-face statistics about massive names become convenient sound bites for fat blokes in pubs to sound knowledgeable and have the last word. Ferguson and Wenger never amounted to much as players, Keano and Rice choked as managers.

However, I think it’s fair to say that after a more in-depth look at the facts that this theory is only half true – some good players become good managers, and some people should leave the game and take up crochet. But as with everything else in football half-truths and big names are extrapolated to become the whole; they are enough when you want to make a point.

One thing is for sure, the players we know as great now will never be given the chance to succeed in the modern climate where coaches are sacked after only a few games. Part of the success of Ferguson and Wenger lies in the fact that they were allowed to build their own destiny.

As for the English, how did our managers fare? Glenn Hoddle at number 26, Kevin Keegan at 97, Bobby Robson at 105. Thank God Capello’s at number twenty. Hang on, who’s that at number five?