Remember Raymond Domenech?
That’s right: the man with the
caterpillar eyebrows who occupies
the middle of the Venn diagram of
“international football managers” and
“amateur astrologers”. In 2016, when
Zinédine Zidane was first appointed
head coach of Real Madrid,
Domenech gave an interview to
Le Monde.Pirlo needs hunger, not just destiny
On the subject of his former
captain, he spoke compellingly, and
with prescience. Describing Zidane as
“a human god... a myth capable of
eliciting emotions in people,” he
predicted that he would succeed at
Real because “to manage [in the
modern game] you need only two
things: an image, and weight in the
eyes of the players”. Turns out there
was one star whose path Mystic Ray
could predict.
Four years on, Zidane has led Real
to 11 trophies, but his real legacy mayhave been to change the face of
football management. When he took
charge of Castilla, Real’s reserve team,
in 2014, he hadn’t even obtained his
coaching badges. Yet despite having
scant experience or enthusiasm
for the craft of coaching, he has
triumphed. Some innate tactical
acumen is a given, but the real key to
Zidane’s success is that he is an avatar
of Real, who commands the respect
of his squad. For other clubs, the
precedent of a manager who makes
up in affinity what he lacks in avidity
has been hard to ignore.
These days, it feels as if everyone
wants to find their own Zidane. Last
summer, Chelsea appointed Frank
Lampard after only one season at
Derby County. In January, Barcelona
tried desperately to hire Xavi, who
had been a head coach for all of seven
months. Last week, Juventus plumped
for Andrea Pirlo over Mauricio
Pochettino. Lustrous club icons have
as many seats at the top table of
European football as proven coaches.
Once, the ideal manager was
someone who had absorbed things:
experience, knowledge, lessons. What
is often sought now is the opposite:
someone who reflects a brand, an
aura; a hologram of the club’s essence.
It is hard to imagine a starker
illustration of this than Juventus’s
decision to replace Maurizio Sarri
with Pirlo. Sarri’s managerial career is
a 30-year odyssey that began in the
eighth tier of Italian football; he
hauled himself up, rung by rung,
through passion and perseverance.
He led Napoli to their record points
total in Serie A and though there are
legitimate criticisms of his spells at
Chelsea and Juventus, they both
ended with a trophy.
Pirlo, 41, has never coached a
competitive game and has not yet
completed the Uefa Pro Licence
course at Coverciano, the Italian
coaching school. In another industry,
his CV would be shredder fodder, but
he has two qualities in his favour.
First, he looks as if he has just stepped
out of a Nespresso advert. Second,
he understands what it means to play
for Juventus.
Those were traits that Sarri, 61,
the rumpled carpetbagger, could
never hope to emulate. He was
doomed by whispers that he struggled
to connect with Juventus’s superstar
squad. And there is a pattern of
thought that players of the highest
calibre require managers of similar
hauteur, not coaches for whom the
job is a vocation.
It took Real 14 games to reach
that conclusion about Julen
Lopetegui. Barcelona have
surely made up their mind
about Quique Setién, a
brilliant coach who has
been emasculated at the Nou
Camp. Jorge Sampaoli, once
considered one of the best
coaches in Europe at Seville,
was ruined by taking the
Argentina job, which reduced
him to a hapless patsy.
Pirlo may well be a
success at Juventus.
He has gravitas and a
certain mythic allure. He
knows the club inside-out. He is
someone who can look Cristiano
Ronaldo in the eye. But in the
rush to unearth the new Zizou,
something important is being
overlooked. To say that Pirlo
hasn’t demonstrated a desire to
be a manager would be anunderstatement. In his autobiography,
he described coaching as “not a job
I’m attracted to” and even when he
enrolled at Coverciano, he said rather
grudgingly it was to get “the piece
of paper”.
Coaching is a hunger game.
Authority and legitimacy are
important but an ardent commitment
to the job of improving players and
teams is fundamental. There is a
reason that stories of the work ethic
and attention to detail of those such
as Jürgen Klopp, Chris Wilder and
Marcelo Bielsa are legion — because
that is what it takes. Clubs ignore this
ingredient at their peril.
Paul Ince, one of the best midfield
generals of his era, was elevated to
the Blackburn Rovers job before he
had finished his coaching courses,
which, like Pirlo initially, he regarded
as an unnecessarily bureaucratic
imposition for “people who know
enough about the game and have
worked with managers who are the
best in the business”. Ince never
fulfilled his potential as a manager
and, three unsuccessful jobs later, his
coaching career was over.
It is not only about the badges. Phil
Neville has been steeped in top-levelfootball and has his Uefa Pro Licence.
He is a nice guy and as a figurehead
the FA couldn’t have asked for better,
but before being appointed manager
of the England women’s team, he had
never worked in a head coaching role
or in women’s football.
Neville will leave next summer
after 3½ largely underwhelming years
and the FA has appointed Sarina
Wiegman, who has managed three
teams, including the Netherlands,
over a 14-year career, to succeed him.
Completing the full gamut of
courses and climbing the ladder is
hard and often uninspiring work.
Occasionally someone such as Zidane
comes along and makes it all seem
like an inessential drudgery: why
hire a thoroughbred when you can
get a unicorn? But jumping through
the hoops isn’t just about satisfying
some procedural nicety; it’s also about
separating those who have the drive
to get to the top from those who
do not.
Coaches such as Sarri and Setién
may lack the seductive immaculacy
of a Pirlo or a Zidane. But their
place in the managerial ecosystem
is vital because they
demonstrate that it is
possible to reach the
apex of the game
through hard work,
not divine right.
Turn off that
undercurrent of
aspiration and we
wouldn’t have two
great coaches such as
Julian Nagelsmann and
Thomas Tuchel
contesting a Champions
League semi-final.
Maybe Pirlo really is
“predestined”, to use the
description of Juventus’s
sporting director, Fabio
Paratici. But as Klopp
once said, “You cannot
ask for destiny; you
have to work for it.”Sport Football
10 1GS Saturday August 15 2020 | the times
James
Gheerbrant
Pirlo initially said he was
not attracted to coachingWhat is often sought is
someone who reflects
a brand; a hologram
of the club’s essence