required by the sports in question. An interesting testcase of the “transferability” of
athletic skills concerns the question of whether or not expert football players also make
expert coaches or managers (see Box 6.5).
Box 6.5 Thinking critically about...whether or not expert soccer
players make successful managers?Does expertise transfer from one specialist role to another within a given sport? This
question comes to mind when we explore whether or not expert footballers become
successful managers (Marcotti, 2001; Moore, 2000). At the outset, we need a definition
of expertise in playing. An obvious possibility in this regard is to use the ten-year rule
explained earlier in the chapter. The difficulty with this criterion, however, is that it does
not distinguish between players who excel consistently over a period of time and those
whose performance is more variable and/or short-lived. In view of this problem, another
definition of success could be postulated—namely, whether or not one is selected to
represent one’s country. This latter criterion is promising because research suggests that
less than one per cent of professional players will be selected for their countries’ national
teams (Marcotti, 2001), As regards a definition for “success” in management, coaching
one’s team to win a league championship or cup competition may suffice. Initially, it is
easy to think of some excellent football players who subsequently became successful
managers. For example, Kenny Dalglish was a star for Liverpool and subsequently
managed that club to league championship honours. Similarly, on the international stage,
Jack Charlton, who won a World Cup medal with England in 1966, managed the little
known Republic of Ireland team to a quarter-final place in the World Cup finals in Italy
in 1990, Also, legendary stars like Franz Beckenbauer won World Cup medals both as a
player and as a manager. From these examples, it is clear that one advantage of
possessing playing experience at an elite level is that it adds credibility to one’s views on
coaching. But on the other hand, Moore (2000) calculated that of the twenty-six
managers who had coached winning teams in the Premier League championship in
England between 1945 and 2000, only
five had won more than six caps for their countries. Surprisingly, even acknowledged
expert managers like Bob Paisley and Bill Shankley (both of Liverpool) and Sir Alex
Ferguson (manager of Manchester United—perhaps the most successful club manager in
England over the past fifty years)—were never capped by their native country, Scotland.
In addition, statistics reveal that only one (Jack Charlton) of the eight English World
Cup-winning team of 1966 who went into management was subsequently successful in
this role. Additional support for the idea that one does not have to be a great player to
become a great manager comes from the fact that top managers such as Arsène Wenger
(Arsenal) and Gerard Houllier (Liverpool) were never capped for their countries either.
But let us leave the last word on this issue to Arigo Sacchi who won the Italian league
and two European Cups with AC Milan even though he had never even played
professional soccer! He said, “What’s the problem here? So I never played, I was never
good enough. But so what? If you want to be a good jockey, it’s not necessary to have
been a horse earlier in your career. In fact, sometimes it’s a hindrance” (cited in Marcotti,
2001, p. 9),
What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 171