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The trials and tribulations of a football manager
by Neil Warnock
Headline £16.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 323 January 2014

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Outside Yorkshire people would call Neil Warnock’s bluntness “refreshing”, but I had enough relatives from the county to realise he is just talking normally, apart from the strange absence of any swearing. Warnock takes us well beyond the angry and abusive figure he was on the touchline to give perhaps one of the last accounts of being a manager from an English, old-school perspective, stretching across all the divisions.

He is prepared to name those he does not like, bears a few grievances (and why not after 33 years as a manager) and offers a few telling insights into the managerial mind. Some clubs have apparently switched the position of the home and away dug-outs, the better to berate the linesman running the right wing – no stone left unturned in the modern game.

Warnock has aired his views by means of a weekly column in the Independent (which I have not read and therefore cannot tell how much, if any, is rehashed). For The Gaffer he has employed the Independent‘s Glenn Moore to bring some polish to his thoughts. The pleasing result is an unusual structure, more reminiscent of fiction than biography. At times it reads like the musings of an after-dinner speaker reviewing his whole career through the prism of his current and recent jobs. The benefit to the well-informed fan is that you do not know what is going to come next, as you would with a more chronological approach.

The disadvantage, of course, is the reader might not get what they expect. I would have preferred more on his time at Bramall Lane. For me, and for the football world in general I think, this was the apotheosis of Warnock: ardent supporter turned successful manager and tragically undone in 2007 by managerial “friends” Alex Ferguson and Rafa Benítez, who picked weakened teams against Sheffield United’s relegation rivals, and the dodgy Carlos Tévez deal.

Instead the focus is very much on later years with unstinting praise for Simon Jordan, once chairman of Crystal Palace, and the club’s fans. This is followed by a detailed account of life at Loftus Road under the auspices of various uncontrollable international business moguls and in charge of difficult talents such as Joey Barton and Adel Taarabt. The job did not get any easier with the Anton Ferdinand and John Terry affair, which gets a close and dispassionate examination.

Warnock conveys a very strong sense of the manager’s role being invaded and undermined by non-football issues inconceivable when he started at Scarborough and Notts County, hence the sub-title of this book. Nevertheless he remains hooked on the thrills and changing fortunes of football management. After QPR he took on Leeds, Ken Bates and a foreign takeover and the final few pages read more like another job application than a farewell to a boisterous 33 years of hurt.

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Inside the minds of football’s leaders
by Mike Carson
Bloomsbury in association with the League Managers Association, £16.99
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 321 November 2013

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Often when reviewing a book it is customary to quote one of the best bits at the start to give a little flavour of what treats can be found within its pages. This isn’t an easy thing to do with The Manager. Mainly because there aren’t any best bits, or even any good bits to speak of – apart from occasional unintentionally good bits, such as the passage that starts off by quoting St Francis of Assisi and Stephen Covey “best-selling author of The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” (me neither) before ploughing into a passage on the philosophy of Neil Warnock (yes that one).

On the other hand despite its lack of good bits, its muscular banality – the literary equivalent of a long and tedious game of squash – The Manager is also a considerable achievement in its own right. Most notably it takes one of the more mercurial and thrillingly baroque aspects of English football and turns it into something so unrelentingly laborious that this book, which is sponsored by the League Managers Association and the Premier League, should come with a warning not to operate heavy machinery or drive late at night should you accidentally find yourself reading more than a paragraph or two.

Yet this is perhaps a little unfair. In reality The Manager is barely a book at all, more a kind of how-to guide aimed not at football fans but at business-minded people: leaders, rain-makers, ladder-climbers, even football managers themselves. This lumping together of football and corporate managerdom is a process that has been in train for some time, but it is given a fresh twist here. The first secretary-mangers would often borrow the mannerisms and vocabulary of clerks or factory foremen.

In the 1950s a socially mobile breed of manager took up the coat and hat of the ambitious junior sales manager. The 1980s brought with them a breed of Thatcherite manager-made-good, the Big Ron-ish notion of the manager as self-made man and flash git. With the celebrification of the modern manager – and with football generally bleeding into every other walk of life – this is now a process that has increasingly been reversed. The corporate world looks to football, borrowing the manager’s habits, mannerisms and – as here – musings on success, the leadership of men and the rest of it.

Perhaps for this reason the book seems to describe an unfamiliar footballing world. In part this is because it presents a version of football completely robbed of any humour, becoming in the process at times quite funny – favourite chapter heading: “Seeing The Bigger Picture (Harry Redknapp)” – and in part this is because it is simply very dull.

Poring over the cracker motto banalities (“if there is a lesson to take from this it is the tendency of great leaders to take ownership of their situations. In the words of Mick McCarthy…”) it is tempting to conclude that the real problem with The Manager is managers themselves. When they talk about football English managers just aren’t very interesting. Instead they are famously dull, anti-academic and light on any coherent management theory. Particularly when, as here, what they have to say is presented unquestioningly, without context, irony, analysis or any of the things most people who like football like about football.

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Nick Miller reports on Ken Bates’s decision to ban critical supporters from Leeds United games

To put things delicately, Ken Bates’s tenure as chairman of Leeds United has been interesting. It was difficult to imagine a way he could top appointing his godson’s father as manager, banning journalists for having the temerity to ask whether he actually owned the club (before eventually admitting that he did) and calling Leeds fans who disagreed with his methods “morons”. However, Bates arguably outdid himself in March, after a group of fans were barred from Leeds games, simply for speaking out.

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Adam Bate considers why so few former goalkeepers have been managers in the Premier League

Joey Barton may have felt he was insulting Neil Warnock by likening him to the eponymous film hero Mike Bassett, but there is no identikit for the football manager. All sorts of folk have trodden the touchline in England, but only two goalkeepers have ever managed in the Premier League. Nearly two decades on from Mike Walker’s sacking at Everton, it is surely high time we asked the question: where are all the goalkeeper managers?

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