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The last hurrah of the player-manager

By on December 20, 2015

Football has largely left behind old-school managers — the boozers, the kick-and-runners and yes, even some of the greats.

Premier League managers now face a multi-faceted job set amid an ongoing analytical and financial evolution of the league. The few that have managed to juggle these new responsibilities alongside their playing career have become an extremely rare phenomenon. The player-manager is a dying breed.

The last player-manager throughout the four tiers of professional English football was Garry Monk, recently sacked by Swansea City. There were two player-managers in the Premier League during the 2013/2014 season, including Ryan Giggs who ended his playing career as an interim player-manager following David Moyes’ sacking in early 2014. You wouldn’t have known it though, but for a famous moment in the seventieth minute of United’s 3-1 victory over Hull City when Giggs brought himself on as a substitute. It was his 672nd Premier League appearance.

Together, Monk and Giggs only actually played twenty-minutes after taking over managerial duties before the Swansea gaffer went full-time with his managerial duties and Giggs retired, taking up the post of Louis van Gaal’s assistant manager. The workload, it seemed, consumed their attention.

Other recent player-managers tell of the same stress, between managing the scouting, day-to-day operations and actually playing, let alone the difficult match-day transition between player and manager roles. Monk insisted his squad members still call him by his old nickname but others, such as Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool in the late 1980s, preferred that he was referred to as “boss,” causing unintended tension with older squad members.

In the end, a player-manager can often become conflicted about placing himself in the starting-lineup. Said Peter Reid, player manager at Manchester City for three years in the 1990s, per FourFourTwo: “I was never one for saying I’ve got to be playing all the time and in the end I brought in Steve McMahon to do my job because I thought that was best for the club.”

Apart from Monk and Giggs, only Stuart McCall, who took charge of Bradford City for less than a month as caretaker, has held in the role of a player-manager in the Premier League since the turn of the century. There have been quite a few player-managers in the lower-leagues, however, notably Gary McAllister at Coventry, Paul Simpson at Rochdale and Dennis Wise, who lead Millwall to an FA Cup Final meeting with Manchester United in 2004. Wise started that match alongside young-gun Tim Cahill up front, but couldn’t keep United from coasting to a 3-0 win. More recently, Edgar Davis lead Barnet from 2012 to 2014 as a player-manager and maintained consistent match-fitness.

But the increasing professionalism of the managerial position has led to the player-manager’s downfall. To obtain the Uefa Pro License and manage in the Premier League requires 240 hours of work, per the BBC, all of which is nearly impossible to balance whilst playing at the top level. With increasingly high stakes and big-money being dealt with in the Premier League, top flight clubs are weary to place the reigns in the hands of an inexperienced manager anyway. Ironically, player-managers might find it easiest in the Premier League with a deep backroom staff that can be delegated certain tasks.

In the 1970s, player-managers were seldom seen beyond the lower leagues for this very reason, until Dalglish came around in 1985, sparking a renaissance in the business. Memorably, Dalglish scored the very goal to give his side the league title in the days of the old First Division.

Suddenly, other senior players found a way to both elongate their career and streamline into management at the same time. For some, notably Glenn Hoddle at Chelsea in the early 90s and Graeme Souness at Rangers in the late 80s, this worked quite well. Bryan Robson was successful at Middlesbrough as was Ruud Gullit at Chelsea. Upon Gullit’s sacking in 1998, the Blues appointed another player-manager, Gianluca Vialli, who built upon Gullit’s work and lead Chelsea to win both the League Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup. Yet he too was gone after falling out with several star players in 2000 and Chelsea opted for a more traditional replacement.

For others, like Terry Butcher at Coventry in 1992 and Romario at Brazilian side Vasco de Gama (perhaps he was the only manager ever to be suspended for failing a drugs test), the job overwhelmed them and only served to cut their professional careers short and stunted their managerial forays at the nub.

And now again the player-manager has gone into near exile, a relic of a bygone era.

Homepage photo credit: Danny Molyneux, via Flickr

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.