The death of the manager: Toward a new mode of discourse
In December, Manchester United were made the subject of this sentence: “Manchester United scored five goals for the first time since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer began his brief tenure with a 5-1 Premier League win against Cardiff.” Who was responsible for this win? Was it the newly-instated Norwegian, having implemented innovative new tactics at the club? Was it the recently-departed Jose Mourinho, his methods finally having come to fruition albeit tragically too late? Was it the players, freed from what we were led to believe was the relentless yoke of tyranny under their old coach, motivated to prove him wrong? Was it, perhaps, the result of some sort of behind-the-scenes restructuring on the part of the club? Or was it sheer luck? It will always be impossible to know.
That conclusion, that we can’t know, may seem off-beam. Of course it’s important to consider various factors when attempting to assess a football team, but in this instance it seems only natural to focus on the manager. The manager is, after all, the only thing that changed.
This certainly seems to have been the approach taken by most media following Solskjaer’s appointment, consciously or not. Less than a month after Mourinho’s sacking, for example, The Athletic’s Michael Caley claimed that “what Solskjaer has achieved is putting together a team that can romp against bad teams, particularly weak attacking teams.” Even a piece that devotes several paragraphs to downplaying the Norwegian’s impact ends up placing him at the center of its analysis.
Other journalists have focused on Solskjaer’s psychological impact on the squad. James Ducker noted that, “From a young age growing up in Norway, Solskjaer kept comprehensive notes about his highs and lows in front of goal and then later started compiling a detailed diary from his meetings with Bill Beswick, the sports psychologist Sir Alex Ferguson used to employ at United.”
Given Solskjaer took over from a man who seemed to take most of his psychological inspiration from Niccolo Machiavelli, it’s hard to doubt the impact of the Norwegian’s more personable approach. As before, though, the manager is placed front and center of our analysis of the team.
There’s one curiosity that has been consistently overlooked in the coverage to date: The speed at which the transformation took place. “I arrived on Wednesday night and only had Thursday and Friday with the players,” said Solskjaer after the Cardiff match. “Wayne Rooney texted me and gave me some advice — so it must be down to him! He told me to make them play football, enjoy themselves and be Manchester United.”
Tongue in cheek though it was, Solskjaer’s comment is not exactly wrong: Rooney’s text was as likely the cause of the 5-1 thrashing of Cardiff as Solskjaer himself, or at least it seems probable Solskjaer told his players more or less exactly what Rooney told him. The truth is the rapidity of the turnaround suggests the upturn in results had more to do with the fact United were no longer being managed by Mourinho than the fact they were now being managed by Solskjaer.
All of which raises the question: Do we give managers too much weight in our analysis of their teams?
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If you’re familiar with the work of Roland Barthes, you might have recognized the opening paragraph to this piece as a parody of the opening paragraph of his essay, “The Death of the Author”:
“In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: ‘It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.’ Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain ‘literary’ ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know.”
Barthes frames his discussion of the author’s place in literature with the broader question: How should we interpret a piece of writing? He considers a number of lenses through which to interpret a text — its author, the characters, “literary” ideas, universal wisdom — and concludes that we couldn’t possibly give interpretative priority to one over the others.
This might seem counter-intuitive. After all, if we hope to understand a text, who better to turn to than the person who wrote it?
That was certainly the modus operandi of scholars in the period during which Barthes’ was writing. As he saw it, in his era, “the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions.”
For Barthes, though, this emphasis on the author set a dangerous interpretative precedent. “To give an Author to a text,” he wrote, “is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing … once the Author is discovered, the text is ‘explained’: the critic has conquered.”
Fundamentally, Barthes argues, taking authorial intention as the context within which interpretation occurs leaves the reader with too limited a view of the text itself. For although the author brings a piece of writing into being, once that creative process is begun, the text takes on a life of its own. To suggest there can be no understanding of a text beyond the author’s is to miss the multi-faceted richness of what a text, by its very nature, is, “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”
When he talks about the death of the author, then, Barthes is describing how a writer passes away in the very act of writing. “Probably this has always been the case,” he says. “[O]nce an action is recounted … this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.” In the process of writing, the text becomes something other than the person composing it. Or, as Barthes prefers, the author “dies.”
The point of Barthes’ essay is to advance an interpretative shift: Away from the author and toward the reader. Because the text has a life of its own beyond the author, it’s the reader who is best placed to interpret it, the reader who “holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.” When we attempt to come to terms with a text, therefore, we should avoid falling into the trap of viewing it through the eyes of its author. To do so ignores the fact that the text exists not as the product of one individual’s specific intentions but apart from them as a multifaceted “tissue” of various influences. In the end, then, as Barthes says, “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.”
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The parallels between Barthes’ discussion of the interpretation of texts and my earlier discussion of our interpretation of Manchester United in the weeks following Solskjaer’s appointment should, by now, be coming into view. If we regard the team as a text and their manager as its author, we are faced with the same interpretative problem that beset the French intellectual: What role should the manager play in our interpretation of a football team?
Prominence seems to be given to the manager as an interpretative locus, much as the author was once the interpretative locus of our interpretation of a text. As we saw, the media responded to United’s 5-1 win over Cardiff by emphasizing Solskjaer’s role. But this approach is not reserved for the media. Owners and boards of directors clearly feel as though the buck stops with the manager, holding them accountable for the performances of their squad when things go badly. Possibly as a result of this, the manager is also usually the first target of angry fans.
This might seem sensible enough, particularly in a case like United’s. Of course Solskjaer should be the focus of the media in the days after he takes control of one of the biggest clubs in the world. Of course Mourinho deserved to be sacked for United’s poor performances during the tail-end of his tenure. Then again, the author once seemed like the obvious lens through which to interpret literature.
The question of manager value — namely, how do we measure it? — has been raised before. Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper attempted to do this by correlating a football team’s performance to their wage bill, and then analyzing any variance for evidence of a so-called “manager effect.” In the end, they concluded, “[F]ootball does a bad job of valuing managers. Football managers are modern celebrities, yet the vast majority appear to add no value to their teams, and could probably be replaced by their secretaries or stuffed teddy bears without anyone noticing.”
Szymanski and Kuper are, no doubt, exaggerating here, but they’re also careful to state their conclusion in less bombastic terms: “factors besides the manager might have caused each club’s overachievement.”
Other studies of manager value make the same point. “Teams do over-perform for reasons other than their managers,” claims The Economist in its article on the topic (which, perhaps questionably, uses the FIFA video game as a model by which to assess a manager’s performance.) The more academic ICMA Centre Discussion Paper on the manager effect takes into account a in“club’s wage bill, transfer spending, and the extent to which they were hit by absent players through injuries, suspensions or unavailability.”
Here, we find ourselves back in Barthes’ purview: In the realm of the text as “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” Ascribing too much importance to the intention of the manager is, to appropriate the nouvelle critique, to miss the rich complexity that is at play in the performance of a football team. To rewrite Barthes, “once the Manager is discovered, the team is ‘explained’: The pundit has conquered.”
By placing the manager at the center of our interpretative framework, we assume the outputs of a football team are linked to intention. If one team beats another, they were “found out” by the opposing manager. If the result goes the other way, the manager was “tactically naive.” But this approach ascribes too much causality to managerial intention. Regardless of how much a coach tries to anticipate an opponent, football is a high-variance game involving 22 players interacting within a remarkably large field of possibility.
As a result of this complexity, the sport is susceptible to what philosophers call the Gettier problem: Managers can appear to have been “right” about an opponent in spite of a lack of intention on their part. In other words, winning accidentally looks no different to winning intentionally.
Without the intentional link between the manager and their team, the interpretative framework that has become de rigueur starts to falter. For in the same way that the author dies when they produce a text, the manager dies when they produce a team. The team exists beyond the intentions of that one individual, as a “tissue … resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”
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In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes includes an aside about the origins of the author. “The author is a modern figure,” he writes, “produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the ‘human person’.” Until we arrived at the twilight of the medieval period, Barthes suggests, there had been no conception of the author of a text. Before that, narratives were presented by a “mediator, shaman or speaker, whose ‘performance’ may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his ‘genius’.” At that time, texts were not “owned” by a person but shared within a broader oral tradition.
Barthes doesn’t explore this idea any further in the essay. But the nouvelle critique does, most notably in the work of Michel Foucault, who develops the concept of “author function.” Foucault, like Barthes, considers the author a modern phenomenon, but is far more interested in tracing the emergence of the author within modern history.
When considering the unfolding of history, Foucault argues, we should not look for specific intentional decisions on the part of individual players but rather at the interplay of dispassionate external factors which we often consider to be outside of history — sexuality or power, for instance. In the case of the author, we should not be looking for those early individuals who exist as proto-authors, but at the function the idea of the author played that can explain its emergence in the first place.
This function, it turns out, was primarily penal. Foucault writes: “Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive.” Foucault links this function to the advent of property rights and the rise of early capitalism. As soon as objects started to be considered in terms of ownership, as “a thing, a product, or a possession,” it was only a matter of time before we began speaking of the “author” of a text — that is, the owner of the text.
These two concepts — the idea of possession and the idea of transgression — can be ported over into the world of football without much difficulty. If we were to speak of “manager function” within football, we might argue that the manager emerges as an interpretative phenomenon in a similar way the author did for Foucault. With football becoming a playground for billionaires, the club soon shifted from being regarded as a local “good” to being a “possession” of an owner. As a result of this, there emerged a need for some sort of locus for liability in the event of transgression.
Our decision to place the manager at the center of our interpretative framework stems, no doubt, from these external factors: The need for a scapegoat in the event of a club’s underperformance. The death of the manager resists this historical shift and seeks out a more persuasive interpretative standpoint.
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Where do we go from here? If, having died, the manager loses their appeal as a standpoint from which to assess a football club, where should we turn in our attempt to understand a team? How do we read the team as a “tissue”?
If the danger of seeking out the manager as the locus of interpretation is that the team exists beyond them, then we need to find a space in which are “gathered into a single field all the paths of which the team is constituted.” For Barthes, this is the reader. The reader stands at the conclusion of the text and can hold together simultaneously the various threads of which it is woven, tapestry-like.
Interpreting a team, then, we start at the end. This would mean a refusal to start with the manager’s intentions, and commit to an interpretative framework that begins at the destination — putting the “reader” of the team at the center of the process of analysis. Only in this way can the various facets that make up the “tissue” of a team be given adequate attention.
This doesn’t mean we should ignore the manager altogether. We could still talk about the tactical underpinnings of a team. However, by avoiding the temptation to conceive of any tactical success in terms of explicit managerial intention, the analysis will allow space for other factors to be considered which might otherwise be disregarded.
To take an example: Tottenham’s targeting of Jorginho when they played Chelsea last November has resulted in other teams following suit, factors which could, in the long run, see Chelsea’s tactics shift (or, as seems more likely at this point, not). With the manager in a position of interpretative prominence, we might view this tactical development as confirmation of Maurizio Sarri’s brilliance or incompetence. Accepting the death of the manager, though, we are now in a position to view this tactical development apart from Sarri, as the product of external circumstances — the decisions of other managers, the successes of other teams.
Our interpretation need not be tactical. The team is as much a product of a club as it is of a manager (or even the coaching staff — remember that, for instance, Liverpool’s tactical evolution may have as much to do with Pepijn Lijnders, their assistant manager, as Jurgen Klopp). This will mean that any interpretation will have to take into account the structural factors at play in a club. In this vein, Manchester United’s search for a Director of Football will likely play more of a role in the future of the team than the temporary (or even, perhaps, full-time) appointment of Solskjaer. The business acumen (or not) of the club chairman, Ed Woodward, is also a key factor in the “tissue” that is Manchester United.
Mention should also be made of clubs for whom the manager is secondary to a more fundamental ethos that runs through the organization. Early proponents of this approach were Swansea, who went through a phase of appointing lesser-known managers who immediately became successful. More recently, Watford have adopted a similar setup. Viewing the manager at the center of the interpretative framework means that we overlook the external role played by clubs in a manager’s performance. Marco Silva at Everton looks a shadow of Marco Silva at Watford, while Javi Gracia excels at Vicarage Road.
Then there are the players. All too often, we view them as products of a manager. No doubt managers play an important role in a player’s career. However, we often overlook the fact that players themselves can be the products of other systems. Paul Pogba’s success on the left side of a midfield three at United may be as much a product of the Frenchman’s time at Juventus as it is the result of his performances on the training fields of Carrington. And the psychological impact of no longer being managed by Mourinho should not be overlooked either.
In many respects, this promotion of the reader to the center of our interpretative framework might seem obvious. When analyzing a club, of course it’s important to take into account a broad spectrum of data. But proclaiming the death of the manager is not about increasing the amount of data we use to assess a football club: It’s about adopting an interpretative framework that enables us to read the data in the most effective manner.
As things stand, the primacy of managerial intention is preventing us from reading football well. It narrows the game down to a limited purview of possibilities open to the manager, and overlooks the richness of the tapestry that is a football club. In the end, then, to finish where Barthes finished, we know that to restore to football its future, we must reverse its myth: The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the manager.
The Unexamined Game is a series exploring the intersection of philosophy and football. You can find the previous articles in the series here:
Toward a philosophy of football
Pep Guardiola, tiki-taka and the end of football
Ball don’t lie: Football’s problem of other minds
How Isaac Newton ruined football
Stefano Pioli, and the power of mindfulness
Raheem Sterling, Michel Foucault and football’s racist discourse