Appointing a manager is the most important decision a football club has to take. It not only determines how your team perform on the pitch but it sets the tone for the whole institution, both inside the building and in what it projects to the outside world.
Nobody expects clubs to always get it right when choosing managers. Football clubs are not always known for their foresight and clear strategic thinking. But at a minimum, we expect them to be able to hire someone. If you are a huge global brand who can fill stadiums and bring in millions in sponsorship deals, how hard can it be to find somebody to take a well-paid job as your public face?
And yet, the strange reality of elite football in 2024 — richer and more powerful than ever — is that clubs are finding it increasingly difficult to appoint the right person. Everywhere they turn, they run into dead ends. This is the time of year when teams try to line up the manager or head coach to guide them through next season and beyond. In theory, it should be a time of creativity and movement, coming after a long period of relative stasis at Europe’s biggest sides.
But instead it looks as if the coaching market is somehow broken. As if the harvest has failed, or the conveyor belt on the production line has jammed, and there are now suddenly no new potential head coaches coming through. Teams who thought they could walk into the marketplace and be overwhelmed with an abundance of choice have instead not found anything to their liking.
This feels jarring somehow, at odds with football’s era of plenty, with our sense of its big clubs as behemoths who simply have to click their fingers to get whoever they want in.
Just look at the example this week of Bayern Munich.
Since it was decided in February that Thomas Tuchel would leave at the end of the season, they have spoken to Julian Nagelsmann, who Tuchel replaced at Bayern in March last year, only for Nagelsmann to decide to stay with the German national team. Then they spoke to Ralf Rangnick, who has decided to stay with Austria’s national team.
Suddenly Bayern, six-time European champions, winners of 11 consecutive Bundesliga titles before this season, giants by any standards, are left uncertain where to turn next. Even as their team are trying to make it to next month’s Champions League final under Tuchel.
Thomas Tuchel has taken Bayern to the Champions League semi-finals but is set to leave the club this summer (Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Or to take another club of a similar size: Barcelona.
At the end of January, Xavi announced that this season would be his last as their manager. But there was never any real consensus about who would replace him in the summer, and the most common name linked with the job was Rafael Marquez, the former Barcelona and Mexico centre-back who has been coaching Barcelona Atletic, the club’s reserve team who play in Spain’s third division, since July 2022.
He would have been a gamble to say the least, as that is his first job in senior management. Club president Joan Laporta always maintained that he wanted to convince Xavi to change his mind and stay on, and, late last month, Xavi confirmed that he would be there next season after all.
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You may point out here that neither Bayern nor Barcelona have been especially well-run clubs in the past few years, and that the centre of gravity in European football has been shifted by the broadcast wealth of the Premier League.
Maybe so, but even in England it does not feel right now as if the stars of management are lining up to come and work here this summer. That spell during late 2015 and 2016 when Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola and Antonio Conte all signed for Premier League clubs looks very far away.
Liverpool have had a unique challenge recently finding a successor to Klopp and of course it is impossible to directly replace someone like him. They appear to have gone for Arne Slot, who has an impressive record with Feyenoord in the Netherlands and who looks to have the right character and approach for the job. But he would not arrive with the same known-quantity profile as Klopp did nine years ago, having won two Bundesliga titles and the DFB-Pokal (Germany’s FA Cup) and also taken Dortmund to a Champions League final in the previous five seasons. Slot would come to Anfield with much more to prove.
Arne Slot is set to take charge of Liverpool next season (ANP via Getty Images)
We do not know yet what Manchester United will do about Erik ten Hag, but as his team head for a Premier League finish between sixth and eighth he has not exactly made a convincing case to stay on.
And yet the new hierarchy at United will be very aware of what a difficult time it is to appoint a manager and how few good options are out there. It is telling that the name they have been linked with the most, England manager Gareth Southgate, has made his name in the international game rather than at club level. Similarly, Chelsea will know that if they do part ways with Mauricio Pochettino at the end of his debut season, they will not be replacing him with anyone as proven.
Clearly, this is about more than just head count. There is no reason why the number of available managers/head coaches should be less than it ever was before. There are as many clubs as there ever have been. There is a pool of out-of-work managers and it has not been totally dried up by the less-stressful alternative of TV work.
What we are, in fact, dealing with is not a shortage of managers but a shortage of the type of managers that elite clubs think can work for them. It is not that the shelves are bare, but that the buyers do not like what they see sitting on them. Pickiness does not imply scarcity.
Ultimately, this is to do with stratification, with the fact that the richest sides are almost playing a different sport now from the rest. It used to be that top clubs would look across the landscape and see dozens of candidates who they believed could make the step up into the big time. But now those sides are so elevated from everyone else in the game that they can barely make out who is operating way down there.
The gap between managing a good team and a superclub is now bigger than it has ever been. Judging who can make that leap has become one of the hardest things to do in football. And because the superclubs monopolise the trophies in the major leagues, there are far fewer candidates for elevation than ever before.
The fastest route remains having been a player at a big club, and the success of Mikel Arteta at Arsenal since his 2019 appointment will surely inspire the next decade of copy-cats, just as his mentor Guardiola’s at Barcelona 11 years before did.
(Michael Regan/Getty Images)
This is why the example of Xabi Alonso is so instructive.
By winning the Bundesliga title this season, with a possible Europa League and Pokal treble to follow in the next few weeks, he has made an emphatic case that he could manage at the top. The fact that he played at Liverpool, Real Madrid and Bayern for a combined 14 years suggests he would slip straight back into the superclub life, too. If Alonso had left Bayer Leverkusen this summer, he could have solved a problem at Bayern or Liverpool for years to come.
But achievements like Alonso’s, which used to be more common, are now once-in-a-generation phenomena. Maybe in time he will herald the changing of the guard, but right now there are few Alonso-equivalents out there to choose from.
The coveted but unavailable Xabi Alonso (Massimo Insabato ATPImages/Getty Images)
When United appointed Ten Hag from Ajax in summer 2022 it felt like a bold move, a reward for his enterprising style that had won three Eredivisie titles in four years and taken Ajax to the semi-finals of the Champions League. But his struggles to impose his style of play at Old Trafford may make other clubs think twice about appointing someone with a similar career in future. Clearly it did not worry Liverpool, who hope that Slot will do a better job of a similar jump from Dutch football.
Right now, clubs are thinking about Ruben Amorim, close to winning his second Portuguese league title with Sporting Lisbon in four seasons. In the past, Portugal has been a great platform towards working in England. Chelsea turned to Porto to recruit Jose Mourinho in 2004 and Andre Villas-Boas seven years later (in both cases, after European-level as well as domestic success). Apart from winning in Europe, there is very little more that Amorim could have done at Sporting and yet it remains to be seen what job — if any — he will get this summer.
No wonder then that the risk-averse elite, thinking that even Europe’s best young managers are beneath them, choose to recycle the names who have already proven themselves at that level. Conte will not be out of work for much longer. Nor will Tuchel, once he leaves Bayern.
If you have been a success at a big club before, you can expect a phone call at the very least. Because those teams are still in no rush to peer down at the masses beneath them and take a chance.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
