When does a manager become a coach?

We Brits are always somewhat resistant to change and new ideas, particularly when those ideas come in from the continent.

In football there is a general feeling that, just like our breakfasts, British is best.

The latest bastion of Britishness being forthrightly defended on terraces up and down the land is the old school British manager.

Already this season the Premier League has seen two managerial departures and in both Alan Curbishley and Kevin Keegan’s cases the general consensus among football fans is that the two men were put in impossible positions.

The West Ham and Newcastle bosses are experienced top flight managers, used to the traditional role of a manager which includes picking the team, training the players and, crucially player recruitment.

Both men left under a cloud as it emerged they had become disillusioned with the way in which their control over the players who came in and out of their clubs had been taken out of their hands.

This may seem to many a completely unworkable situation, the thought of a manager being given a squad and then simply being told to get the best out of it, but this has been the system adopted by European clubs for decades.

In Gianluca Vialli’s book ‘The Italian Job’ he muses on the differing roles of Italian and English managers.

The Italian boss is simply there to coach the team, a sporting director or director of football liases with the owner over which players to bring into the club and the manager simply works with it.

He compares this system to the example given by David Platt, who claimed he was so busy during his brief spell as manager of Nottingham Forest with contract talks and trying to sign players that on some days he was unable to make it onto the training pitch to work with his team.

The anecdote is endorsed by no less a manager than Arsene Wenger, who says he is perfectly happy to leave an assistant to take care of training and sees his role principally as building a squad.

Perhaps this is why there is such an emphasis on the tactical approach in the Italian game, managers simply have more time to work on this side of the game.

This approach may be different but it can work, the key is the fans understanding the respective roles.

We are used to blaming managers for everything, they are easy targets as they stand there on the touch line and face the media (usually) after every game.

But in Italy when something goes wrong it isn’t always a case of blame the manager, if a loss or bad run is due to tactical decisions maybe, but fans also question the club hierarchy if they feel poor decisions have been made regarding the club’s resources.

In some cases this would be an ideal route for English managers, they are normally ex-players and football is all they know so to leave them to that side of the game makes sense, just as long as they are only accountable for these areas in the eyes of the press and supporters.

If an owner has invested buckets of cash into a club, why shouldn’t he also then have an influence on where the cash is spent.

In some cases, such as with the likes of Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger who are so used to having complete control and have completely built their squads themselves, this continental model is a non starter but I believe it can work in the English game.

I think the big problem in Keegan and Curbishley’s cases were they were simply not used to this approach and it led them to feel that there had been a breach of trust when matters they assumed they would control were taken out of their hands.