"Identity" has become the single most important quality in football, from which everything flows.
If you speak to the most effective sporting directors and executives, it is pretty evident what "best practice" looks like when building a successful modern club.
You first decide what kind of club you actually are and want to be. In other words, you set on a football ideology – that "identity" – preferably informed by the history and culture of the club in order to encourage a deeper commitment from everyone. Every single decision, from recruitment of players to coaches, then fits into that. That's how every single quality you have is multiplied. There's a unity of purpose, which brings focus, and – yes – "conviction".
All of Liverpool, Brighton, Manchester City, Sunderland, Bournemouth and Brentford have clearly done this.
Arsenal had started doing this, only to divert down a slightly different direction that has had a similar effect. They gradually centred power around Arteta once he'd proved himself, with the Basque then significantly promoted from head coach to manager. The latter title denotes a club figurehead; the former always feels more dispensable.
All of Palace, Aston Villa and Fulham seem to have gone for a more old-fashioned approach where the manager is the driving force. The "ideology", at least, is more linked to them.
A key difference with Ruben Amorim, however, is that the structure is there to empower Oliver Glasner, Unai Emery and Marco Silva.
Palace have long had one of the best talent production lines in the game, persistently filling the first team. Hence, like their rivals Brighton, they can lose Michael Olise and Eberechi Eze in successive summers and still seem to rise to a higher level. Adam Wharton is just the latest, and Palace would want well over £100m for him if he were ever to move – especially given the premium on that position.
Glasner's force of personality – and supreme tactical management – has then driven all of this. Villa, as outlined in Guillem Balague's new book Rise of the Villans, took the unprecedented step in the modern game of empowering Emery to build his ideal club.
United have done none of this. They've dropped a very specific type of coach into a situation that needed so much work. That work, to be fair, is also why the hierarchy are keen to allow Amorim some grace. It's now widely believed that differences over this direction were among the reasons Dan Ashworth abruptly left last year.
One thing Ashworth is greatly respected for in football, after all, is exactly this: organising one of these technical structures. It looks precisely like what United need right now. The same with West Ham, who are once again just lurching towards completely different profiles of coach.
There are, meanwhile, murmurs that if Amorim were to go, United might once again look at Gareth Southgate.
Chelsea seem to have gone halfway there, albeit with the leadership's own twist. While they have employed a lot of "best practice" in terms of building a head coach structure around a modern way of football, their private equity ownership has untypical and unprecedented views on recruitment. The constant churn arguably goes against traditional ideas of team-building, with so much of their identity – or perhaps, yes, personality – tied up in Cole Palmer.
The actual point of all this, and a brilliant Premier League weekend, is how it translates to the pitch.
Palace and Bournemouth have been able to drastically overperform because of that conviction, that identity. Chelsea, despite those two trophies last season, are still underperforming because of the absence of it. Brighton continue to sell them players but continue to take points off them. And Manchester United? Well, it says much that you could put a coach as brilliant as Andoni Iraola in there and there would be fair questions over whether he would just have the same problems as Amorim in terms of players to fit his idea.
It's been discussed in this newsletter before how one response to last season's rise of the middle class was the wealthy clubs buying their stars, but the proof of the recent Premier League is that this can be weathered. All of Brighton, Palace and Bournemouth can keep rising because of that unity of purpose.
Liverpool, despite the weekend, obviously have it too. They're just developing a new team.
None of this is to say that Arsenal won't derive immense benefit from such a victory.
The point is more that wins like that come from something deeper, which a lot of clubs could do with thinking about.
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário