Martin Samuel Attacks J W Henry
In the era of the owner-manager, you'll never work alone
By MARTIN SAMUEL
This has been football's summer of the owner-manager. Meet the new kid on the block.
The most important employee at the club used to be the man who picked the team. Now it is the man who picks the team from which the team is picked. And that isn’t the manager. Not any more.
Changing rules have created changed empowerment. It is not enough to know what is best for the team these days. The manager may think he needs a centre half, but this information is factored in with other policies, cash expectancy, the rafts of red tape now wrapped around what was a simple process of buying the best fit for the starting XI.
Clubs like Manchester United seem very old hat these days.
Ask the best qualified football person at the club to identify the areas requiring improvement, then act on his opinion: where is the strategy in that? Far better to do it the Roman Abramovich way.
Sugar daddy knows best.
Except there are not that many owner-managers with Abramovich's resources, who can afford to get it wrong (Luiz Felipe Scolari, Andre Villas-Boas, Juan Veron, Andriy Shevchenko) and right (Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Didier Drogba, Eden Hazard), and sometimes by accident (Roberto Di Matteo) with such dramatic changes of direction yet still remain successful.
Many clubs therefore resort to plan B. Bean counter knows best; or Billy Beane counter knows best if your owner happens to be a disciple of the statistical-financial analysis method known as Moneyball.
Take Liverpool. If we are to believe John W Henry’s open letter to supporters this week, the club were tied in knots this summer pursuing a transfer policy of such fiendish complexity and vision, that they were left with one top-class forward in Luis Suarez, yet remain on course for success.
So, to borrow a phrase from Henry’s side of the water, shall we cut the crap? There are reasons to be positive about Liverpool, but few were contained in Henry’s missive.
Liverpool did not fail to land Clint Dempsey or anyone else this summer, due to an evangelical belief in financial fair play. Liverpool 2012 were not greatly disadvantaged by the mistakes of Tom Hicks or George Gillett, either, although they were plentiful at the time.
And Liverpool certainly did not end up light on strikers due to a long-term plan so sophisticated that the Fenway Sports Group — in football for less than two years and confessed novices — understand it, but those who have followed the game all their lives remain mystified.
Put simply, a very rich man was burnt in the transfer market last summer, feels he did not get value for money and has determined it will not happen again. He blames those he considered to be experts and will no longer trust mere football expertise.
Sadly, his manager, Brendan Rodgers, now counts as an expert, too. So while Rodgers is one voice having a say on transfer policy, he no longer carries the argument without various stamps of approval, meaning Liverpool’s spending is managed by committee. A committee that inadvertently overlooked the need for goals.
That is what often happens with committees. Somebody thinks somebody else read the memo, and then it gets put to the bottom of the out-tray, and this one was on holiday and that one didn’t see it as his remit or was too worried to speak up in case he said the wrong thing, and the rest have four different opinions and the next thing you know Suarez is leading the line solo and Manchester United have signed Robin van Persie; because the manager wanted him.
Close-knit team: Gone are the days when the manager was the most important employee at a football club
There will be a lot of this now that UEFA have given the owners an excuse to say no. Time was that the board alone took responsibility for resisting the manager’s wishes. It was an executive call and the chairman had to front up. Now the big chief hides behind bigger chiefs.
‘We are avowed proponents of UEFA’s financial fair play agenda that was this week reiterated by Michel Platini, something we heartily applaud,’ read Henry’s statement to fans. ‘We must comply with financial fair play guidelines that ensure spending is tied to income.’
And the extra £1million required to secure Dempsey from Fulham would have influenced that how?
Are we to seriously consider that Liverpool are within £1m of being thrown out of Europe, or that the club do not employ one business brain capable of moving numbers between columns to satisfy UEFA over such a comparably inconsequential sum?
Leeds used to be the under-investors' alibi, now it is Portsmouth. ‘We don’t want to end up like Leeds,’ the chairman would note sagely, as if there was no middle ground between taking a £100m punt with money you don’t have and managing steady decline.
‘What has happened at Portsmouth demonstrates the need for prudence,’ it is now added, as if correlation exists between investing money without strings attached, and giving and demanding repayment almost in the same breath.
The Manchester City project would be grievously flawed if Sheik Mansour was only loaning, rather than gifting, a portion of his vast wealth. Unreasonably swift owner reimbursement killed Portsmouth; not thoroughly reasonable ambition.
Supporters love to believe they are being consulted and that is what Henry’s open letter offered; the illusion of a partnership.
Keeping a close eye: Liverpool owner John W Henry was forced into releasing a statement this week
Henry was ‘as disappointed as anyone’ that Liverpool could not find another striker. The difference being that he had the power to influence the process, while just ‘anyone’ didn’t. Indeed, little of what Henry said stood up to much scrutiny.
‘Spending is not merely about buying talent,’ he added. Oh yes it is. That is all it is about. What else is there to spending, other than the acquisition of talent?
The talent can be groomed for the future, or come ready to start next Saturday. But there has to be talent. If not, what are Liverpool actually buying?
‘These are the first steps in restoring one of the world’s great clubs to its proper status,’ Henry insisted, ‘there is a clear vision at work.’ No there isn’t.
What is clear about stating a preference for a young manager, and then appointing 60-year-old Kenny Dalglish; or buying a player for the British record transfer fee, Andy Carroll at £35m, and then appointing another manager, Rodgers, whose preferred style of play would plainly find no role for him?
Where is the vision in letting Carroll go on loan for a paltry £1.5m payment, without finding an adequate replacement? This isn’t a plan, it’s a grope in the darkness.
Rodgers said he would not work with a director of football, but has instead seen a committee of transfer overseers installed around him. David Fallows and Barry Hunter have been recruited from Manchester City as senior scouts — they are not yet available for work, but one presumes can answer a telephone and give advice on the QT — while Michael Edwards is Liverpool’s head of analytics. There are now a lot of voices in Henry’s ear.
Taking its time: Steven Gerrard and some other reliable Reds have looked unsure of themselves
The deal for Joe Allen from Swansea City took longer than expected because of an internal debate over whether he was worth £15m, and somebody told Henry that Dempsey was too old to command £6m, and it wasn’t Rodgers.
This is another consequence of financial fair play. By linking spending capacity so specifically to income, UEFA have placed the power with the accountants.
The manager is merely some bloke who tries to make the team work for 90 minutes. The real planning is done by people who know about income streams and projected shirt sales for 2015.
Similar struggle: Andre Villas-Boas
Abramovich was years ahead of his time. Thanks to Platini, the era of the owner-manager has arrived. Henry did not much fancy Dempsey at £6m, so did not make any great attempt to sign him, yet Rodgers’s input could at least be detected in buying Allen and Fabio Borini.
Daniel Levy, chairman of Tottenham, would appear to be taking the practice a stage further. The most forlorn plea of the summer came from his manager Villas-Boas.
‘The window should finish at the beginning of the season,’ he said. ‘It’s extremely unfair for players, clubs and managers as they prepare.’
Of course, the transfer window could as good as finish at the beginning of July, no matter the actual deadline. It just needs a club to do their business early, something Levy will never sanction in case he misses the sniff of a deal. So he holds out on Luka Modric until the last moment, and signs Dempsey and goalkeeper Hugo Lloris so late that they miss the game with Norwich City.
The deal for Joao Moutinho becomes such a scramble that it does not get done at all. Funny that, considering he was the one player Villas-Boas appeared to covet.
And where is Villas-Boas in Tottenham’s recruitment policy? It is hard to say. He got Mousa Dembele from Fulham, but did not start him against Norwich. Now Villas-Boas says there is no guarantee Lloris will get straight into the team, provoking immediate talk of discontent from France, where the former Lyon goalkeeper has joined up with Didier Deschamps’ national squad.
Villas-Boas’s behaviour suggests the players he did get were hardly priorities.
So did Levy want Lloris and Dembele so badly that these deals were struck ahead of that for Moutinho; or did he not really fancy Moutinho, dragging his heels until the transfer was timed out?
Obstructions including a 15 per cent slice of third-party ownership were blamed for hindering the Moutinho negotiation, yet a way to avoid that would have been to get the process started earlier, when Villas-Boas joined, and when there would have been months, not hours to iron out the wrinkles.
Welcome to the world of the owner-manager, where your pound buys more — or less if some suit in the back office doesn’t like what he’s seen on YouTube.
Swearing isn't caring
UEFA may not approve of Manchester City but they are not above making a few quid off their back. The first issue of Champions magazine this season had Roberto Mancini on the cover. This time last year it was the newly acquired Sergio Aguero. What would UEFA have done to promote their tournament with its tired elite, repeating the same old fixtures, if City had not come along?
Read more: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-2198312/Martin-Samuel-Brendan-Rodgers--youll-work-alone.html#ixzz25rYxWeMn" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/articl ... z25rYxWeMn</a>
