The Head Coach Market Gets Freaky

My friend Jeff hosts a dinner every year at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. There are practitioner dinners of all stripes at Sloan, but Jeff’s is a particularly motley crew of golfers, bettors, future Stanley Cup winners, NBA-title winners, chess grandmasters, political pundits/professional poker players, and assorted clevers from all walks of life.

And me.

One year, Jeff let me invite a couple of Liverpool fans - we’ll call them Eddie and Iggy - to the dinner, and I was giving Eddie a hard time about being in town. “I know you have nerd cred, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before - you must be in town for ‘showdown talks with the big boss’ or similar nonsense. Or have you cultivated a Celtics fandom during all that gardening time?”

“I’m just here for the talks. You know I get along well with nerds. What have you been up to?” he asked.

“Mostly American Football. I just came from the NFL Combine where we met over 20 teams in person across two days and the feedback was really good. I’m genuinely so proud of our team and this product - I think we finally cracked it and people will start buying this year. [And it’s true, though optimism on this product nearly proved the death of me,] It’s been three full years of dev… I’m ready to come back to soccer.”

“Why’s that?”

“Ha, I’ve been watching the names come up on the job market for Director of Football roles and there are so few competent names involved, I feel like there’s a real shortage of supply. On the other hand, I have always found coaching tempting. I really enjoy set pieces, and figure I can take that role for a couple of years, work on my badges, and then move up the ladder on the head coach side.”

“You don’t want to do that, mate… Iggy used to threaten doing that back when he’d get frustrated, and I’d have to explain that only madmen take that job and enjoy it. And even then, they still burn out.”

“I hear that. I guess it’s a bit like being President or Prime Minister - no one who is qualified actually wants to do that job. The stress. The responsibilities. The sacrifices…”

Other guests began to arrive then and further conversations were lost to waves of alcohol and sushi, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then, and I’m pretty sure Eddie is right. Being a head coach at the biggest clubs is an impossible undertaking with impossible expectations. Anyone who takes those jobs either does so knowing it will chew you up and burn you out, or is totally oblivious to that possibility.

I mention this because the head coach job market went positively Freaky Friday this summer. I’m going to bullet a fraction of the madness here just to give a sense of scope.

• A variety of big teams seem to have mostly fired their head coaches, tried to recruit replacements, failed in those pursuits, and then walked back the almost firings in various degrees. This happened in Munich, Barcelona, and at Manchester United.

• The guy who got relegated with Burnley was hired by Bayern Munich.

• Brighton appointed someone born in 1993! as head coach!

• Pochettino seems to have quit after a what was actually a pretty good first season at Chelsea. He inherited a complicated squad, they had a ton of injuries, and things remained chaotic behind the scenes, I don’t think he was correct in deriding the idea of set piece coaches (obviously), but you also don’t usually see a good coach walk away from a very high paying job where the team seems to be progressing. Poch had a comment in the spring about people failing to ask coaches whether they are happy that felt pretty on the nose about these types of jobs.

• Chelsea then replaced Poch with Enzo Maresca. He of the “one successful season at Leicester City, in the English Championship” track record.

• Brian Priske replaced Arne Slot at Feyenoord. And Lars Friis replaced Priske at Sparta Prague. There are now two former Midtjylland coaches coaching Champions League clubs.

• Edin Terzic lead Borussia Dortmund to the Champions League Final… and then quit the club just before the start of Euros.

Like I said… weird. But not entirely inexplicable. In fact, things have been headed this way for a while now.

1) There are not enough talented coaches in football.
2) The hardest thing to do if you run a football club is to replace a good head coach.
3) One of the big reasons for this is that no one has figured out how to find and develop new coaches at scale. You can’t just learn what you need to know from a book, plus it takes time to get reps and learn. Meanwhile, coaching badge programs are too gated, have varying degrees of utility, and produce a wide array of styles.
4) Teams now realise that the style of play former players learned to coach and a modern, competitive style of play are not necessarily the same thing. And they have cottoned on to the fact that you can’t just TELL a coach what style of play you want the team to play. Coaches have to actually know how to coach and train that style successfully, BEFORE YOU HIRE THEM. Which is pretty counter-intuitive.
5) Smart teams also realise that hiring former players with little experience to take the mantel at a big club is a negative-skewed lottery, so they have largely stopped doing that.
6) Former top level players make enough money when playing that they don’t need to go into coaching. And they are aware of the life sacrifices that need to be made in order to do it. So a couple go into commentary where they work one or two days a weekend, and the rest have kids and retire.

So if you need to replace a coach nowadays, where do you go?

Some go to their academy systems, where you can de-risk the personality aspects at least and hire someone who “understands the club.” It doesn’t mean they’ll be great at the competitive league level, but you go in knowing something.

Others go out into the market every time and try to find the best coach that is available that they can also afford. Which is really difficult to do when every other team is doing the same thing and needs a new coach every two years.

And finally, a growing number of teams are scouring world football for anyone that is competent at playing most of the style of play they want to see on the pitch. Can these coaches handle a dressing room full of players with big egos? Who the hell knows. But from what we have seen on the coaching side, these hires have more success than the alternative hiring processes.

There’s a podcast called Founders created by David Senra that is one of the best podcasts on the planet. [A good hopping on point for new people would be here.] Senra has done over 350 episodes now, and his focus is on the life and learnings from major (mostly business) figures throughout history. People like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Coco Chanel, Jay Z, Walt Disney, Napoleon, Michael Jordan, etc.) Senra creates his material by reading books about his subjects, taking notes, and then cross-referencing that material with his massive knowledge of other greats throughout history.

I started listening to learn more about running a business when I was CEO, and there were two early learnings I got from Senra’s podcast that have stuck with me the last few years.

The first is that a surprising number of history’s most famous entrepreneurs had major failures or bankruptcies before they succeeded. Starting a business is spectacularly hard - there are almost too many lessons you need to learn that are never taught anywhere except through experience. And just because one fails, does not mean one can’t be incredibly successful again in the future.

The second lesson was that so many of these people were completely, utterly devoted to their work to the expense of everything else in their lives. They had tons of failed marriages, and relationships with their children that barely resemble the word. Friends and collaborators existed, but barely outside of work. Not all of the greats lived this life… but there were enough to realise the frequent cost of success in the most competitive endeavours is the sacrifice of everything else.

Coaching a professional team is also like that. The lifestyle of a head coach is that of the team. You live, travel, eat, drink, sleep, and breathe with that entity, and there is little space for anything else in life. And it has to be this way.

If you want to develop your skills to be one of the best in the business, there isn’t time for normal, every day things like life.

Sure, if you are good, the numbers on your paycheck will be lifechanging. But the thing that you sacrifice is… everything.

Paul Graham often tells us following our curiosity is one of the best guides in choosing a next compelling career step. In contemplating my own next steps, I was looking at things I am both qualified for and interested in doing. For me, coaching is one of those. I have been offered set piece jobs before, and it would be a fairly easy path to use that position as a platform to get coaching badges and eventually end up a head coach somewhere.

Or… to get on as a Director of Analytics in college football, and roll that into enough years of experience to find a coaching position in that sport.

After a great deal of introspection over the last year, I have discovered that learning is my siren’s call. And I think there is almost nothing that produces more compelling study in the world than the competitive coaching space. (Especially the playcalling chess match of American Football.) It is a fractal problem that goes as deep as you have time to devote to it. It involves teaching, communication, camaraderie, and competition. No wonder competitive, ambitious people commit their lives to it, even knowing the consequences.

On the other hand, I have kids I genuinely like, and there are only a couple of years left before they start to leave the house. The sacrifices it takes to grow a startup from 0 to £10M a year have been massive, and coming out the other side has been both painful and refreshing at the same time. Traveling with a team would force me to give a lot of that up, while knowing that you will never get that time with your kids back.

So I chose this - to write about sports and analytics again, instead of joining a team. To enjoy myself in the research process, and to talk to all of you multiple times a week. To do podcasts with fascinating, smart people and let them deliver insights and their own stories. It doesn’t rule anything out for good… coaching will probably still be there in a few years, and maybe I’ll still be good enough to make a difference. And being a Director of Football remains an obvious path I have been on for over a decade now. I’ve started a few new things in my life so far that have gone on to reasonable success, one more should be easy, right?

The one catch I ran into during all this coping process was that Manchester City posted a set pieces role online last week.

To learn from the greatest coach ever… would be my kryptonite.

Even if it was just sitting there watching him conduct meetings and training every single day for a year, that learning journey would probably be too good to pass up.

I know enough people at Manchester City they’d at least look at my C.V. I could probably get an interview. Lord knows I’ve taught enough of the other people they would potentially hire to do the job in the first place.

I would crash myself on the rocks to learn from Pep.

But that’s also the reason why I very carefully did not pick up the phone and make that call.

—Ted