Note: This is a review of The Manager series from the Guardian football website and so for those who have not view the six-part video series, skip this blog entry.
They are called ‘manager’ in British football, but not so in the rest of the European continent. But the person in the dugout has come a long way. As per the Guardian website, football managers have gone from ‘anonymous secretaries to superstar millionaires’. In a six-part video series being released on the Guardian website’s football section, the Guardian senior sports writer Barney Ronay explores how the football manager has evolved over the last century.
As Barney Ronay said in the opening of the first video, ‘It’s easy to take football managers for granted these days.’ In the modern era, they are more than just giving orders from the dugout. Thanks to the media outlets of today, they have also become celebrities in their own right. Speaking at conferences, meeting politicians, posing for glamour shoots, the football manager of today is an entity of its own. But the football manager in English football was not like this all along.
Barney Ronay, who had also written a book about the football manager, takes the viewer in a journey through time where external influences outside of football also have a say in how the football manager has evolve throughout the course of time. It was a real eye-opener for me, right from the start of the first video in the six-part series. How do the social changes of the time affect the football manager. In the beginning of the video series, the role of the football manager was a far cry from what I know in the modern era. The football manager as I know it has the final word on whatever decisions he may be making, even when it comes to the transfers.
As the series went on, so do the role and the importance of the football manager changes. Not only were that, heading into new territories but yet, the men who ventured abroad unappreciated at home. English football was in its own world when it had forward-thinking football managers who eventually had fans beyond its shores, until the arrival of the great Hungarian side in the Magical Magyars in a friendly against England at the Wembley in 1953. And that match had profound effects for people like a certain Sir Alf Ramsey.
But whatever the future of the football manager it may be now that we have reach the era of billionaires owning football clubs, from its early beginnings...it is actually a fascinating journey. He had gone from an anonymous figure before the era of Herbert Chapman in the 1920s to being the ‘most important man in the most important sport’ as we know it.
If you think you know everything there is to know about the football manager, then this six-part video series from the Guardian website’s football section will surprise you. Each video is less than 10 minutes long and so if one wants to find a way to kill time, then the video series is a perfect fit.
