One of the problems with getting older is that you’re never quite sure whether it’s you or them. Is the world really changing, or is it just you, struggling to adapt? There’s a milestone in life, probably as you’re contemplating university or a first job, when you realise you’re watching a footballer who is younger than you.
Then, 15-20 years later, you realise you’re watching a manager who is younger than you. And 15-20 years after that, especially if you’re watching the modern Premier League, you realise that almost every manager is younger than you. At which you do two things: give thanks for David Moyes; and check to see whether it’s actually happening, or whether this is just the football equivalent of the policemen-getting-younger cliche.
Managers used to be ashen-faced men with nicotine-grey hair dressed in the sports jackets of grim experience. They spoke with a rasping melancholy of the depths of human fallibility and of fates that were not to be trusted. Now they’re trim, sprightly figures in T-shirts, convinced that analytics can explain the world.
There are fewer Premier League managers now aged 50 or over than at any point in the past 20 years: only four, and two of those have only just made it over the threshold. Moyes is 63 (three months younger than José Mourinho, which, like Aberdeen being further west than Bristol, is a fact both true and too counterintuitive to be worth believing). Then there is Unai Emery at 54, Oliver Glasner at 52 and Régis Le Bris at 50.
Most Premier League managers are in their 40s, with the youngest two Matthias Jaissle, 38, and Fabian Hürzeler, 33. This is not coincidence; rather it seems the result of two interconnected trends. Even at the turn of the century, when Mourinho was starting out, it was unusual for a manager not to have played the game to at least a reasonable level, which meant they were starting their managerial careers in their mid-thirties.
That’s still the route many take – Andoni Iraola, Michael Carrick, Gary O’Neil or Álvaro Arbeloa, for instance. But there’s also a recognition, to use Arrigo Sacchi’s phrase, that a jockey does not need first to have been a horse. Coaching is regarded as a job in its own right, requiring a very different skillset to playing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
