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Real Sociedad’s Estadio Anoeta was barely half-full for their game against Elche on Friday night. The reason fans had stayed away, according to the commentator, was because the match was being shown live on Spanish television. My suspicion is that they had decided there were much better things to do in San Sebastián on a Friday night than watch a David Moyes team for 90 minutes.
I jest, of course. Moyes ended his first La Liga home game with a dominant 3-0 win: a tentative first step in the detoxification of Brand Moyes, a marque associated rightly or wrongly with a particularly dispiriting sort of failure. An absence of ambition, a paucity of pomposity, a faint-hearted urge to “make things hard for our opponents”.
The game was broadcast from the Spanish feed, with a Sky Sports commentary over the top, and before long a curious disparity between the two began to appear. Real’s early goal was greeted with the words “Carlos Vela gives David Moyes the perfect start!”
Co-commentator Efan Ekoku agreed. “What a start for David Moyes,” he said.
Strangely, while all this was going on, we hardly saw Moyes at all. Were Moyes a prominent La Liga manager descending on the Premier League, you could guarantee that his every twitch would have been scrutinised, a camera trained on him for the whole game. Here, instead, he was a background figure: a blurry character at the edge of the shot, a matchstick on the touchline. It was almost as if the players on the pitch were somehow more deserving of our attention.
I wanted to check out my hunch, so I watched a few of last week’s other games. During Manchester City v Bayern Munich on Tuesday night, ITV spent every spare moment cutting away to the lightly seasoned visage of Pep Guardiola. On Wednesday at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadum, meanwhile, Sky treated us to no fewer than 13 close-ups of Borussia Dortmund’s Jürgen Klopp: from every possible angle, in real time and in borderline-erotic slow motion.
Why do we care so much about managers? And why do other countries – with the possible exception of Holland and France – care so little? In most of Europe, the manager is a more peripheral figure. Go through back issues of a big Spanish sport newspaper such as Marca and almost without exception, they feature players, not managers, on the cover.
There are many possible reasons. One of the main ones is that managers are very often the only people in English football with anything worth saying. Often you will read glossy magazine interviews with players such as Xavi or Paolo Maldini, and they are so effortlessly erudite: full of poetic little passages like “The ball is an angel with wings, and it flies from the soul – pim, pim, pim – and it’s a phenomenon that brings peace to the heart”. And you think: why are Jordan Henderson interviews never like this?
But there is something else to it, I think. English football is still transfixed with the idea of manager as lightning rod, figurehead, dictator. We lap up tales of Sir Alex Ferguson’s control-freakery, go weak at the knees for Louis van Gaal, worship at the altar of Bill Shankly. Perhaps this lascivious thrill over footballing dictators is because this country never actually got to experience real-life dictatorship: the bold typefaces, loudspeakers on every lamp-post, the military rallies, the indiscriminate killing.
It all seems so exhilaratingly exotic. And we wonder why Ukip is so popular.
Yet change is in the air. Only last week, Tottenham’s Mauricio Pochettino reminded us that he was not a manager, but a “head coach”. Once tangential, footballing figures such as Paul Mitchell, Jorge Mendes and Stan Kroenke now command mainstream interest. Slowly, English football is realising that glory, and thus ignominy, depend on more than the sheer force of one man’s personality.
And some day, perhaps posterity will allow Moyes a fairer hearing too. Perhaps he will take Real steadily up the table. Perhaps the Van Gaal project will stumble. Or perhaps neither. Either way, the erosion of England’s peculiar manager fixation is something from which Moyes – less dictator, more very competent civil servant – can only benefit.
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