Communication and coaching experience often surpass a gilded playing career, writes Gregor Robertson
Published 28/09/21.
It’s a phrase I heard aimed at referees, journalists and the odd aspiring coach repeatedly throughout my 15-year football career and, thanks to the inherent groupthink in changing rooms, might even have uttered myself: “They’ve never played the game.”
Any mistake, transgression or questionable view and, within the closed ranks of football, you are still liable to be dismissed out of hand: if, the theory goes, you’ve never been a player, you will never really know.
It’s a sentiment I’ve pondered regularly in the five years since hanging up my boots. And counterproductive as it may be for a former footballer now working in the media to admit, the longer I’ve spent on this side of the fence the more I’ve come to question the merits of that view.
This week the thought returned when my colleague Martyn Ziegler reported that the PFA, the FA and the Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) are once again trying to recruit former players to train as referees, with a plan to fast-track the best candidates to become elite match officials.
Football, as an industry, is awfully keen to “fast-track” former pros. Heck, I undertook a fast-track degree in sports journalism, with the help of the PFA, to prepare for my own second career, the irony of which is not lost on me.
With officiating in England seemingly at a low ebb, you didn’t have to look very far this weekend for someone suggesting that ex-players could do better job. When the Middlesbrough midfielder Matt Crooks was unjustly sent off by Peter Bankes for what he deemed an overly physical challenge, the Middlesbrough manager Neil Warnock (quelle surprise) repeated the trope.
“It’s a shame because it shows when referees have never played the game they don’t understand these types of things,” Warnock said. “I don’t think anyone ever improves, because you’ve got to know what it’s like to feel the game. But it’s such a closed shop, they don’t want any interference. That’s how they are. Ex-pros as referees? We’ve been asking for that for donkey’s years.”
Now, putting aside for a moment the irony of the “closed shop” analogy, do not for a moment think this a view held by Warnock’s generation alone. It’s a deeply ingrained belief among footballers that we, with only a very few exceptions, have a more profound understanding of the game.
My own experience of football, and now journalism, however, leads me to believe that it’s not quite as straightforward as that.
Despite a growing list of cerebral coaches with no playing careers of note — from Arrigo Sacchi to José Mourinho to Julian Nagelsmann — the same thread of thinking still applies to those in the dugout. A friend who works in academy football admits that he would never employ a coach who had not played professionally, because without that experience it’s impossible to pass on the finer details — the mechanics and thought processes involved in every action or passage of play — that he wants his young players to learn.
There is perhaps a kernel of truth in that. But having lived something does not mean you have a skill for teaching it, and dismissing those who haven’t closes the door on a wealth of experience and talent. As the great Sacchi, a former shoe salesman, said before going on to win back-to-back European Cups as manager of AC Milan: “A jockey doesn’t have to have been born a horse.”
The point is that experience counts for nothing if you cannot transfer your learnings to a new pursuit. I played 375 professional games in a decade and a half and I can’t, in all honesty, remember more than a handful of truly enlightening coaching sessions in that time.
Paul Hart imbued in us the basics of the game masterfully in the Nottingham Forest academy. Alan Knill, assistant to Chris Wilder at Northampton Town, had a sharp and inquisitive mind. But my experience with our Scotland under-21 coach, Rainer Bonhof — one of the finest German midfielders of his generation and a World Cup winner in 1974, aged 22 — was more common than not: he was unable to impart one iota of his unquestionable knowledge and experience to us as a coach.
Perhaps there is an element of protectionism within a sport in which there is an ever-greater scramble for roles and relevance. In a magnificent column for The Guardian during the World Cup in Russia 2018, the great Jorge Valdano wrote: “For some time now, a silent battle has been fought between those who know about football because they played it and that taught them endless things — lots of ex-players don’t even know all that they know — and those who, while they know less, explain it better because university gave them knowledge and the tools of persuasion.”
Valdano, the former Argentina forward, was writing, primarily, about the growing influence of science and big data in a game he perceives as art. He concluded: “The battle is being won by the educated. But a word of warning: we are underestimating, and risk losing, the huge amount of wisdom that exists on the side of those who don’t even know all that they know.”
“Those who don’t even know all that they know” is a hugely perceptive phrase and strikes at a deeper truth. If you can’t access and impart the knowledge you have accumulated as a player, what advantage do you have over those who have spent years training for the same role?
The reason Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher have elevated the standard of punditry is not, in my view, because they’re able to analyse the game in ways others cannot. It’s because they have the intelligence to articulate their insights, and the perfect platform on which to do so, more engagingly than any other broadcasters on television.
Their stellar careers, of course, add weight to their analysis. They know when a vignette from their playing days is appropriate, and when it is not. But there are journalists who are just as astute, have covered the game in detail for many years, but who find their views disparaged because “they’ve never played the game”.
You may remember, in 2015, when John Terry was widely derided for saying he would only accept criticism from ex-players who won trophies and medals with big clubs, such as Rio Ferdinand, Carragher and Neville, but not someone like Robbie Savage who, despite captaining four Premier League clubs and winning 39 caps for Wales, “played at a really bad level”.
That was part of the same “scale of credibility,” as Savage put it in an adroit riposte in the Mirror, that those who ascribe to the “never played the game” mantra ought to reassess.
Indeed, Terry, who has yet to be offered a managerial role, will now be acutely aware that a gilded career is no substitute for years of hard work and experience as a coach. The same is true in every walk of life.
Football would do well to realise that.
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