part 4
He didn’t do too badly. His Plymouth won the third division with a record points total, and were closing in on another promotion when he left in spring 2004 to join the big time: the Premier League with Southampton. Sturrock did decently there too, winning five matches out of 13, pretty good for a small club. “I probably had the most successful 13 games any manager’s had at that club,” he chuckles. However, he says he left within six months after falling out with the chairman Rupert Lowe. He never got a chance in the Premier League again. Sturrock muses: “‘I’ve ‘been to the show’, as the Americans would say. The one thing I’ll say is that I enjoyed every minute of it.” Why does he think big clubs ignore him? “Two years ago I came out with it, told everybody I had Parkinson’s. I think that has been a feature.” However, that cannot be the whole story; he was undervalued long before that. When pressed, he talks about what he calls “the Southampton debacle”. Almost despite his results, his spell there tarnished his reputation. The first time the national media noticed him as a manager, he was squabbling with his chairman at an unglamorous club. Tara Brady, Southend’s chief executive, says: “I think Southampton may have been his one shot, unfortunately.” Sturrock admits, “Maybe people tagged me that I’d failed in that environment.” The problem for men like him is that it’s hard to judge managers on their results. After all, results are mostly down to players’ wages: that’s why Southend, say, finish lower than Chelsea. Nobody, as far as we know, has ever systematically investigated which managers overachieve relative to their clubs’ wage bills. It’s also hard for outsiders to judge managers on their day-to-day work. Most of the biggest managerial decisions are made in private, and the outcome of those decisions – signing a certain player, say – might only become apparent much later. This difficulty of assessment also bedevils judgments of corporate chief executives. That’s why a man can appear on a magazine cover as saviour of his company one month and appear in the dock the next.
Because clubs seldom know which managers are good, they tend to recruit managers who at least look like managers. Looking the part is crucial. Christian Gross discovered this the day he became Tottenham’s new manager in 1997. The obscure bald Swiss walked into the press conference waving a Tube ticket, saying, in a heavily Teutonic accent, “I want this to become my ticket to the dreams.” Gross looked like nobody’s idea of a manager. Spurs sacked him within months. He had previously done very well in Switzerland; after Spurs he had an excellent decade at Basel. In England, he just didn’t look right. In the collective British mind, the ideal football manager is a white middle-aged man, an alpha male with a conservative haircut who used to be a great player (even though Szymanski has shown that success as a player does not predict success as a manager). Managers tend to get judged on surface characteristics: their ethnicity, looks, charisma, and personality clashes as reported by the media. These characteristics mostly count against Sturrock. His Parkinson’s is not immediately visible, but it slows him down. He speaks softly: more headmaster of a village primary school than leader of men. Brady says: “He’s a bit of a dour Jock. He wouldn’t come across as over-impressive.” After Southampton, Sturrock could have waited for another big club. However, he says, “I always made my mind up to pick the first club that asked me to be their manager, after I moved on. Keep myself in work, keep myself in work.” This strategy has probably tagged him with the image of a lower-division manager. He won promotion at Sheffield Wednesday and Swindon, then returned to Plymouth and led them to their highest league position in 20 years. “We also sold all our best players,” he adds glumly. When results declined slightly, Plymouth shunted him into a commercial post. He moved to Southend in 2010. “So. Here I am,” he laughs at himself. He had taken probably the least sought-after job in English professional football. When he arrived in Essex, Southend were facing a winding-up order for unpaid tax. They had almost no players – something of a problem for a football club. “I signed 17 players in a week,” he recalls. One was his son Blair, who has played for his father at four clubs. Sturrock prides himself on his eye for a footballer. “I think I’ve had a high percentage of players who’ve been successful. I think that’s the secret,” he says. But because of Southend’s financial mess, the league wouldn’t register his signings. Only two days before the season began, as Sturrock was preparing his youth team to masquerade as the first 11, was the embargo on transfers lifted. Brady, a smart-suited Essex man who had made money in technology and finance, came to Southend in December 2010. In the chief executive’s office with a view of the car park, he explains: “I am fanatical about football. The club needed money. I had money.” Football is a bizarre industry, where key employees regularly get arrested after night-time brawls, but Brady has tried to impose some reason. He employs his own “stats guy” to crunch data on, say, completed passes in the final third of the field. From the data, he has deduced a strategy: in the lower leagues you must hit long passes. Relatively unskilled players cannot pass short à la Barcelona. You need to put the ball near the other team’s goal, and keep it away from your own. Brady inherited Sturrock by accident, but soon discovered that they thought similarly about football. Unusually for an ex-player, Sturrock cares about statistics. He too employs his own “stats guy” who sends him findings. Like Brady he has concluded from the stats that “long-ball football done in a clever way” wins matches in the lower divisions. Sturrock hasn’t used the long-ball game all his career, and presumably he would work differently if he had better players, but he believes it is right for Southend. This is not “hoof-ball”, Sturrock emphasises: it’s not just blindly punting balls long. “There’s a way of doing it. I think you’ve got to be accurately playing balls up to your front men. And supporting them.” Playing clever long-ball football is a craft. Brady and Sturrock are not soulmates. Together they perform the awkward dance of director and manager, with each trying to lead. Sturrock says: “Tara is a hoof-ball merchant.” Just before the match, Brady says: “Me and Paul disagree on a number of things. We disagree on who should play up front today.” Yet they have built an alliance. At Southend, Sturrock is overachieving again. The club’s annual revenues are £3.2m. Brady says, “We’ve the ninth highest wage bill. We should finish ninth, right?” In fact, going into the match against Bradford, Southend are second in League Two. This overachievement doesn’t surprise Brady. He noticed early on that Sturrock has something special. “During a game he can instantly see what is going wrong and change it, when it will take me till after the game to work out what it was.” Having a good manager makes a “massive, massive” difference, Brady believes, because there aren’t many of them. “I think most managers are fakes,” he says. In his observation, the City is competitive and football is not. He has concluded: “Based on the competition we are up against, if we have the ninth-highest wage bill we should finish much higher than ninth.” It’s hard to explain what good managers do right, because if it were obvious everyone would simply copy them, but if anyone can identify Sturrock’s secrets it’s Brady’s father Chris. In the course of a long career, Chris Brady has played and managed in semi-professional football, taught courses to managers in the professional game, and been a professor of management studies at various universities. He now consults for private-equity firms, helps out at Southend’s training, and argues with Sturrock about football statistics. Football’s besetting plague, says Chris Brady, is panicked decisions. “In the corporate world you are under scrutiny every quarter. In football you are under scrutiny every quarter of an hour. Paul resists that. He never gets rushed into decisions.” Instead, Sturrock arrives at verdicts through clever deliberation. Chris Brady says, “He’s very consultative, but he’s not interested in consensus. He’ll be interested in more or less everybody’s view. But he’s very happy to make his own decision.” And afterwards Sturrock can analyse his own decision. Sometimes he’ll say, “I f***ed up.” Footballers listen to Sturrock, adds Brady père. “You’ve got to be with him regularly in the changing-room to see that he has this quiet influence.” But the world isn’t regularly in the changing-room with Sturrock, and therefore it struggles to value him. Tonight Southend run out for the match against Bradford in front of 5,526 diehards. Everyone here is performing an age-old ritual: there must have been 200,000 now-forgotten matches like this in English history. Bradford are low in the table, yet it fast becomes clear that they have the better players. Their winger, Kyel Reid, who should not be in League Two, outclasses everyone at Southend. Clearly, Sturrock has led a poor team to the top of the table. Yet tonight his magic isn’t working. Not a man to stir himself unnecessarily, he once or twice even ventures out of the dugout to call to players. In the second half, he changes the game: he brings on a midfielder, Anthony Grant, and suddenly Southend have possession. Yet two minutes from time, Bradford’s Luke Oliver pokes in the game’s only goal. In the tiny press box, Bradford’s radio announcer exults. The crowd files gloomily out. … A month later, Southend are number one in the table. Sturrock looks headed for another unnoticed promotion. He has apparently resigned himself to life in anonymity: in mid-January he signed a new rolling contract with Southend. And yet there are recent signs that clubs are slowly becoming more rational in their choice of managers. Charismatic ex-star footballers are losing their monopoly on managerial jobs. Three of the 20 managers in today’s Premier League never played first-team professional football: Chelsea’s André Villas-Boas, Swansea’s Brendan Rodgers, and Roy Hodgson of West Bromwich Albion (he never got past Crystal Palace’s reserves). The Premier League’s historical average is one in 20. Steve Bruce, the last ex-star player without much managerial success who still managed in the division, was sacked by Sunderland in November. Meanwhile, other ex-star players such as Roy Keane, Bryan Robson and Diego Maradona are no longer in demand as managers of serious clubs. Maradona, who after a disastrous world cup with Argentina now coaches obscure Al-Wasl in Dubai, grumbled this month that management jobs go to a “closed circuit” of intimates. Something is changing. One day the market in managers might finally become efficient. But it will probably be too late for Sturrock.