‘Captain Courageous’ on rotation
Strong leaders used to be seen essential to a successful team – but no longer, writes James Gheerbrant
ABOUT a decade ago, The Wall Street Journal writer Sam Walker had the idea of trying to identify the most objectively great teams in sporting history, and seeing if he could discern any common traits. He got it down to 16, across sports as diverse as football, rugby union, baseball, handball, field hockey and Australian rules football.
He found they all shared a single characteristic: for every single team, the duration of their success coincided with the lifespan of a captain who could elevate a team to perform beyond the level of their natural ability, from Ferenc Puskas to Carles Puyol to Richie McCaw. In short, he theorised that the one thing that the greatest teams have in common is great player leadership.
Walker’s findings – which he turned into an excellent book The Captain Class provide an interesting counterpoint to an inconspicuous, but intriguing trend of this Premier League season. At many teams, the club captain has been an impermanent or peripheral figure this season. Gary Cahill has barely played for Chelsea; likewise Everton’s Phil Jagielka and Southampton’s Steven Davis, now on loan to Glasgow Rangers. Manchester United’s Antonio Valencia and Manchester City’s Vincent Kompany have started five and six league games respectively. Ten clubs have had the same starting captain for 60 per cent or more of their league games this season. Only three captains (Crystal Palace’s Luka Milivojevic, Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Conor Coady, and Chelsea stand-in Cesar Azpilicueta) have played every game; while seven clubs (Arsenal, Everton, Fulham, Manchester City, Manchester United, Newcastle and Southampton) have had four or more captains. All of which begs a question: is the ever-present, totemic captain an endangered species? And does it matter?
The first thing to point out is that there does not appear to be an obvious correlation between consistency of captain and success based on the small sample of this Premier League season. City do not appear to have suffered for rotating the armband and although Wolves have been outstanding, neither Chelsea nor Palace are among this season’s notable overperformers.
In fact, it is easy to disparage the importance attached to captaincy as old-fashioned; a peculiarly English hang-up. When pundits – usually from the generations of retired former players – bemoan the lack of leaders in modern football, it feels like they are often harking back to that monolithic figure of English folklore: blood-soaked Terry Butcher, or captain-leader-legend John Terry, or Bryan Robson or Tony Adams shouting and pointing fingers. But Nigel Winterburn, who played under Adams at Arsenal, says that the presence of an old-school Captain Marvel in the ranks was not something he or his team-mates considered a particularly important factor in their success.
‘‘It didn’t give us anything extra,’’ Winterburn says. ‘‘I never really worried who was captain: it didn’t interest me.’’
When Winterburn moved to West Ham United, and the captaincy was less consistent, with Steve Lomas often out of the team, ‘‘I didn’t personally notice the difference,’’ he admits.
Is the lionisation of a single captain out of step with the reality of modern football then; a prehistoric obsession in an era of advanced analytics and player rotation? As Michael Cox pointed out in an excellent article for ESPN on Arsenal’s perceived lack of leaders in 2016, every generation thinks it had better leaders.
As early as 1938, Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman was lamenting: ‘‘Football today lacks the personalities of 20 or 30 years ago.’’ A lack of leadership is often a retrofitted criticism applied to underperforming teams, while teams that succeed despite lacking archetypal leaders escape censure.
However, it would be wrong to say that the idea of captaincy is something that is entirely incompatible with the analytical side of modern football. Few Football League clubs are more forwardthinking in their use of data than Brentford; you may have assumed, then, that their policy of rotating the captaincy under previous manager Dean Smith reflected a flippant attitude towards the significance of the armband. But you would be wrong. According to Smith – who wrote his Uefa Pro Licence dissertation on captaincy – internal statistics showed that Brentford’s players ran more and harder with the armband.
Smith sees rotating the captaincy as a way to empower players in a ‘‘modern society [that] creates followers, not leaders.’’ It is possible that the cult of the captain has seemingly declined in parallel with the rise of the cult of the coach. In his 2015 book about leadership, Manchester United legend Sir Alex Ferguson wrote of his conception of the captain as the player responsible for transmitting his instructions on the pitch. Think of Roy Keane shouting instructions and pointing teammates into place. But that was a different era, one in which there was more on-pitch improvisation, and before the advent of meticulous training-ground micromanagers such as Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, whose coaching depends in large part on intensively rehearsing movements and systems so that their team is never unsure what to do in any phase of the game.
It seems there has also been a change in the type of player considered for the captaincy. In the past, that office was usually the preserve of vocal, charismatic, defensive players. To use Eric Cantona’s epithet for Didier Deschamps, captaincy was a job for the ‘‘water-carrier’’.
But a new breed of captain has begun to emerge. This season, Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil, David Silva at City and Fulham’s Tom Cairney have worn the armband in the Premier League; Lionel Messi captains Barcelona; and Eden Hazard and Neymar captain their national teams. These are all attacking players, most of the individualistic variety, none especially loud.
But Winterburn, who was captained by Joe Cole in his final season at West Ham, believes they can do the job. ‘‘You don’t always need vocal captains,’’ he says. ‘‘You can lead by example as a creative player. If the likes of Hazard or Silva are picked as captains, for me that’s a sign that those guys should be able to inspire the team.’’
Winterburn still prefers the single-captain model – he believes Adams would have been a galvanising captain of some recent, rudderless Arsenal sides. But, he adds, ‘‘There should be 11 captains out there.’’
It seems that is the way we are heading but by rotating the captaincy, are you multiplying leadership or spreading it more thinly?
Therein lies the paradox: with 59 players and counting having skippered a Premier League team this season, is captaincy in decline? Or is it in fashion?
THE TIMES, LONDON