LÖW SETS STANDARDS
Coaches at World Cup not among top earners
WHERE have all the good managers gone? If it seems an odd question to ask in this, the so-called era of the ‘supercoach’, then take a glance at the list of managers at this World Cup.
Modern football may be revelling in an unprecedented era of managerial heavyweights at club level – from Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho in England, to Massimiliano Allegri and Diego Simeone abroad – but the trend does not extend to the international arena.
Of the 32 managers jetting off to Russia this week, only a handful could be considered modern-day ‘Alisters’, the sort of coach who could hold genuine ambitions of landing a job at one of Europe’s elite clubs.
Germany’s Joachim Löw is among them, as is Jorge Sampaoli, the Argentina manager who guided Chile to the Copa America title in 2015.
An argument could be made for Tite, the Brazil coach who enjoyed remarkable success with Corinthians in South America, and perhaps also for France’s Didier Deschamps. Beyond that the pickings are unusually slim.
Once the pinnacle of football management, the international game has been rapidly reconfigured in recent years. As ever, money has played its part in this.
The best-paid coach at this year’s World Cup will be Löw, who reportedly earns about £3.31-million (R57.9million) each year, followed by Deschamps (£3.02-million, or R52.8-million) and Spain’s Julen Lopetegui (£2.58-million, or R45.1-million).
To put this into context, Pep Guardiola’s new Manchester City contract is said to be worth an annual £20-million (R350.1-million). Mauricio Pochettino’s will earn up to £8.5-million (R148.8-million) each year as part of his new deal at Tottenham Hotspur. Even Manuel Pellegrini, the new West Ham United manager, will earn more than double Löw’s salary after agreeing a £7-million-a-year (R122.-million) wage. Economically speaking, the peak years of a manager’s career are now best spent in club football.
This was not the case 10 years ago, when Fabio Capello’s £4-million (R70million) salary as England manager put him level with Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, and only marginally behind Jose Mourinho’s earning power at Chelsea.
The landscape of international management has therefore shifted. And with the world’s top managers proving, by and large, unattainable, the leading nations have recalibrated their sights. The overwhelming trend of this year’s tournament is that countries are, more than ever, appointing managers from within their own federations. The most obvious example is Gareth Southgate, who has progressed from the FA’s head of elite development to become the manager of England U21s and then the manager of the first team.
In Spain Lopetegui was hired to the first team after working with the U19s, U20s and U21s. The same has happened in South Korea, where Shin Tae-yong has been promoted from within, and in Senegal, where Aliou Cisse has jumped from the U23s to the senior team.
In total, 13 of the 32 managers in Russia have worked as either an assistant or a youth team coach at their country’s federation. In the 2014, 2010 and 2006 World Cups, there were only seven at each tournament.
There are obvious benefits to this, not least when it comes to continuity in styles and players. Southgate (who, with an annual salary of £1.5-million (R26.2-million), is also relatively cheap) has been able to seamlessly assimilate younger players such as Ruben Loftus-Cheek into the England senior team in part because he has worked with them before.
Managers who have already worked at international level also know, because they have experienced it first-hand, how to cope with the challenges of being with their group of players for just a few days at a time during the regular season.
Lopetegui, Southgate and the rest of this generation of groomed international managers will be hoping, if not expecting, to have a major impact this summer. In doing so, they would be further ushering in a new era of international specialists, and further widening the gap between countries and clubs. —