Frank Lampard was minutes into his new job as Derby County manager when the news came through that a vacancy had just cropped up at Real Madrid. “He certainly quit at a good time,” Lampard said, thinking on his feet. “I don’t know Zinedine Zidane’s plans but he will want a holiday, I’m guessing, before he does anything else. You can’t beat that for going out at the top, though. Maybe that’s a lesson to us all.”
First you have to reach the top, of course, and not that many managers do. Lampard was careful not to promise promotion to the Premier League in his first season in charge, but it is no secret that is Derby’s fervent desire. The club’s seventh manager in three years knows perfectly well that nothing he has achieved in the game as a player will count for much if his side are off the pace three or four months into the season. Lampard has relatives with experience of management, his father, Frank, and uncle Harry Redknapp. Did they not warn him off this most insecure of careers? “Quite the opposite,” Lampard replied. “Maybe they are the ones who are mad.”
All managers are a little bit mad. Even though the job these days is hugely well-rewarded, you still need the combination of drive, megalomania and obsessive attention to detail that you always did to put yourself up for it. The theory used to be that when you reach the top, where you are in charge of a big club with the very best players, things would get slightly easier.
Arsène Wenger might dispute that but Zidane’s resignation five days after entering the history books with a third Champions League title in three seasons puts a whole new spotlight on the madness at the top end of the management game. To put what Zidane has just done into perspective, only two other managers have won the European Cup three times, and Bob Paisley did so towards the end of his career while Carlo Ancelotti had been a manager for 10 years by the time he completed his treble. Zidane has been in management for only three years. Each has ended in big silverware (even if this season was not quite as glittering on the domestic front) and he is now saying he has had enough.
From the sound of it he has had enough of Real Madrid, not necessarily of football management, though that is hardly the sort of ringing endorsement to make his eventual successor impatient to start work.
While the Real Madrid position has famously proved a poisoned chalice for even the best and most established managers – Ancelotti, José Mourinho, Vicente del Bosque and Fabio Capello have all been shown the door after varying degrees of success – the job description at the moment is particularly mind-boggling.
To do: catch up with Barcelona in the league; sort out the Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale situations, bringing in high-quality replacements if necessary; pursue Neymar; and reach the Champions League final as an absolute minimum, even if winning it three times in a row is not strictly necessary.
No wonder Chelsea’s unhappy Antonio Conte was instantly linked with the task. Mauricio Pochettino might be the more rational, long-sighted solution, but Real are not exactly famous for being rational and long-sighted. The Tottenham manager must think long and hard about whether it would be wise to trade his current stability for the insanely pressurized though undoubtedly alluring role at Madrid, though Conte could much more easily make the jump from one madhouse to another.
For a start he seems to be in need of a new job anyway, with Chelsea going so far as haggling over the price of importing Maurizio Sarri from Naples as a replacement, and for another his angry ant persona would fit right in at the Bernabéu, whereas the steady and reliable Pochettino might end up being treated like Rafa Benítez.
News that Roman Abramovich has pulled the plug on Chelsea’s proposed £1bn stadium, apparently in protest at off-handed treatment over a visa renewal, is being interpreted as the beginning of the end of the financial muscle the club has enjoyed over the last 15 years.
Conte would doubtless argue that the beginning of the end was actually about a year ago, just after Chelsea had won the title, though if Abramovich is suddenly being careful about spending nothing can be taken for granted. Conte might have to see out the last year of his contract, for instance, instead of picking up an expected £9m in compensation, while Abramovich must also be wondering, just like everybody else, how on earth Napoli can demand any sort of compensation for a coach they have already removed and replaced.
No wonder Benítez, who has worked for both Real Madrid and Chelsea, is content to keep a low profile at Newcastle. Mike Ashley is no one’s idea of a dream owner, yet in the mad, mad world of top-level management there are plenty worse.
One can only wish Lampard the best of luck at the club where a lot of the madness started. “Last of all, bottom of the heap, lowest of the low,” shouts the Derby chairman Sam Longson, giving a rundown on how a club is run just before dismissing the title-winning Brian Clough in David Peace’s The Damned United, “comes the one who in the end we can all do without. The effing manager.”
Lampard knows the story, has seen the film. “It’s a high-pressure job,” he said on becoming the newest recruit to the asylum. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
(The Guardian)
