The Anatomy of Liverpool is Jonathan Wilson’s compelling account of the long and decorated history of Liverpool Football Club. It is framed in the context of ten of the club’s most important matches. I’ll return shortly with a closer look at what I learned from Wilson’s book.
However, today I want to address my comment from the February newsletter about how I borrowed a key idea from this book to comment on helmet football. The basic point was this – when there is a feeling that an organization is about to enter a period of decline, the manager usually leaves. The lesson plays out over and over again in the pages of this book as Wilson recounts the various circumstances surrounding the departures of Liverpool’s many decorated managers – Shankley, Paisley, Fagan, Dalglish, Houllier, and Benitez. Though the circumstances were unique for each manager, the underlying lesson was the same – when the outlook was turning negative, the manager would need to move on in order for the club to be able to do well again (1).
As Wilson demonstrates time and again in his book, a manager tends to leave because of a structural reason. One common reason is when ownership loses confidence in the manager. Another reason is when ownership suspects the players no longer believe in the manager. Sometimes, a manager will resign before the negative effect of bad ownership or unskilled players becomes conflated with the manager’s ability (which would harm the manager's reputation in the open market). In any event, when the manager goes, it is a sign that a unified team with a common goal is fragmenting into an unstable alliance of independent contractors.
The subtle aspects of the lesson came from Liverpool’s highest profile resignations – those of Bill Shankley and Kenny Dalglish. On the outside, everything appeared to be going great. But for different reasons, each manager was burnt out by the demands of the role. When they resigned, they felt they no longer had anything to offer the club. The structural problem underlying the success at the club was Liverpool’s inability to support a manager at the peak of the profession. A team that cannot support a top manager is second-rate in a similar way to a team that cannot afford to pay a top player – eventually, the top talent finds a club that can support him and his demands (2).
I thought about these many lessons when I read January’s infamous ESPN piece prophesying the imminent end of the New England Patriots’s helmet football dynasty. Each sign described by the article was compelling as a stand-alone thought. Is Brady... too old? Is Kraft meddling... too much? However, the article didn’t really get to the underlying truth about organizational decline – if the Patriots indeed were falling apart, the man to watch was the head coach, Bill Belichick (the equivalent of a soccer team’s manager). The only relevant sign of decline would manifest through him and only him, not because of the specific details or dynamics as it pertained to the New England Patriots in October or December or February, but because managerial flight is the universal symptom of a crumbling organization.
Good managers succeed if they are supported with resources and allowed to do their jobs in the way they see fit. If this doesn’t happen, they either leave preemptively or are forced out when the inevitable disagreements and conflicts are no longer tolerated by ownership. There is no reason why the Patriots are some special exception to this rule. Therefore, I am not going to entertain any thought about their decline until I start to hear real whispers that Belichick is possibly on the way out.
Footnotes / actually, now that you say so…
1. This actually oversimplifies it, but still…
In these circumstances, what is the club supposed to do, fire itself? Or perhaps sell all twenty-five or so first team players? An oversimplified analysis to this problem simply acknowledges that since the manager is the easiest to sack, the manager always gets sacked first.
2. Oh, the what-ifs…
To be clear, these demands can be anything - wages, emotional support, etc. The difference between a top club and a club just off the top can be the ability to support unusual versions of these demands without causing those demands to upset the balance of the team.
Going back to the two Liverpool departures mentioned here, after the fact each man acknowledged how quickly he would have jumped at the chance to return to the position he had just vacated. It’s a nice thought and creates some great what-if hypothetical scenarios. But my guess is that the club’s poor underlying infrastructure would have led once more to burnout. If this didn’t turn out to be the case, another possibility is that the managers would have seen a drop in performance as they reigned in their effort in order to prevent burnout from returning.
