PREMIER LEAGUE:It's time for some of these Premier League managers to cop on to themselves, writes ANDREW FIFIELD
THERE ARE lots of things about Premier League football which confuse me. The fact that David Moyes appears to be the only human being alive who does not need to blink; Steve Bruce’s nose; Fulham suddenly having 25,000 fans when, for most of my childhood, they had about three – as in three actual fans, not 3,000.
Most perplexing of all, however, is the way in which managers have suddenly become bona fide celebrities. This should never have been allowed to happen. Football managers always used to be surly, hairy types who would rather saw through their own nasal septum with a rusty butter knife rather than dive head-first into the froth and nonsense of celebrity culture; now, it seems they are almost as likely to be photographed stumbling out of some ghastly Essex wine bar as one of their players.
And do not underestimate just how endemic this problem is. The other day, I was talking to a manager who once enjoyed a night out in London with Alan Pardew (I know, the mind boggles), just after he had been sacked by West Ham. Apparently, the pair were eventually forced to abandon the excursion as they could barely walk 10 yards without being assailed by another snap-happy buffoon wielding a camera-phone. And this is Alan Pardew we’re talking about: we can only imagine the kind of hysteria which would have been greeted by the sight of Jose Mourinho swanning into Chinawhite.
Mourinho, it must be said, is the man largely to blame for this noxious trend. The Portuguese has always seen himself as the star turn and the decision he took, while at Chelsea, to star in a series of adverts for a mobile phone company, which cast him as a James Bond/Jason Bourne hybrid leaping from building to building after taking a few sneaky shots of some hitherto undiscovered starlet, should probably be viewed as some sort of cultural tipping point – football’s answer to Bono handing Pope John Paul II his sun-glasses, or Noel Gallagher giving Tony Blair advice on foreign policy.
But Mourinho was a special case. Not only was he a celebrity trapped in a football manager’s body (that haircut, those eyes . . .), he was also smart enough never to allow his self-bestowed star status to infiltrate the dressing room. With his players, he was humbleness personified.
He also had the achievements to back up his self-regard. The problem for the current crop of coaches desperate to be inked on a guest list is, quite simply, that they do not. Pardew thought that winning an FA Cup runner’s-up medal was reason enough to treat himself to a new Ferrari at West Ham, while Phil Brown would gladly have paid for a giant chocolate statue of himself to be erected in Hull city centre after leading them to the Premier League, if only so he could spend his free time licking his own face. By the time both men realised the only people who believed in their publicity were themselves, it was too late.
There is a salient point here: that managers determined to act like one of the glitterati must also be prepared to accept all the fickle foibles of the celebrity circuit, where A-listers become Z-listers in the time it takes to say something inappropriate to Lily Allen. So it is that Pardew is now reacquainting himself with the grubbier aspects of a coach’s existence at Southampton in League One, while heaven only knows where Brown will end up once the axe finally falls at the KC Stadium.
For those baffled by how such an existence could ever be in the slightest bit appealing, it was refreshing to see Carlo Ancelotti and Alex Ferguson – two managers who are perhaps as far removed from celebrity culture as it’s possible to be – huffing and puffing on the sidelines at Stamford Bridge yesterday.
Ferguson’s suspicion of all things starry-eyed is notorious, of course, stretching back to the day he first laid eyes on one Victoria Adams, while Ancelotti – the doughty water-carrier in the famously ego-riddled Milan team of the late 1980s – is as grounded and pretence-free as one would expect from someone who still belongs to the Pumpkin-Growing Club in his native village of Reggiolo.
It will be some time before either the Chelsea or Manchester United manager is asked to throw a smouldering look into the camera or unbutton their shirt to just below the navel all in the name of a new aftershave.
But it’s safe to assume the trail left by their stardust will stretch much further into the ether than that sprinkled by Alan Pardew, Phil Brown or, yes, even Jose Mourinho.
