Football Food For Thought / Gary Boswell / 16 December 2010 / 6

The stories of goalkeepers becoming successful managers are far and few between. Strange coincidence or are there deep psychological explanations? Gary Boswell investigates.

Name five goalkeepers who have made the transition into successful football managers. The question that stumped doyens of the UK Pub Quiz League - The Eagle and Child Eggheads. They managed Dino Zoff who won the UEFA Cup with Juventus in 1990 and was of course only denied Euro 2000 success in the dying seconds of the final against France.

They also got Raymond Goethals who led Marseille to European Cup glory in 1993. Walter Zenga of Steua Bucharest and Red Star Belgrade fame got them a third tick in the box but they then fell foul of fourth choice Neville Southall on the technicality of the word 'successful'! One game in charge of the Welsh national team (lost 2-0 to Denmark on 9th June 1999) does not apparently constitute success. The aggrieved Eggheads lost their appeal and we never got to hear who their fifth candidate would be.

We racked our brains here at betting.betfair.com and Pacman gets the credit for coming up with current Twente manager Michel Preud'homme who won the Belgian league First Division with Standard Liege in 07-08 and the Belgian Cup with Gent in 09-10. You can back Twente at [60.0] with Betfair to win the Europa League after their third place in Tottenham's Champions League group qualifies them for the next phase. Goalkeepers as managers on the continent is less of an issue it would seem.
Successful goalkeeping managers in UK football is a rarity -arguably never happened. England stopper Tim Flowers is giving it a go at BSN relegation contenders Stafford Rangers. Record so far: seven games, seven defeats. Looks like he's going to conform to type!

Scottish keeper Bryan Gunn looked to be about to break the mould when he took over at Norwich and led them to a 4-0 win over Barnsley. The infamous 1-7 start of the season defeat to Colchester saw the end of his short tenure. Twenty one games and ten defeats with a 28.57% win ratio. Not good enough. Gunn took the hint and is now a director of business development for a Great Yarmouth based digital phone company. Par for the course in UK football.

So what is it that marks out the psychology of goalkeepers and makes them rare candidates for success in football management? David James is on the case. Currently doing his coaching badges, he has been told by backroom staff that he must become good at understanding his strengths and weaknesses and learn to delegate. Tough lesson for keepers that. Years of solitary control and detachment from the team ethic. What Peter Schmeichel called being 'one on one. Me against the strikers. More like being tennis players than team players. Solitary combat.' You can see how that doesn't bode well for man management! ' I'd be good at bawling them out in the dressing room half time when they've played like a bunch of pandas but how the heaven am I going to teach them to dribble?'

It's a fair point. James says that football for goalkeepers is very black and white. 'Whereas an outfield player can make a bad pass and expect to get covered (unless he plays for England perhaps?), a goalkeeper has no margin for error. He must learn to become very singleminded to succeed.' Eleven of the 20 Premier League reading Star ambassadors for the current Library Literacy programme are goalkeepers. Robert Green lists his favourite book as Homer's Iliad.He also identifies with the plays of Albert Camus who was himself a goalkeeper for his University team. More evidence that goalkeepers are perhaps a breed apart.

No hope for James and Flowers then in UK football? Neville Southall's eccentric career as manager of Dover and Margate would suggest not. Jock Wallace did ok for a while for Rangers in the Seventies but Psychology Today's recent study shows goalkeepers to have highly developed pre-frontal cortex. Makes them good at tunnel vision and concentration and also presumably gives them an edge in penalty shoot outs against strikers with poorly formed pre-frontal cortex who just hit and hope! Not going to make them good in the man management/delegation stakes though. Not here in the UK at any rate, where perhaps we are also more likely to treat things in a black and white way.

Jose Mourinho's Dad was a goalie. Perhaps there lies an answer. Five successful football managers whose fathers were goalkeepers? Where are those Eggheads when you need them?

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1. Simon Rowlands | 16 December 2010

   I think you are on to something here.

   Another literary great who was a decent goalkeeper (while at Cambridge University) was Vladimir Nabokov, a person whose preference for individualism over collectivism was legendary.

   He would surely have been an abject failure at football management had he tried it. But, fortunately for the rest of us, he stuck to writing works of timeless beauty in a number of different languages instead.

   I ended up as a 5-a-side goalkeeper (via the well-trodden route of nippy goalscorer, attacking midfielder, holding midfielder then pedestrian defender) and have heard it said that I should not be allowed near management of any form.....

   Simon

2. Dave | 16 December 2010

   Peter Taylor was a goalkeeper and a very important assistant manager to Brian Clough.

3. Justin Bryant | 16 December 2010

   Nice thoughts, but you've ignored the simple maths. There are 10 or more outfield players for each goalkeeper, so naturally there will be far fewer goalkeepers represented in management. Beyond that, the specialist nature of the position means that most keepers who go into coaching become goalkeeper coaches.

   There have been some successes in South America, too. 86 World Cup winning keeper Nery Pumpido won the Copa Libertadores as manager in 1990.

4. James Pacheco | 16 December 2010

   Justin, your second point is a very valid one but the maths still doesn't 'add up' as regards the first one.

   I'm sure you could name 150-200 managers who were outfield players if you thought about it for long enough but I think we'd all struggle to come up with 15-20 who were goalkeepers. In other words, the number of managers who were former goalkeepers is well below 10%.

5. Mike Norman | 17 December 2010

   What about Bruce Arena? DC United were extremely successful under him, winning at least two MLS Championships. He also guided the USA to the QF's of the 2002 World Cup.

   There is another reason why goalkeepers possibly don't become successful managers, and that's because they don't go into management until a much later age because of their longer playing career. Just a thought.

6. Will | 17 December 2010

   I suspect it is down to maths, although the sums involved are not quite as simple as you'd think.

   Imagine a team that's sacked its manager and is looking to replace him with one of its players. They have a choice of ten outfield players, or their keeper. If they were to pick randomly you'd expect it to be the keeper just over nine per cent of the time.

   However, as we all know football is a cut throat business and failure is punished. In this case, the manager has a 50/50 chance of failing in his first season and never being offered another job in football. Taking this into account, the chances of a goalkeeper being appointed and staying in the job for a season are 4.5 per cent. An outfield player has around a 46 per cent chance of being in the job at the end of the season. Obviously, the chances of a goalkeeper remaining in football management grow slimmer as the seasons pass.

   Clearly these are aproximate figures only, but the lack of goalkeepers turned managers seems to be down to the fact they are outnumbered on the pitch and that so many managers in general fail early in their careers.

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