UPDATED: Thursday, 26 February – I admit that being a fan of professional American sports (you know the ones: Baseball, Football, Basketball, MLS (you try telling an American footballer – excluding kickers - his sport can’t have exclusive rights to the word “football”, and I’ll sign a multi-year contract with Luton Town!) gives me a unique perspective in the relationship between the project team and the professional sport outfit. But that’s what made Lindsay Scott’s post earlier today about the Premiership Team = Project Team so dynamic and so befitting my love for sport: The concept of the programme manager (AKA Director of Football) that seems so new and Yankish is because, well, it is!
We, the fans of American sports franchises (sounds harsh and capitalistic, but we’ve grown immune), have essentially been at the peril of the programme manager (commonly known as the General Manager or occassionally, even Director of <Insert Appropriate Sport Title> Operations). These bastions of the front office can have power ultimately stripped away from them, or be given complete control of tema operations, thus affecting their true impact. Although theirs is a more stable profession than managerial/head coaching roles tend to be, the job has taken on that of the sporting wonk in recent years. Cost wary owners who make die in the smaller markets of the big leagues (essentially everyone outside of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Eastern Seabord cities like Washington, Boston and Philadelphia) have been dazzled by the cost-effective ways in which some general managers have been able to get results despite being outspent year after year. With top-notch evaluation skills, teams consisting of the best brains in the game, and an uncanny ability to spot the talent you need as opposed to what you want, cost-effective GMs are being snatched from other franchises left and right.
And with their proximity in seniority to the owner’s box, they also have a better grasp on the purse strings as well.
In general, if Mark Hughes were a baseball manager for Man City Maine Roaders, he would be used to the notion that the guys he has been given (the feuding Robinho and Craig Bellamy, for two), it would indeed be down to Hughes to be the field manager, the one who takes in all the chemicals of this often crazed lab experiment and try to end up screaming “It’s alive!” at the end of the season.
The chemicals provider would be his general manager. Someone else (Garry Cook, perhaps?). Whoever it is, it wouldn’t be Hughes’ responsibility.
This is not to say that the two-for-one idea hasn’t been tried. Or become en vogue, particularly in the NFL. Some franchises might own up and say, “You know what? He can manage them and be the general manager. Two for one.” It’s rare for the other two of the big three sports. And even the NFL has gotten away from it – even when the idea of two-for-one seemed to be the new way forward just a single decade ago. I feel former NFL coaching great Marty Schottenhemier said it best in the above linked article about the doomsday way of the two-for-one system: “The volume of data and problem solving and day-to-day coaching that’s involved in putting a football team together is so overwhelming that, to do it right, Einstein couldn’t process it all himself,” he said. “That’s why I’m firm in my belief that organizations [as opposed to individuals] win.”
While the NBA and Major League Baseball generally doesn’t go for the 2-for-1 route, one notable example from personal memory (granted it was before my time, but I devour sports books) is Whitey Herzog. More widely known for his work as a manager, mostly with the speedy St. Louis Cardinals in the 1980s, Herzog recounted in his autobiography “White Rat: My Life in Baseball” that as the team’s GM post was vacant in the early 1980s, solid players that were ripe for St. Louis’ plucking slipped through the cracks. Would-be Cardinals would not be Cardinals after all, and Herzog knew it had to be fixed somehow, so he assumed both roles in 1980.
Here’s the kicker: to close the 1980 season, Herzog handed over field managing duties to an assistant while he focused on the general manager responsibilities. He then retook responsibility for both roles for the 1981 and 1982 seasons, leading St. Louis to the World Series title in 1982 before giving up GM responsibilities for good. While the 2-for-1 style had produced a winner, the strain on Herzog may have taken a bigger toll: The Cardinals plummeted to a losing record in 1983 and were not competitive again until 1985. By then, however, with structures firmly in place, St. Louis had re-established themselves among the elite in Major League Baseball, and were one blown umpire’s decision away from winning a second World Series (yes, I’m a Cardinals fan. Yes, I’m bitter. Yes, I was four at the time. No, the validity of the controversial call is not up for debate!).
It traces back to the Schottenheimer quote: Organizations and defined hierarchies create winners. Take a look at these Wikipedia pages for MLB, the NBA and the NFL (advanced apologies for the lengths of the NFL list), and one thing is clear: though other titles such as Director of Player Personnel or Executive Vice President may adorn the GM office, none of these 92 purse-string holding and player-courting executives also holds down the role of head coach or manager.
So, if we are to take Lindsay model of programme manager/director = Director of/general manager, and project manager = head coach/manager, and apply it equally to America’s Big Three, it would seem that the project team would be even more pronounced and efficient on the other side of the Atlantic. That said, the best teams still win two-thirds (sometimes more) of the time, and the worst teams still lose two-thirds (or more) of the time. So it can’t always be rosy.
