Liverpool are winning the league. Does that mean managers don't matter?

Hey, sorry this one has been late, but I’m also working on another newsletter that should come out very soon after this!

How much do you rely on your manager?

I’m not talking about your team. I’m talking about you, at work, and your manager or boss (if you don’t have one, well I’m sorry but I’m not changing a perfectly good intro for you). How much is your performance and output dependent on your manager’s contributions? How much would you expect to get worse at your job without a top manager?

The answer, I’m guessing, is “not very much”. You put your contributions at work down to your own ability and application. I’m willing to bet that most footballers feel the same way.

Imagine you asked people in 2020, when Liverpool followed up a Champions League win the previous year with a Premier League title, about the single most factor in the side’s success. I’m pretty sure most football fans would have answered with a single name: Jürgen Klopp. In the popular imagination, he was the catalyst and driving force for everything positive at Anfield during his time in charge.

We’re now about ten months out from Klopp leaving Liverpool. Barring an utter catastrophe, the Reds will win the Premier League again this season. Other than all 28 minutes of Federico Chiesa’s time on the pitch, this has been the same team as last season. This is Klopp’s Liverpool managed by Arne Slot. But you would never know from looking at the results. That can’t help but make me wonder: did we overstate Klopp’s importance? Do managers not matter after all?

1. the claim that managers don’t matter

2. what slot has done at liverpool

3. some counter-arguments

It’s been a debate among the football nerds for as long as I can remember. “Managers’ influence in the game is much less than people believe”, John Muller claimed, somewhat provocatively, in his article consciously provoking the conversation. It’s just really hard to find clear, conclusive evidence in the data of football managers making a big difference. Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former Director of Research, is probably the most prestigious number cruncher to weigh in on the issue, and he takes the view in his book that “controlling for the quality of the players at his disposal, a good manager can add a few points per season […] about the same value as a good player brings”. This, he points out, matches how well coaches tend to get paid. Liverpool, for example, were paying Klopp about as much as they pay Mohamed Salah.

There’s an intuitive logic at play here, even if it goes against what everyone thinks. The most important factor in winning football matches, by far, is having better players than the opponent. It’s true when you’re playing in the park with your friends, therefore it may well be true in the Premier League. Everything else is marginal compared to this simple fact and, as talent has concentrated at the richest clubs, it should be even harder for managers to make a big impact.

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski go even further in their book Soccernomics. “The general obsession with managers”, they argue, “is a version of the great man theory of history, the idea that prominent individuals – Genghis Khan, or Napoleon – cause historic change. Academic historians binned this theory decades ago”. Personally speaking, I tend to be of the view in life that collective endeavour achieves more than brilliant individuals. Reframing successful football teams as the masterpiece of singularly brilliant artists like Pep Guardiola or Arrigo Sacchi is as seductive as it is, I suspect, wrong. And it probably lets a lot of managers get away with what we would otherwise consider abusive workplace behaviour.

It’s a really difficult thing to measure because manager performance has so many variables. Unai Emery is clearly a good manager even as it did not work out at Arsenal. Players won’t be suited to certain systems. Institutions won’t be suited to certain personalities. It’s much, much harder to judge what a good manager is supposed to do than, say, a good striker. Getting other people to do a thing well is a job much harder to quantify than simply doing the thing well.

So here we are with Slot. Liverpool have maintained Klopp era results with the same players, but does that mean the new boss hasn’t changed things? No, it certainly does not. The structure of the side has changed pretty significantly. It really looks like a 4-2-4 at times, with the wingers starting wider and the backbone of the side relying a lot on Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch as a double pivot. We’ve seen a lot of tactical tweaks over the season that Klopp would not make. I, broadly speaking, think that’s been a positive thing. After nine years, it’s natural that you might need to freshen things up a bit. Liverpool didn’t make a major signing over the summer so, without player turnover, the change had to come from elsewhere.

I don’t think it’s ultimately a huge deal. I think Rodri’s injury has cost Manchester City much more this season than anything Guardiola has done. I think the single most important job a manager can do is not mess it up. If players do not like a particular boss, or if some obviously brilliant names are being left out or obviously misused, that will hurt performance. When we see managers have a big impact quickly, it usually means two things: something weird is happening with finishing conversion rates, or the players hated the last boss and are delighted to get rid. I don’t think it almost ever means that the new manager is doing something miraculous.

So we know that the players determine success, but that raises another issue: where do they come from? In the old days in England, the manager signed the players. The great managers of English football in the 20th century were, more often than not, most renowned for signing the right names. That is the factor that best allowed them to achieve more than others. Good recruitment could be an even bigger edge back then because no one knew anything. You couldn’t pull up video and data from any league in the world. You couldn’t even pull it up for your own league, so you had to rely on old fashioned scouting and connections. Having a manager who was really good at separating the wheat from the chaff could be an absolutely huge edge back then.

Recruitment has been largely handed over to sporting directors while changing pretty drastically. There’s so much more information about a player to sift through. By far the biggest factor in “signing good players” today is, obviously, money. The more significant differentiating factor is arguably less about recognising good players from bad but finding the ones who will fit with the other pieces. If money determines the vast majority of how much a team can achieve, a harmonious culture and squad on and off the pitch probably makes up most of the rest. In that sense, the quality of the institution from top to bottom is much more important than the manager.

Klopp did have an impact in building Liverpool’s institutional culture and shaping just about everything they did. Guardiola is doing the same right now. But I’m willing to bet a decent amount of money that Slot won’t have that privilege. This team needs rebuilding, but that job will primarily fall to CEO of football Michael Edwards and sporting director Richard Hughes. Unless something dramatic changes, Slot will not get to dictate what the next Liverpool side looks like without Trent Alexander-Arnold and eventually other key stars.

I’m not saying Slot hasn’t done a good job. He had to deal with a group of players who could’ve been looking for an excuse to drop off and he’s managed to avoid it. But how much value is he adding here? How decisive has he been? I’m just not sure I can convince myself it’s a great deal.