It is noticeable that Sven Goran Eriksson is invariably not considered for the top 25-50 or so positions. Not by journalists, not by the public (internet geeks) and maybe also not by peers. Most peers agree that club manager/executives have more control than part-time national team variants. Therefore there are also many more 'great' club managers who have done decently well as national team coach, than vice versa. Furthermore, coaches with a knack for tournaments have more control over two-legged affairs than over one game. Eriksson has an excellent record in this respect. In 13 seasons in Europe he played 5 finals, with three different teams and three different countries (Goteborg, Benfica, Lazio - all of them were a noticeable improvement and above their usual level). He let Goteborg play some (fairly) good football as well. Add to this a semi final with Sampdoria in his only try. There are very few managers with a (remotely) comparable track record. In the Champions League era Mourinho is king of semi finals. He has 8 in 13 tries.
France Football this week: The criteria were: trophies won, influence on the game, their personality and how it has influenced coaches who followed. Bold claim: Sacchi is too high.
Does this work? Top 50 Managers | France Football’s full classification of the top 50 managers of all time. pic.twitter.com/WjpNWGPgRJ— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness) March 18, 2019
It does for me, thanks. It's an interesting list. At an initial glance, I agree on Sacchi. Ancelotti ahead of Mourinho doesn't make sense in my mind, although I can understand an argument for it, & Simeone seems way too high. Putting him ahead of someone like Del Bosque, who won a Champions League, European Championship & World Cup seems extremely odd. Almost criminal actually.
Not sure what Rijkaard is doing on this list either, especially in front of someone like Otto Rehhagel. If he continued the trajectory his career was on... sure. But Rehhagel not only achieved arguably the greatest underdog win in international football history, he won the Bundesliga with a newly-promoted side in Kaiserslautern. He deserves to be higher at the very least, IMO. Guardiola too high for me as well. His lack of success in the Champions League outside of Barcelona should weigh very heavily. Interesting but a suspect list.
Not sure about the order, pretty sure about the exclusions: -Herrera = Suárez Miramontes -Michels = Johan Cruijff, even partly in 88 -Rocco = Rivera -Guardiola = Messi -Shankly = Paisley Inclusions: Ernst Happel, Bob Paisley, Udo Latek, Sir Chewing Gum, Diego Simeone, Franz Beckenbauer, Mou, Carlos Bianchi, Roberto Scarone, Vicente Del Bosque, Vittorio Pozzo, Johan Cruijff, Carlos Bianchi, Osvaldo Zubeldía, Bela Guttmann, Carlos Alberto Parreira, Zinedine Zidane, Felipe Scolari, Bora Milutinović
France Football bases it on: Results gained/titles; legacy; personality; duration and impact of the career 1. Rinus Michels 2. Alex Ferguson (Schotland) 3. Arrigo Sacchi (Italië) 4. Johan Cruijff 5. Pep Guardiola (Spanje) 6. Valeri Lobanovski (Sovjet-Unie/Oekraïne) 7. Helenio Herrera (Argentinië/Frankrijk) 8. Carlo Ancelotti (Italië) 9. Ernst Happel (Oostenrijk) 10. Bil Shankly (Schotland) 11. Matt Busby (Schotland) 12. Giovanni Trapattoni (Italië) 13. José Mourinho (Portugal) 14. Miguel Munoz (Spanje) 15. Brian Clough (Engeland) 16. Marcello Lippi (Italië) 17. Nereo Rocco (Italië) 18. Louis van Gaal 19. Ottmar Hitzfeld (Duitsland) 20. Bela Guttman (Hongarije/Oostenrijk) 21. Fabio Capello (Italië) 22. Zinédine Zidane (Frankrijk) 23. Viktor Maslov (Sovjet-Unie) 24. Herbert Chapman (Engeland) 25. Jupp Heynckes (Duitsland) 26. Bob Paisley (Engeland) 27. Jürgen Klopp (Duitsland) 28. Albert Batteux (Frankrijk) 29. Guus Hiddink 30. Udo Lattek (Duitsland) 31. Diego Simeone (Argentinië) 32. Arsène Wenger (Frankrijk) 33. Vicente Del Bosque (Spanje) 34. Jock Stein (Schotland) 35. Tele Santana (Brazilië) 36. Vic Buckingham (Engeland) 37. Rafael Benitez (Spanje) 38. Hennes Weisweiler (Duitsland) 39. Bobby Robson (Engeland) 40. Dettmar Cramer (Duitsland) 41. Mircea Lucescu (Roemenië) 42. Tomislav Ivic (Joegoslavië/Kroatië) 43. Stefan Kovacs (Roemenië) 44. Luis Aragones (Spanje) 45. Frank Rijkaard 46. Otto Rehhagel (Duitsland) 47. Raymond Goethals (België) 48. Marcelo Bielsa (Argentinië) 49. Antonio Conte (Italië) 50. Jean-Claude Suaudeau (Frankrijk) Your opinion on this ranking please.
Yes I'm looking whether I can access/buy digitally the individual issue somewhere and read their reasoning.
Is it so bold? He was such a failure outside of Milan. The failures don't wipe out the influence he had on the game with Milan, but I wouldn't say the Milan tenure alone is worth a top 3 spot. This was another one of those completely random lists. Where are all the pre-60s guys? Pozzo and 2 WCs not good enough to hang with Frank Rijkaard? Ok, it makes sense to not include all the old-timers because their role was so different to the modern manager, I thought, but then there's one token Herbie Chapman so they can say "Look! All-time!" Haha, speaking of random lists, what was this? A collection of coaches whose work you wanted to undermine? Helenio Herrera, the first modern manager who micromanaged everything about his team, was just a jacket on Luis Suarez? Guardiola=Messi, but Zidane=Zidane? Gee, I wonder which side of the fence you stand on?
I have read the whole thing now. They only consider coaches with (also) a convincing club career. So that is the problem of Pozzo. That this collection has some weak points is one thing (funnily they themselves mention Sacchi was only great for two or three years) but that people criticize without reading and seeing the logic is another. Maybe I will post the whole thing or at least the top five.
Wow, I didn't even notice Klopp embedded in there as well. Klopp ahead of Del Bosque? Ahead of Wenger? You can literally count the amount of Klopp's trophies on a single hand.
Maybe Branko Zebec and Gyula Lorant could have been included. They were instrumental in bringing modern football tactics to German football in the 1960s and 1970s (early advocates of zonal systems and were really successful in teaching and applying these ideas at a time when man-marking was ruling and zonal systems were considered too risky and 'foreign' in Germany). They didn't coach really big clubs, though, and thus their trophy exploits were not impressive. But as football minds I rate them higher than most famous German managers at that time, like Lattek, Weisweiler or Schön.
That’s too nuanced for this list. Looks like it was created by a teenager. Each time I take a look at it I find something crazy. Bielsa has no business on that list, much less right next to a coach like Rehhagel.
If one takes a look at the list and use the impact a coach had on the game (how it was played for years by enough clubs/national teams) the number of coaches quickly shrinks.
So as a start for a more structured debate, criticism or thoughts here the introduction: --------------- THE 50 BEST COACHES IN HISTORY Text Thierry Marchand and Patrick Urbini FF dives in the past and evaluated the present to lend its list of the 50 technicians who marked the history of the game. Naming the 50 coaches who made or make the football story is not easy. Classify them even less. This hierarchy is necessarily subjective, even if we have taken into account criteria that were not. Among these, the two principal remain the track record and the trace left on the game by these technicians of clubs, and only of clubs, since we have arbitrarily chosen not to amalgamate those who work daily in a structure which gathers in permanence and the others, the breeders, whose work is evaluated in the field only ten times a year and whose influence on the game is necessarily less haunting. No Beckenbauer, therefore, neither Deschamps, Platini, Maradona, and even Menotti, Bilardo or Zagallo, whose club stamp has been less pregnant than their passage in the selections they have trained. History and influence on the game, but also the personality of the coach or his proven descendants were so many references that allowed us to identify a gradation, if not an authority, in which Rinus Michels emerged victorious. Why Michels? Because more than all the others, the Dutch left a claw called "total football" that marked the spirits and influenced the game and its history. A brand, in every sense of the term, that lasts beyond the years and his followers are Cruyff, Van Gaal or Guardiola, to speak only of those who appear in the top twenty of our ranking. Michels had a stature and unmatched commanding stature. He won almost everywhere he went, including abroad and even with the Dutch national team. It was this consistency that prevailed against the dazzling record of a Ferguson, his style less impacting on the history of the game, and the tactical genius of a Sacchi, whose brilliance at the box office lasted only three years. That of Michels, it has spread over more than two decades. Better, it is eternal. Criteria: palmares and influence on the game, but also personality or attested descendance. ARCHITECT He created a philosophy, that of total football, which inspired several generations of coaching, from Cruyff to Guardiola passing through Rijkaard and Van Gaal 1 Rinus MICHELS (Netherlands, 1960-1992) COURSE: JOS, DWS, Ajax, Barcelona, Netherlands, Ajax, Barcelona, Los Angeles Aztecs, FC Cologne, The Netherlands, Bayer Leverkusen, The Netherlands. HIS FACT OF ARMS: the first C1 of Ajax, in 1971. The memories of the meeting barely disappear over the years, so much the interview remains unforgettable. It was May 2000, in a large hotel in the suburbs of Amsterdam. For two hours, Rinus Michels had told us about him in general and his prodigal son in particular, this "total football" whose baptismal name, according to him, had been given by a journalist of France Football. One hundred and twenty fascinating minutes. It was said of the man who was called "the Sphinx," "the Bull," or "the General," that he was of a martial and austere nature. He was extremely obliging and extremely gentle. The exact opposite of the firm and psychologically exhausting technician who made life so difficult for Piet Keizer that he danced on the cloakroom table when he learned of his departure from Ajax in 1971. Michels had a key word: discipline. He founded his revolution on this sentence, which goes badly with the supposed liberty of such an upheaval. Bobby Haarms, who was one of his teammates when he was a player at Ajax before becoming his right arm on the bench of the same club, said of him that he was "an animal trainer, lined with a chess player". A spartan who slept in front of the hotel door during his travels to prevent his players from going out, and who deeply messed up the history of world football, including that of Ajax, a club he passed in six years of bottom of the classification on the roof of Europe, and the Dutch selection (final of the 1974 World Cup, victory at Euro 1988). A technician whose influence remains, twenty-seven years after his last match (in 1992 with the Oranje), considerable. HE LOVED BRAZIL OF THE 1960S Michels was a hybrid being, as inhuman in the performance of his duties as he was outside. At Ajax, his talks consisted of a few words, rather a huge punch on the table he punctuated with an exclamation: "Boom!" In a stadium or field, his players were first numbers, pawns he never called by name. "Hardware", in his words. Each issue had a role and obligations. The man had to correspond to a stereotype, applicable in the academies. When he arrived in Ajax in 1965, the gear in question had a certain quality. The "numbers" were Cruyff, Keizer or Swart. But Ajax was nothing and the Dutch football, which the national team had taken out of Euro 1964 by Luxembourg, even less than nothing. Former sports teacher, Michels introduced professionalism, and everything that goes with it. The training methods, the contribution of a physiotherapist, the order, the requirement, "the establishment of a collective mentality, that is to say, individual qualities in the service of a collective efficiency ", in his words. Then it was necessary to "use this spirit to develop the tactical line of the team, its collective maturity", as he explained it to us in May 2000 before saying: "The tactic establishes the coordination between the players, but movement must be associated with efficiency. " Michels loved Brazil in the early 1960s and his 4-2-4. He was for a long time his reference, before switching to this 4-3-3 which remains the true genetic fingerprint of Dutch football, in April 1970, after Ajax was out in the semifinals of the C3 by Arsenal and conceded the draw (3-3) to rival Feyenoord in the Championship. That's when total football really took off. Ajax, finalist of the C1 in 1969, was then a power that his opponents were trying to stem by massing in front of their goal. Michels encouraged his defenders and midfielders to go up a notch to create excess numbers. He asked them to swap positions, to create "a storm of movement" that would destabilize the opponent. The defender became an attacker and the attacker had to think about defending, except for Cruyff. Adjustment and coordination turned into capital concepts. No one was confined to his territory. A revolutionary idea from which emerged an equally vital concept: space. A flexible space. "We were talking about this all the time," remembers Barry Hulshoff, the central defender. A STRATEGIST, NOT AN IDEALIST For him, borders did not exist. They therefore had no reason to be. All that remained was a structured chaos, an organized tumult in which "all positions and combinations" had to be optimized. From then on, the collective animation will have to be a paradigm of fluidity. Naturally, another tactical development takes shape, that of the pressing, which the Dutch technician makes a double-edged sword. The pressing needs to be used to recover the ball in high position, to be transformed at once into an offensive instrument. For Michels, it's about "making the ball live as fast as possible". The physical abilities of a Neeskens ("a soldier, a kamikaze") and the tactical acuity of a Vasovic will be all vectors that will accelerate the explosion of this total football, of which Michels is the great author and the players the masters labor. His overall football is broadly equated with an offensive tactic in the extreme. It is to forget that this rigorist also had two obsessions, the result and the efficiency. While the defensive aspect of Michels' work is often overshadowed, it is essential to his success. The Dutchman was a strategist, not an idealist, much less a utopian, like Cruyff. He started coaching at the age of thirty-two at a small club in Amsterdam (JOS), after studying "the thought structure in the world of sport" (dixit Michels himself) for four years in an academy. "It was the perfect course to experiment with my ideas. To save Ajax from the relegation, promised to him when he arrived in 1965, Michels emphasized defense. But his revolutionary methods brought the nuisance to players who wanted to be offensive. All his training was done with the balloon, a rare thing at the time. Already, he insisted on the quality of play at the foot of a goalkeeper, which is why he pitched Jongbloed at the 1974 World Cup with the Netherlands. As a psychologist, he forced the players to criticize themselves publicly in the locker room, the diatribe for all, including Cruyff. Michels won almost everywhere in Barcelona, Cologne, with the Netherlands. But if his work continues, it is as much by its influence as its genius and its results. From Cruyff to Guardiola via Van Gaal, but also Rijkaard, his disciples, and the followers of his disciples, can not be counted, even today. Michels created a philosophy, that of Ajax, which influenced that of Barça, via Cruyff, and by ricochet, many others. Before leaving us, in May 2000, this enlightened missionary had entrusted us, as if to convince himself of his posterity: "Everything in football is a question of time and patience. " A parable... ------------------------------ So this already 'answers' some of the criticism raised here. Club career is a necessity, and trophies are not everything but they matter for practical application. Many trophies with (already) elite teams, or a few trophies with 'underdog teams' (Klopp) seem to be a minimal requirement. That said, almost every great manager has their weaknesses. Michels his strengths and weaknesses have been discussed a few times already (by me and by others). Notice in above text the (known) remark about the switch to 4-3-3, which was really pressed upon him by his own players. A clear weak point in this discussion is his relative lack of high finishes and success without his pupil, with euro 1988 as major exception, and even there some obvious qualifiers are possible in terms of improving the players and working daily with them (the opposite is not true: his pupil had a number of big successes as player and trainer without Michels). In terms of 'influencing' others we can see the case of Kovacs (and his later books and adventures), establishing 'La Masia' in 1979, or the Danes of the 1980s with which Michels had little to do, while the opposite examples are (imho) more scarce. That he had a close-ish relationship to Van Gaal and Dick Advocaat (less famous), yes I agree. Ferguson cs. to be provided next (and yes, also he has 'weaker' points like breaking the British transfer record three/four times in the early 00s, being the richest club in the world, while achieving little success with it).
I don't buy their rationale. They claim to put an emphasis on club career but, correct me if I'm wrong Puck (given you are Dutch), isn't Michels greatest achievement aligned moreso with the Dutch national team vs. his club career? Not to say his club career wasn't impressive (particularly given that it served as a foundation for his later NT success), but the Total Football of 1974 that took the Netherlands to a WC final and then ultimately winning the EC in 1988 and giving the Netherlands their only title should eclipse his club achievements, no? If that is the case, I'm not sure how they can state that club career is such an emphasis while their #1 pick for GOAT is from someone whose greatest DIRECT impact was with a national team. I understand their influence argument via Cruyff, Guardiola, etc. but the point still stands. And there isn't any argument that they can make for Klopp being so high on that list. His greatest achievement is a Bundesliga title with Borussia Dortmund. In Germany, Bayern is Bayern but let's not kid ourselves, Dortmund after Bayern is also in a relative class of their own. I fail to see how his achievements surpass even someone like Benitez. If Dortmund is an underdog in Germany, then Valencia even moreso, where Benitez won two La Ligas. And there's the little detail of Benitez winning the Champions League with Liverpool. That was an underdog story, and completely surpasses anything Klopp has come close to. Rehaggel wins Bundesligas with Werder Bremen and then takes Kaiserslautern from the second division to an immediate Bundesliga victory. In addition to his unrivaled national team success with Euro 2004, he also won a European Cup Winners Cup. IMO, Klopp is an egregious placement on that list. There's other instances worth calling out but that one is laughable. Recency bias can't even come close to explaining it.
I also believe Mourinho's recent career period unfairly hampered his ranking. His victory with Porto in the CL could very well be the last time a club from outside the Top 4/5 leagues becomes champions of Europe. That's a serious achievement.
Well, I'm not his greatest fan or believer. It is better to ask the people who are on his side in the "who was the principal brain" discussion. Apart from that it helps to play with a 'super player' (or two different generational greats during his principal achievements?), leading to rhetorical questions and maybe false comparisons as "do we say George Martin made The Beatles to play guitar", I also think you can link Cruijff to way more EC/CL wins and way more Ballon d'Or winners, way more improvements of players whenever his face pops up (as Figo et al. will testify), than Michels. Not to forget Michels did not win a major club trophy for two different clubs. Another flaw people make is to think of a small stream and small lineage, while the true 'influencers' reach out or have a finger in many streams (Kovacs, the Danes etc.). A network analysis (this post) is in that respect an insightful tool rather than a singular lineage. In terms of Guardiola, and I'd argue it is better to do it more structured and when his name pops up, if I'm not mistaken he has now the all-time highest win percentage in La Liga (by a mile), Bundesliga and Premier League (that it's possible to put this in a sobering context, I agree). That puts down some big parameters.
I don't like your presumption. But I kindly ask you to show what Herrera has accomplished without Suárez and how much significance it holds in comparison to all the other managers.
It was pretty clear from the list NT-achievements were either ignored or devalued. I'm weird in the sense I think a top 50 greatest managers should take into account every manager. I can accept their reasoning, but in that case the list should be titled greatest club managers. And of course as Benficafan points out, they immediately mess up their own criteria by going on about Michels' NT-achievements. Which also seems to work against their argument that a NT-manager can't impose his vision or influence the game properly, or whatever it is they're saying. But enough of that. Restricting the list to club managers only, who's missing? I would include long ball guru Stan Cullis.
The problem with your list is that you arbitrarily picked a group of managers who you apparently wanted to denigrate for having a star player on their side, then suggested the inclusion of other managers who also worked with similar world class players. So now we're ignoring managers who only won because of the players they had at their disposal? Uhh, how are we going to make the list again?