The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders

From the post room to the board room, everyone thinks they can be the manager. But how do you manage outrageous talent? What do you do to inspire loyalty from your players? How do you turn around a team in crisis? What’s the best way to build long-term success? How can you lead calmly under pressure? The issues are the same whether you’re managing a Premier League football team or a FTSE 100 company. Here, for the first time, some 30 of the biggest names in football management reveal just what it takes. With their every decision, remark, skill, and success or failure under constant scrutiny from the media and the fans, these managers need to be the most adroit of leaders. In The Manager they explain their methods, give examples of lessons they’ve learned along the way, and describe the decisions they make and the leadership they provide. Each chapter tackles a key leadership issue for managers in any walk of life and, in their own words, shows how the experts deal with the challenges they face in an abnormally high-pressure environment. Offering valuable lessons for business leaders and fascinating behind-the-scenes insights for football fans, The Manager is an honest, accessible and unprecedented look at the day-to-day work of these high-profile characters and the world of top-level football management. Contents: A Piece of the Action (Roy Hodgson); The Art of One-on-One (Carlo Ancelotti); Behind the Scenes (Arsène Wenger); Building High-performing Teams (Sam Allardyce); The Field of Play (Roberto Mancini); Handling Outrageous Talent (José Mourinho); Pursuing a Career Under Pressure (Brendan Rodgers); Seeing the Bigger Picture (Harry Redknapp); Creating Sustained Success (Sir Alex Ferguson); Crisis Response and Turnaround (Walter Smith); Triumph and Despair (Mick McCarthy). Also featuring: Gerard Houllier, Tony Pulis, Martin O’Neill, Neil Warnock, Howard Wilkinson, Kevin Keegan, Dario Gradi, Andre Villas-Boas, David Moyes, Alex McLeish, Hope Powell, Martin Jol, Glenn Hoddle, Chris Hughton, David Platt, Paul Ince, and George Graham.

About the Author :
Author Mike Carson, a leading management consultant, working in partnership with The League Managers Association (LMA) has been able to access the LMA’s members, some of the biggest names in football.

Review :
Carson asks 30 of the biggest names in football management – including Jose Mourinho, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger – what it takes to succeed at the highest level. More than a “how-to guide”, its depth of shared knowledge is huge. **** Being manager of a football club has a lot in common with running a business in many other walks of life, and that is the starting point for this well constructed assessment of the post and how to succeed in it ... It contains a lot of thought-provoking ideas Talking to 30 top football managers about their careers was always going to unearth a trove of interesting material, and in that respect this book does not disappoint. By far its strongest point is those managers’ first-person recollections and observations A book that aims to dig deeper, including “behind-the-scenes” interviews with more than 30 managers, must be welcomed ... Carson does well to avoid the kinds of clichés that blight so many other books on football Mike Carson takes a different approach in his compelling examination of 30 managers, treating his subjects as savvy businessmen as much as sports gurus ... It’s impossible to interview such people and not come away with some peerless insights