THERE are 12,796,346 managers in the world.
Four of them are very, very good. And of this illustrious quartet one of them is retired. Of the rest, 12,796,321 are okay and 2001 are really awful.
This statistic, verified after I fitted the wee motors in my heid with catalytic converters, shows that there is the possibility of a football manager in the middle category to do something outstanding.
But to be great the trick is to do it year after year at club after club. This why the first category only has four members. Members of the latter category create mayhem year after year at club after club but this rarely has an impact on their long-term employment.
This why the case of Jose Mourinho is so intriguing to all those who coach teams, whether they be the boys' club or the Sunday league side. Jose is one of the four. He wins everywhere, though in the spirit of innate perversity he managed to be a comparative dud in his last year at Real Madrid.
The Sunday League/boys' club/ five-a-side supremo brigade do not believe they could be the next Mourinho, they know it. Jose, after all, was as good at football as Nick Clegg is at sticking to promises.
Every wannabe coach thus knows that his football background is irrelevant. It does not matter that he lumbered around sodden pitches committing sodding atrocities for 10 years. It does not matter that his football badges came from the inside of cereal boxes. It does not disturb him that his tactical knowledge came from a musty cassette of Andy Gray's Boot Room.
He just knows he could do a job at, say, Liverpool. He believes that one day a director from Anfield will be travelling around the back pitches of Glasgow and suddenly stop to exclaim: "Hey, that centre-half is so obese he is playing Sumo football! Hey, the manager could rent out that back four as a bouncy castle!
"Hey, they are treating the ball with such brutality that the referee has just called social services! But, hey, this coach can set a team out and I love his ethos! He is coming back to Liverpool with me."
It sounds as implausible as Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but that happened.
And, in principle, it is how managers are recruited at the very top level. A board is convinced of a relatively unproven coach's potential and backs him to succeed. Fot at least three weeks.
The great managers - a Mourinho, a Ferguson - can over-achieve, winning European trophies with Porto and Aberdeen respectively. But they also have the ability simply to achieve, that is take a great club and make it do what a great club should do: win and win and win some more.
The mass of managers are condemned to prosper or triumph at the whim of fate. They can impose systems, talk about projects and even chunter on about the group, as if the back four have just been renamed the Beatles (the signature tune at Liverpool should be Help!).
There is a simple truth that is becoming more and more obvious at the top level. The vast majority of managers are dependent on a star player for their reputation.
For example Brendan Rogers + Luis Suarez = the oft-expressed sentiment that the manager was a genius. Brendan Rogers - Suarez = not so much a managerial genius. Similarly, Harry Redknapp + Gareth Bale = say what you like about 'Arry but he knows how to put out an entertaining team. Redknapp - Bale = 'Arry hasn't got a clue; he thinks tactics is a time bomb.
The top guys bend both players and circumstance to their will. Juergen Klopp loses such as Robert Lewandowski and has a blip in the Bundesliga but forges on in the Champions League. Fergie wins titles without Ronaldo and with teams immediately decreed past it, especially if they have just won the title by 11 points. Pep Guardiola has a poor season when winning just the Bundesliga and German Cup. Another candidate for the very top bracket - Diego Simeone - comes within seconds of winning a Champions League with the second biggest team in a city.
They are not in thrall to one player. They believe their future lies within them. They know they can not control the ball on the park, the ref with the whistle or even the player with the attitude. They accept this, knowing they can prevail.
It is what life has taught them. Just ask the other 12,796,342.
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