Leadership Skills of Football Managers

Sir Alex Ferguson is considered to be the most successful manager in English football and certainly the most legendary and successful modern football manager. His key characteristics are his steely determination and natural characteristic to lead and find the best for his team. In a great interview, Ferguson talks about his youth and how it would consist of fighting and football in Glasgow.

His youth in Glasgow shows obvious signs of where he got his most significant characteristics and leadership and coaching skills. He was from a town on the docks and it was all about working hard and being amongst groups of men having to earn a wage for their household. He was a shop steward of a tool room when he was 21 and says that a natural leadership characteristic he felt he always had in him was to be decisive.

Arsene Wenger took English football forward when he joined Arsenal in the 90s. He was raised in a family pub in France and this allowed him to talk with people from many different walks of life, to observe the affects of that environment, such as how alcohol affected people and the general psychological affects of it. This awareness stayed with Wenger and he continually instills in his players the importance of nutrition and fitness.

This is the one aspect that made him stand out when he joined Arsenal. English football was behind the times before he came into the country and the game in this country was going through a transition into a more scientific era and he lead this with his insistence, particularly with the older Arsenal players, that they should take care of themselves. Many of the older players say he extended their careers by a few years and yet, when he first arrived, they told him they weren’t training hard enough! This was because his methods were more scientific and that they should be doing the right things instead of lots of things which weren’t providing a particularly large benefit to players.

Apparently a keen cyclist in his youth and student of psychology, Wenger also has an excellent ability to lead through his natural rapport with people. He has an ability to read how players are feeling and this may come from his days talking with the locals in the family pub and learning how different people behave. Wenger, a thinker on leadership, also places responsibility onto players and expects them to look at their performance objectively so that they are constantly improving.

The key with these men is that they are generally great leaders. Whether they were leading their teams or selling digital camera accessories or Thai curries they would be great at leadersup within these industries.