Southgate, Frank, Rosenior and the LinkedIn-isation of football man-age-ment

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the changing role of football bosses.

Are they manager or head coaches? Are they, in fact, ageing men or merely coaching heads? Is there any difference? Does any of it matter?

What has definitely happened is a final, decisive and long-inevitable move towards the full LinkedIn-isation of whatever the job is called at the Premier League level.

We’re not surprised it’s happened. We’re surprised it’s taken this long and has occurred at a time when Brendan Rodgers is not gainfully employed in the country to deploy his many pearls of inspirational wisdom.

The charge has been led on actual LinkedIn by Gareth Southgate, a man now sadly lost entirely to that world. Looking back, the waistcoat should probably have been an early clue.

He has gone the whole hog, of course, and is these days to be found right there spouting management-speak (head coach-speak?) guff of a hugely depressing nature as he leans harder and ever harder into his ‘Leader, Manager, Coach’ mantra.

Of course he caps them all up. Of course he’s summed it up like this:

You may have noticed that my current LinkedIn title reads ‘Leader, Manager, Coach’ – in that order.

He’s a Leader first, Manager second. Probably Coach third. We’re not even sure he realises how closely he’s aping one of the great lampoons of idiot bosses; we’re not even sure he realises he’s done the most humourless pastiche imaginable of the infamous Gareth Bale flag.

It is now, sadly, only a matter of time before Southgate is selling a course. All the signs are there. The book. The LinkedIn. It’s a real shame.

Mainly because, like all head-manager-coaches who are succumbing to this terrible affliction, he really does have something useful to say. He’s just choosing the grifter’s path. The podcast path. The sat opposite a smugly nodding Jake Humphrey or Steven Bartlett path.

The wrong path.

It was very clear by the end that Southgate’s time as England Manager (sic) was done. But there was so much of value that he did and could still do. It would be a double tragedy if he really is lost to football in any meaningful capacity. One, because he genuinely has a lot to offer and two because if he did have an actual job in the actual running of football we wouldn’t have to read this kind of terrible bollocks either first-hand or second-hand after the tabloids have scoured it for clues that it is actually either a ‘sly dig’ or come and get me plea aimed at Manchester United .

Actually, that’s another point: if Southgate had an actual job we maybe wouldn’t have to constantly deal with a press pack desperate to get St Gareth installed at Old Trafford for some reason.

But while Southgate is only commenting on the state of Premier League management, within the division we are living in a golden age of guff. Rodgers must be fuming to be missing out. Please, someone, anyone, give him another job in the Barclays . This is his time to shine.

We may not have Brentan Rodgers, but we do have David Brentford. Step forward Thomas Frank, whose desperate unravelling at Tottenham is now steering him into the waiting arms of ‘inspirational’ LinkedIn slop.

We do have sympathy, because managing Spurs looks like enough to send anyone round the bend, but come on. There can only be so much sympathy for a man who responds to defeat against Bournemouth by saying this.

“In a storm, some are building fences and hiding behind it, others are building windmills and getting stronger and getting more energy and learning from it.”

We can only assume that Frank considers himself a windmill-builder in this scenario. Which is an astonishing delusion for a man with visibly less energy every game and whose primary problem is now the conspicuous failure to learn a single lesson from increasingly frequent setbacks and storms.

The first lesson to learn here, by the way, is that trying to build anything in a storm is a really f*cking stupid idea. Even taking this stuff on its own absurd terms, it doesn’t work. Build windmills before the storm, if anything.

And it must be a different Frank who keeps erecting fences marked ‘injuries’ and ‘January is difficult’ and ‘We finished 17th last season, actually’ and ‘I saw really encouraging signs’.

We wonder if there is anything more profound than just a favoured topic in the frequency with which weather appears to dominate Frank’s musings these days. Something about a vague and powerful force that is entirely outside your own control.

This is a man who just this week has stepped out into the cloudiest weather imaginable and tried to convince both himself and watching journalists that the sun is in fact shining and that football is being played when neither of these things is true.

But look at us here. We’re sinking into LinkedIn beard-stroking theorising ourselves, aren’t we? You sly dog, you got us monologuing.

Let’s look beyond Frank for a minute. His weather updates are depressing us anyway. There is of course Eddie Howe, where it’s not so much what he says as the dead-eyed, soulless way he says it that so powerfully evokes the spirit of the LinkedIn podcast bro universe.

Mikel Arteta, at least, walks the walk. While most of LinkedIn’s faux-inspirational and always extremely convenient humble-braggery that passes for bosses’ crowing about how they get the best out of their team by doing things that our downright insane doesn’t pass the sniff test, Arteta is out there doing it.

Sure, you can imagine every LinkedIn grifter from here to the Californian coast saying they hired pickpockets to * with their staff on purpose, but Arteta is walking the walk.

Really this should be worse, shouldn’t it? But we find ourselves grudgingly of the view that Arteta’s genuinely terrifying sincerity is at least somehow almost admirable and definitely less despicable than the general air of insincerity.

Which brings us to the new pretender to the bullsh*t crowd . Liam Rosenior has been here five minutes and is already making a play for Rodgers’ seat as the most self-satisfied talker of self-aggrandising bollocks the Barclays has ever seen.

We’ve all seen the ageing men thing now. And if you haven’t watched the clip itself, we urge you to do so. Note the absolute earnestness of the delivery. There is no playfulness here, the hint of a smile that creeps across his face one not of amusement but self-satisfaction at his incredible profundity.

It’s so daring in the way it holds no truck with any conventional or accepted understanding of anything. It disregards all previously understood concepts of how etymology or wordplay operate, as well as pretending that ‘ageing men’ is a phrase of long-standing acceptance and usage.

We’re just ageing men. Just innocent men.

What makes this important, though, is who it’s all for. Which brings us right back to Southgate and his actual LinkedIn musings.

He was talking about the departure of three high-profile managers from high-profile clubs in recent weeks, and why their reigns collapsed: falling out with club executives (Ruben Amorim at Man United), employees (Enzo Maresca at Chelsea) and players (Xabi Alonso at Real Madrid).

The two Premier League casualties on that list are particularly instructive here. Both those managers had some questionable results, but neither lost their jobs because of those. They lost them because they were either unable or became unwilling to play the necessary corporate game increasingly required at this level.

We don’t yet know what talents or limitations Rosenior has as an ager of men. It’s very obviously far too early to tell. But we know for sure he’s got a better chance than a Pochettino or Maresca of becoming the first manager in a long time to hang around long enough at Chelsea to provide a compelling answer either way.