When it comes to football management, the conventional wisdom is that there is no conventional wisdom. Sure, Pep Guardiola may well have led the greatest team of all time to three La Liga titles and two Champions Leagues, and he may well on track for a third straight Bundesliga title at Bayern Munich. But had he been manager of Watford in 2007, would he have been able to match Aidy Boothroyd’s fine and noble achievement of reaching the FA Cup semifinals?
Sam Allardyce is wildly underappreciated, and not just in his own mind
Sam Allardyce has led Sunderland out of the relegation zone with three wins in five matches. Why is he so underappreciated?
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Sure, Jürgen Klopp may have beaten the Bayern juggernaut and led Borussia Dortmund to back-to-back league titles and a Champions League final against all odds. But would he really have been capable of matching Glenn Roeder and leading Newcastle to the 2006 Intertoto Cup crown? Could they do it on a cold rainy night in Stoke? There'd be a few who'd tell you not.
Extreme examples, just maybe, but there's a sensible conviction underlying them: football management isn't a one size fits all job. There's plenty of evidence for this argument: Neil Warnock is brilliant at getting you up to the Premier League, but useless at keeping you there. Tony Pulis will stop you from getting relegated, but don't expect much more than survival. Thus, just as in physics, the search for a theory of everything, a single strand binding everything from tactical minutiae to motivational techniques goes on.
Or does it? One man would certainly argue that he'd found the answer, that he was football's answer to Stephen Hawking. That man is Sam Allardyce. A man who famously declared that if his surname had a little more Italianate exoticism, he'd be managing a Champions League club.
Over recent years, there have been plenty of managers who've tried and failed to cut it in the Premier League. On the one hand, there's André Villas-Boas, the equivalent of the high school smartass: a man armed with a book of equations but seemingly with the social acumen of Viz's legendary cartoon character, Mr. Logic. Most of us don't like Frank Lampard and John Terry either, but at least we'd have understood the value of trying to keep them on-side.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s “Tactics Tim” Sherwood: a man so nicknamed because of his complete and utter incompetence when it came to the technical side of the game, and tendency to bang on about his players’ passion, commitment, desire, spirit, heart, soul, boldness, braveness, courage and affectingly mettlesome constitution. Maybe not that last one.
Anyway, the best very best managers sit somewhere in the middle of the suitably scientific sounding Boas-Sherwood Continuum, forging strategically cohesive units with the discipline and inspiration required for the sustained intensity of a difficult campaign. And it seems Allardyce manages, almost always, to strike the right balance. Sadly, it’s impossible to prove that he really has found the footballing theory of everything. At least until he’s finally given that big job (I hear you could soon be looking for a new manager, Roman Abramovich ...). But his uncanny ability to get the job done suggests he has cracked the art, and at the very least, the art of Premier League mid-table management.
When Dick Advocaat left Sunderland in October with the side having failed to win a single league game all season, the Black Cats looked in an exceptionally bad way. They looked set to be sucked into a relegation struggle for the fifth consecutive season, and had to find their sixth manager in that time. Who could succeed where Steve Bruce, Martin O'Neill, Paolo Di Canio, Gus Poyet and Advocaat had failed? They'd tried everything from the affable experience of Advocaat to the raging right-wing fist-pumps of Di Canio (a man who quite literally has a massive fascist tattoo on his back). Having exhausted plenty of options, it seemed their problems ran deeper than the man on the bench. Stories of a dressing room drinking problem hinted that they were much more serious.
Yet, when Allardyce arrived, it was difficult to doubt him. He seems to have a mystical power over the human psyche, one that would have allowed him to follow in the footsteps of Sir Alex Ferguson in giving post-retirement concert hall talks on the art of leadership to odious middle managers ... if only he'd got that damn top four job. Sure enough, Allardyce has so far turned a rag-tag bunch of overpaid journeymen and a smattering of foreign imports into something that much more closely resembles a football team. All three of their wins have come in the last five games, and they sit smack bang in the middle of the form table.
Big Sam’s doing what Big Sam does, and it would now be more of a surprise if Sunderland were relegated than if they stayed up. Considering their tendency over the last few seasons to survive only by virtue of an impossibly late escape, that in itself seems indicative of a significant improvement. As for Allardyce himself, well, it’s unlikely that he’s ever going to get that top four job. But that’s not going to stop him philosophizing with the best of them on everything from Tony Blair to the 3-5-2, and holding onto the dream that he’ll one day be appreciated as one of English football’s finest minds.
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