20 Greatest Managers.

Un f**king believable, Shankly at 10 and Paisley at 12!!!
Shankly ranks well above that and in my humble opinon Bob Paisley shoud be near the summit, we know his achievments and the character of the man - that list is total bollocks.

My own opinion is Shanks & Fergie should be in the top 3 or 4

My own opinion is Shanks & Fergie should be in the top 3 or 4

No way Keith Bob Paisleys' record speaks for itself, he may have inherited the squad from Shanks but you know as well as i do unless they are coached with an ultimate professionalism it doesn't mean sh*t what you inherit, Bob Paisley was the ultimate professional.

No way Keith Bob Paisleys' record speaks for itself, he may have inherited the squad from Shanks but you know as well as I do unless they are coached with an ultimate professionalism it doesn't mean sh*t what you inherit, Bob Paisley was the ultimate professional.

The only thing i would add Stuey is like you said, Paisley inherited a good side. However, it still takes a top manager to get them playing at the same level Shanks did. That's why i would always have Shanks better than Bob Paisley. Both legends of course, but Shanks the better of the two in my opinion 

I'm not going to bemoan the list until I see the final 20, all of the managers listed so far have been highly successful in the game in one way or another, so it will be interesting to see who gets thrown in.

The only thing i would add Stuey is like you said, Paisley inherited a good side. However, it still takes a top manager to get them playing at the same level Shanks did. That's why i would always have Shanks better than Bob Paisley. Both legends of course, but Shanks the better of the two in my opinion  

We'll to agree to disagree Keith.

We'll to agree to disagree Keith.

I think we can both agree their legends 

No need for that Crouchy    He's a all time great no matter what you think of him as a person. His record speaks for its self  . Even you can see that 

He's an all time w**ker, that's for sure. Not many greats take 7 years to do something credible and get their arse saved by a last minute FA Cup goal.

He's an all time w**ker, that's for sure. Not many greats take 7 years to do something credible and get their arse saved by a last minute FA Cup goal.

He still did it though 

In 20+ years at the job you'd F***ing hope he did something!

I'm made up he's still there cos all the nobs don't realise he's an advert for alzimers and while he remains they gonna win F**k all.
Let's hope he stays as long as pos.

Remove our rose tinted glasses for a moment mate and he has been successful and won plenty of trophies and that is what greats are inevitably judged on.

Still hate the w**ker though.

Aye, agreed.

Still, Paisley above him IMO. Fergie deserves to drop more spots simply cos he is a c**t

Lawrenson said he felt Paisley was the greatest because 3 European Cups speak for itself doesn't it. Can't argue with Lawrenson there...for once!

Managers like Shankly, Paisley and the likes did it at a time when football wasn't corrupted by money, fat cat owners and greedy immoral players. They really did it in the purest of times and they were the purest of successes which values them at an incredibly higher level than the modern day managers and players regardless of whether they are as or more successful than the fathers of the sport!

p.s - really enjoying the thread RedLFCBlood. Thank a lot!

I've got a feeling this one is going to be rather controversial.

Football’s Greatest Managers: #8 Brian Clough

Few football coaches have grabbed the public’s attention through sheer force of personality in quite the same fashion as Brian Howard Clough. An intoxicating mix of intelligence, arrogance and abrasiveness, Clough was the antithesis of the mid-twentieth century stereotype which saw British managers as gentlemanly sorts who played the game to strengthen their moral fibre rather than to win at all costs.

Born into the humble surrounds of a Middlesbrough council estate in 1935, Clough was a keen schoolboy sportsman and began his youth career with his home town club in 1951 at the age of 16 before moving on to Billingham Synthonia in 1953. After attracting covetous glances from a number of professional clubs through his performances as a young striker, Clough eventually returned to Middlesbrough for whom he signed in 1955.

Between 1955 and 1961 Clough made 213 league appearances for Boro, scoring a remarkable 197 goals and going on to earn two England caps in the process. In 1961 ‘Cloughie’ moved to Wearside to play for Sunderland and continued to hit the net with great regularity at Roker Park, scoring 54 in 61 league games for the Black Cats. However, in 1962 Clough sustained a serious injury to his cruciate ligament from which he didn’t recover. After managing just three appearances in two years, Clough brought the curtain down on his playing career and immediately sought a fresh challenge.

In 1965, aged just 30, Clough was appointed manager of Hartlepool United – at the time an impoverished Fourth Division outfit – and so embarked on what would become a glittering coaching career. It was during his time at Victoria Park that Clough struck up his iconic professional relationship with Peter Taylor who became his assistant in the North East in those early days.

Clough’s first season with Hartlepool saw the club finish a disappointing eighteenth, but the 1966/67 campaign was one of great improvement as the ‘Monkey Hangers’ achieved a respectable eighth place finish. However, that was where Clough’s association with the club ended as he promptly walked out as a result of both boardroom strife and the fact that he has received an offer to take the reins at Second Division Derby County.

It was at Derby that Clough would make his name as one of the country’s finest young managers, guiding The Rams from second-tier obscurity to First Division champions in just five seasons. Indeed, when the Clough-Taylor partnership arrived at The Baseball Ground Derby had been stuck in the Second Division for over ten years, seemingly bereft of the talent and imagination required to progress any further.

The 1967/68 season saw Clough set about transforming Derby County from top to bottom, laying the foundations for the success that was to follow. The club may have endured a poor campaign that year, but Clough and Taylor had signed the likes of John McGovern, Dave Mackay and Roy McFarland and constructed a team that looked capable of pushing for promotion. That much sought-after promotion came the following season as Derby topped the Second Division by the significant margin of seven points and returned to the top level of English football.

Rather than merely aiming to survive the drop in his first season as a top-flight manager, Clough’s indomitable spirit saw him drive his team on to achieve a remarkable fourth-place finish in the 1969/70 campaign. The Rams may have been some thirteen points off the top, but they were separated from the great Chelsea side of Ron Harris and Peter Osgood by just two points, with Don Revie’s Leeds United (of whose style Clough was continually critical) only four points clear.

1970/71 saw the club take something of a backward step, Derby barred from competing in European competition due to financial irregularities and ending the league season in a frustrating ninth. However, that particularly underwhelming season ended up leading into the most successful campaign in the history of Derby County Football Club.



Inspired tactically and psychologically by Clough, Derby marched to their first ever top-flight title as they pipped Leeds to the championship by a single point on the final day of the season. For a club with relatively limited resources and several veterans amongst the playing staff, it was a truly incredible achievement and a career-defining one for Clough.

In 1973 Clough’s relationship with both the FA and the Derby board began to break down, the manager being accused of misconduct after writing an article criticising Leeds’ style of play as well as being caught making an obscene gesture in the direction of Matt Busby during a league game against Manchester United. In typical fashion Clough refused to apologise for either incident and eventually resigned (along with Taylor) in the October of 1973 with his exchanges with chairman Sam Longson having become increasingly hostile.

A brief and unspectacular spell in partnership with Taylor at Third Division Brighton & Hove Albion followed, only for Clough to leave the South Coast – this time without Taylor – to replace Don Revie at Leeds for an infamous 44-day spell at Elland Road which has come to be immortalised in David Peace’s fictionalised account, The Damned United.

It has been famously reported that Clough, intent on drastically altering the stylistic ethos of Leeds, announced to the players on his arrival that they could “throw their medals in the bin because they were not won fairly”. Predictably, this drew an exclusively negative response from the Leeds players who failed to respect his methods and, after a dreadful run of results, saw Clough unceremoniously sacked from the Yorkshire club.

The following season, having recovered from the Leeds fiasco, Clough took on what would be his last – and most successful – managerial post. Taking over at second-tier Nottingham Forest in January 1975, Clough and Taylor guided the club to eighth place before again proving their incredible capacity for transforming the fortunes of their teams by gaining promotion in 1976/77.

Having achieved an impressive promotion, Clough wasted no time in establishing Forest as a force in the division, masterminding the club’s unbelievable league title and League Cup double in their first season back in the First Division. That team, consisting of such talents as Martin O’Neill, Viv Anderson, John McGovern and John Robertson, would go down in history as the finest Forest team of all time as they continued to add to their list of astonishing achievements as the seasons went by.

The club’s greatest feat came in 1979 as Forest overcame Malmö in the European Cup final with a goal from Trevor Francis - the player who Clough had signed for £999,999 in order not to break the £1m mark for a player (although subsequent fees took the transfer over that particular milestone). For a club which had only claimed its first top-flight title a year earlier, Forest’s conquering of Europe was simply astounding and was the ultimate tribute to Clough’s tactical and psychological methodology as well as his uncanny ability to spot players ideal for his preferred system, usually 4-4-2 with attacking full-backs and traditional wingers.


                  Trevor Francis with the 1979 European Cup

Even more remarkably, Clough was able to defend the European Cup in 1980 as Forest beat Hamburg (another 1-0 scoreline) to further emphasise their dominance of the continental game and write their manager into history as one of the greatest of all time.

Clough spent a further thirteen years at The City Ground, Forest winning another two League Cups during that time, although, tragically, a rift grew between the great manager and Peter Taylor, something which sadly led to Taylor’s departure from the club in 1983.

In poor health and struggling to rebuild his team in the early 1990s, Clough resigned from Nottingham Forest after relegation to the second tier in 1993. It was a disappointing end to a truly wonderful career, but it did not take the gloss off Clough’s astonishing managerial record.

Like many of the game’s great coaches, his was a divisive personality, but Clough’s impact on the game cannot be denied. His ability to get clubs to excel despite a lack of money or a particularly high level of talent was exceptional and the ways in which he drilled his players in systemic intricacies and psychological toughness were unrivalled at the time and have since been echoed in the methods of other serially successful coaches.

An enigmatic figure, a master of domestic football and a double European Cup-winning manager, Brian Clough is arguably the best British manager the game has ever seen. His legacy lives on.

Paisley/Shanks > Clough. Period. Finito. Facht.

Where do you suppose Rafa will fit into this list? 

Where do you suppose Rafa will fit into this list? 

Number 1 no doubt

Where do you suppose Rafa will fit into this list? 

He shouldn't even be in the top 100 let alone the top 20.

Bloody idiot ruined the club and took us 500 step backwards.

*sarcasm*

Clough above Paisley and Shankly? Really don't get that.

Football’s Greatest Managers: #7 Valeriy Lobanovskyi

A figure of colossal footballing importance who once bestrode the European game, Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s impact on the game both in Ukraine and the continent as a whole should not be underestimated.

A famous Dynamo Kyiv winger – not to mention the inventor of the “banana shot” – in the late fifties and early sixties, Lobanovskyi hung up his boots in 1968 aged just 29 before setting out on a 32-year managerial career which would see the inscrutable former USSR international achieve worldwide recognition. His first job, at Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, lasted for four years between 1969 and 1973, although Lobanovskyi made relatively little impact at Stadium Meteor during his time there. However, when he returned to Dynamo as head coach in 1974, he began to put in place the methodology that would come to be viewed as his enduring legacy.

Famed for being as pragmatic a coach as he was exuberant a player, Jonathan Wilson eruditely describes Lobanovskyi in Inverting the Pyramid as the embodiment of “the great struggle between individuality and system: the player in him wanted to dribble, to invent tricks and to embarrass his opponents, and yet, as he later admitted, his training at the Polytechnic Institute (his University) drove him to a systematic approach, to break football down into its component tasks”.

An immensely gifted schoolboy mathematician, Lobanovskyi’s view of football as a deeply compartmentalised game was perhaps to be expected. Taking a highly scientific approach to tactical instruction, Lobanovskyi developed a theory of football as a system comprising of twenty-two elements moving with the confines of the given area of the pitch and subjected to the restrictions of the rules. Again as Wilson points out, the Ukrainian came to the conclusion that football was not about individuals, but the coalitions and connections between them.

In his first season as Dynamo manager the club won a double, claiming both the Soviet Top League championship and the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup to become the first team from the USSR to win a continental title. Indeed, inspired by the goals of the prolific Oleg Blokhin and the dynamic midfield play of Viktor Kolotov, Lobanovskyi’s side embarked upon an unparalleled period of dominance in the domestic game over the fifteen years that were to follow.

Eight league titles and six Soviet Cups under Lobanovskyi’s stewardship saw Dynamo become the dominant force in Eastern European football, excelling domestically as well as winning two Cup Winners’ Cups to make their mark on continental competition. Usually deployed in their iconic 4-1-3-2 formation with Anatoly Konkov anchoring the midfield and Blokhin and Onyshchenko providing the fire-power, Dynamo’s first incarnation under Lobanovskyi has gone down in history as one of the greatest Eastern European club sides of all time.

His success with Dynamo aside, Lobanovskyi also enjoyed a fruitful time in three spells as manager of the USSR, guiding the team to a bronze medal at the 1976 Olympics as well as finishing runners-up to the Netherlands of Rinus Michels in the 1988 European Championships. Several years in charge of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in the 1990s yielded little, but his return to Kiev in 1997 heralded an upturn in the fortunes of a club that had slumped since his departure.



Between 1997 and 2002 Lobanovskyi developed a new generation of Ukrainian talent which included Andriy Shevchenko and Sergei Rebrov, taking his young team all the way to a Champions League semi-final in 1999. However, hamstrung by his best players being cherry-picked by Europe’s biggest clubs and modern players who were less responsive to his authoritarian approach, the legendary coach was unable to develop his squad to quite the level he would have wanted.

However, it was not necessarily Lobanovskyi’s serial success that made him such an instrumental figure in the history of European football. Taking his scientific approach to its extremes, the great Ukrainian introduced meticulous dietary and training regimes for his players, collated masses of data prior to every game, gave each member of his team specific tactical tasks and individual technical coaching in order for them to better fulfil their tasks – methods we see mimicked by the likes of Rafael Benitez in the modern era. As Wilson writes of Lobanovskyi, “What happened off the field in terms of physical preparation and, particularly, rehabilitation, was just as important as what happened on it”.

Lobanovskyi claimed that his ambition was to achieve uniformity amongst his players; he wanted his forwards to be capable defenders and his defenders to be capable forwards. He also instructed his players in numerous pre-planned moves, moves which became embedded in Dynamo’s play and were able to be adapted to suit a variety of circumstances.

Such practices may not seem particularly visionary to the modern football fan, but Lobanovskyi was, albeit with the advantage of having learnt at the feet of Victor Maslov, something of a pioneer in terms of the increasing professionalism and scientific regulation of football.

Today, football at the highest level is analysed right down to the microscopic level by coaches seeking to gain advantages, no matter how small, over their opponents. Although the process may have been started by Maslov before him, it was Lobanovskyi who really brought science and football together in order to attain an obviously higher standard of performance.

Mathematical tactical precision and strict dietary regimes for players – all can be traced back to Valeriy Lobanovskyi. Cutting through all of his incredible achievements, perhaps the greatest tribute to Lobanovskyi was given by Andriy Shevchenko in 2003, a year after the manager’s death. Having just won the Champions League with Milan, Shevchenko flew back to Kiev at the earliest possible opportunity to place his medal on his former coach’s grave.

Valeriy Lobanovskyi, arguably the greatest technical pioneer of them all.

Football’s Greatest Managers: #6 Arrigo Sacchi

“A jockey doesn’t have to have been born a horse.” (Arrigo Sacchi)

His time coaching at the very highest level may have been, in comparison with a number of the other managers in this series, relatively short, but Arrigo Sacchi’s impact on the modern European game was absolutely phenomenal.

A man with virtually no formal experience as a player, Sacchi broke down barriers of snobbery and crashed through countless glass ceilings in the late eighties and early nineties to become arguably the most influential coach of his generation.

Never a professional footballer, Sacchi famously held a job as a shoe salesman before embarking on his managerial career. Frustrated at his inability with the ball at his feet, Sacchi became fixated with the notion of becoming a coach and, in 1972, took charge of Baracco Luco, his local club, at the age of just twenty-six.

Despite encountering initial problems of acceptance amongst players that were both older and far more skilled than himself, Sacchi eventually won his charges over and, even at that formative stage, was clear about the attractive, attacking passing game he wished to impress on his team.

Like the great Ukrainian coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Sacchi viewed the game as a dynamic system rather than a collection of individuals, seeing every member of the team unit – whether with or without the ball – as equally significant at any given moment.

After leaving his home town club, Sacchi spent some time as a youth coach at Serie B outfit Cesena before taking on his first professional job as a first team manager at Serie C1′s Rimini in 1982.

After guiding his new club to a respectable fourth-place finish in his first season in charge, Sacchi attracted to attentions of top-flight Fiorentina who offered him a role as the head of their academy. This was to prove an invaluable springboard on his journey to the very top of the European game.

His exemplary work at the Florentine Primavera between 1983 and 1985 led to the former shoe salesman being offered his second job as a head coach, this time at Parma, which, at that time, was languishing in Serie C1.

Sacchi’s first major managerial triumph came during the 1985/86 season, his first at Il Tardini, when he inspired i Ducali to the third tier title, pipping Modena to top spot on goal difference and gaining promotion to the dizzying heights of Serie B.

With Parma playing a stylish brand of football to finish seventh in their first season back in the second tier, Sacchi had built himself a growing reputation as one of the most talented young coaches in Italy.

His meteoric rise was confirmed in the 1986/87 Coppa Italia as Parma overcame the mighty AC Milan in the group phase of the competition, winning 1-0 at San Siro before knocking the Rossoneri out in the Second Round with a goal from Mario Bortolazzi.

Parma’s achievements were enough to attract interest from Silvio Berlusconi, the Milan President, who, seeing his club gradually slide into decline, offered Sacchi the San Siro hot-seat after Fabio Capello had stepped aside in a desperate attempt to revive his club’s fading fortunes. Sacchi accepted, and it was in Milan that he would make his name as one of the greatest coaches the game has ever seen.

***

“Great clubs have had one thing in common throughout history, regardless of era or tactics. They owned the pitch and they owned the ball. That means when you have the ball, you dictate play and when you are defending, you control the space.” (Arrigo Sacchi)

After facing a barrage of media criticism regarding his lack of pedigree upon his arrival at Milan, Sacchi let his coaching do the talking and quickly constructed one of the best club sides to have ever graced Italian football, his personal pursuit of perfection driving his team on to exceptional levels of performance.

Sacchi’s Milan were built around the trio of Dutch players – Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard – that he brought in between the summer of 1987 and the conclusion of the 87/88 campaign.

That season had seen the San Siro outfit march to their first Scudetto since 1979, beating Diego Maradona’s Napoli to the title by three points and deploying a 4-4-2 system which combined pace and dynamism with a rare grace and intelligence.

According to Sacchi himself, the key to Milan’s success was the abandonment of man-marking and its replacement with a focus on pressing and a refined system of zonal marking. In the manager’s own words, “My zone was different. Marking was passed from player to player as the attacking player moved through different zones”. Both defensive and attacking movement of the precision Milan achieved under Sacchi had never been seen before – that generation of Rossoneri were tactical revolutionaries.

As Jonathan Wilson has pointed out, despite many of the innovations that Sacchi’s team have come to be associated with being of a defensive nature (staunch pressing and an aggressive offside trap to name just two), the team itself were far from being negative. “I always demanded, when we had possession, five ahead of the ball and that there would always be a man wide right and wide left”, Sacchi has said about his methods.

Everything Milan did was as a unit, movement was a collective exercise. On the training ground Sacchi was famed for putting the players into position without the ball and drilling them endlessly in the science of exactly where they should be on the field in any given situation. The team moved as one, and they did it better than everybody else.

                                         

Despite not winning the title again during his time at San Siro, Sacchi enjoyed his greatest successes in Europe. Milan brushed aside all who stood in their way during their march to the 1989 European Cup, Real Madrid being annihilated 6-1 on aggregate in the last four before Steaua Bucharest were demolished 4-0 in the Final with a brace each from van Basten and Gullit.

According to Sacchi, it was the closest he ever got to perfection and, along with Barcelona’s triumph in 2008/09, Sacchi’s Milan stand as one of the most inexorable continental forces there have ever been.

The following season, 1989/90, saw Milan retain their title in impressive fashion; Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Benfica being overcome on the way to a second domination of Europe. It was to be Sacchi’s last title with Milan, the man from Fusignano leaving the club in 1991 to take charge of the Italian national side.

***

Sacchi never quite attained the heights he had with Milan again in his career, but his time with Italy was fruitful enough. Failure to qualify for Euro 1992 was, seeing as he came in half-way through the campaign, not entirely Sacchi’s fault, and the way in which he resurrected the country’s fortunes was spectacular.

Two years later, having qualified for the tournament with relative ease, the Azzurri reached the 1994 World Cup Final having kicked into gear in the quarter-finals after a sluggish start to the competition. Indeed, had it not been for some erratic penalty taking against Brazil in the Pasadena Rose Bowl, Sacchi could have added the greatest title of them all to his collection but, as it was, Italy were consigned to a painful defeat at the hands of Carlos Alberto Parreira’s side.

Having quit his post after a disappointing group stage exit from Euro ’96, Sacchi returned to Milan for a single season in 1996/97 but, shorn of the majority of the players who he had worked with previously, was unable to recreate the success he had enjoyed during the late eighties.

Brief spells at Atletico Madrid and Parma followed, Los Colchoneros claiming the 1999 Copa del Rey under his stewardship, but, by the end of the century, Sacchi’s time in management had reached a natural conclusion.

The latter part of his career may have been marked by a failure to return to the near-impossibly high standards he had set for himself at San Siro, but Arrigo Sacchi will be remembered, quite rightly, as one of the finest tacticians of the age and the man who re-invented pressing and zonal marking for the modern game.

Arrigo Sacchi e il suo Milan degli Immortali

Football’s Greatest Managers: #5 Herbert Chapman

Like so many of the game’s greatest managers, Herbert Chapman was little more than a mediocre player, travelling the lower leagues as a journeyman inside forward and never once getting his hands on any silverware. However, Chapman’s impact on the British game as a coach and tactical innovator remains unparalleled, the man famous for taking Arsenal to the very pinnacle of English football bestriding the modern game like a colossus.

Unlike some players who become set upon the idea of becoming a manager early in their careers, Chapman came to the profession almost entirely unintentionally. In 1907, having decided that he would retire from football after the conclusion of his final season with Tottenham Hotspur, Chapman had planned to pursue a career in mine engineering but was unexpectedly offered the chance to coach Northampton Town, a position he accepted and took on initially in a player/manager capacity.

At the time Northampton were languishing in the lower reaches of the Southern League and, frustrated with the total vacuum of tactical organisation he had witnessed throughout English football, Chapman took it upon himself to transform The Cobblers both in terms of results and methods.

He got Northampton playing a style of football which saw the midfield drop deeper in order for the forwards to be afforded more space (of course, in those days teams regularly fielded four or five forwards) and drew the opposition defenders further up field to create space in behind. These tweaks to Northampton’s game eventually led to the creation of an effective counter-attacking methodology, one with which Chapman’s team enjoyed great success.

Indeed, the local media at the time recognised the extraordinary nature of Northampton’s tactics under their Yorkshire-born coach, the Northampton Daily Echo noting at the time “The forwards wove no fancy patterns…but, given the ball, straight they sped for the goal. Just a brief run, enough to draw part of the defence to the spot, and over it went with almost amazing accuracy to the other side of the field. There the operation was repeated.”

Having finished a respectable eighth in Chapman’s first season in charge, Northampton won the Southern League in 1908/09 although were not promoted due to the lack of a system for automatic promotions or relegations being in place. Angered by the absence of a coherent meritocracy of any kind in the footballing pyramid, Chapman proposed the idea to the Football Association and, although rejected at the time, was introduced a decade later – the basis for the idea being credited to the visionary coach.

Famed for his scouting abilities, Chapman proved his supreme eye for a player over and over again during his time with Northampton, the signing of 21 year-old winger Fred Walden from Wellingborough Town being a case in point. Walden, deemed by many to be too skinny and lightweight (he was a little over five feet tall) to make it in the rough-and-tumble world of early twentieth century English football, blossomed into one of the finest wide players of his generation under Chapman’s tutelage, even going on to represent England.

Three consecutive top four finishes in the Southern League with Northampton led to a host of other clubs seeking to hire their talented young manager, Chapman (who was still working part-time at the local collieries at this stage) eventually leaving for Leeds City in 1912. A team struggling in the Second Division, Chapman’s influence quickly transformed the original tenants of Elland Road into a competitive force, finishing sixth in his first season with the club and fourth in his second. By the time the First World War broke out and disrupted the footballing calendar, Leeds City were widely expected to win the Second Division title but, during the conflict, were forced to participate only in regional competitions.

In the wake of the Great War, Leeds City were charged with financial irregularities and found guilty of making illegal payments to players during wartime matches. In October 1919 the club was dissolved and its top officials, Chapman included, were summarily given a lifetime ban from football. It looked as though Chapman’s promising managerial career had been brought to an abrupt end.

However, just a year later Huddersfield Town approached Chapman with a view to making him their new assistant manager. Supported by the Huddersfield board, Chapman successfully appealed his lifetime ban claiming ignorance of the underhand dealings that had been going on at Elland Road during the war.

Shortly after his arrival at Huddersfield Chapman was installed as manager following the departure of Ambrose Langley in February 1921 and quickly set about implementing his counter-attacking philosophy. Central to Huddersfield’s tactical approach was Clem Stephenson, an experienced England forward whom Chapman signed from Aston Villa shortly after taking the reins from Langley. Stephenson was famed for the innovative – now recognised as conventional – way in which he broke the offside trap, dropping back into his own half before getting forward at pace.

Having ingrained his philosophy in the players and modernised Huddersfield’s facilities by re-turfing the pitch and making huge improvements to the press box amongst other things, Chapman began to further develop his tactical theory and introduced a deep-lying centre-half to his system. Tom Wilson, the player Chapman chose for the role, was deployed far deeper than was conventional at the time and was used to break up opposition attacks and provide extra defensive cover in a similar fashion to the likes of Sergio Busquets today.



Huddersfield’s new tactics in an era when the majority of teams played a rigid 2-3-5 formation did not go down well in the wider footballing community, but they were successful nonetheless. Despite drawing criticism from certain quarters, Chapman led his team first to the 1922 FA Cup before going on to win two consecutive First Division titles in the 1923/24 and 1924/25 seasons. So effective was Chapman’s management style becoming that he was offered the job at Arsenal, at that time a very wealthy club despite occasionally battling against relegation from the top flight. Chapman jumped at the chance and was installed at Highbury by the start of the 1925/26 campaign.

It was to be with Arsenal that Chapman transformed himself from an excellent manager to the footballing icon he is seen as today. Indeed, Chapman’s claim upon arrival in north London that it would take him a maximum of five years to win silverware demonstrated his ever-increasing confidence in his own abilities. As it happened, it took him a little over four years to start winning trophies with The Gunners as Arsenal marched to the 1930 FA Cup, but it was tactical development and infrastructural modernism, not silverware, that most characterised Chapman’s time at the club.

                                     

Having signed international striker Charlie Buchan from Sunderland and inspired by the change in the offside law in the summer of 1925 (the number of players required to be between the attacker and the goal line was revised down to just two), Chapman scrapped 2-3-5 and set about developing the 3-2-2-3 formation, more famously known as the W-M.

With the centre-half in the 2-3-5 converted to a conventional centre-back and the inside-forwards far deeper than they originally had been, the W-M facilitated an even more extreme and direct interpretation of Chapman’s counter-attacking philosophy.

All the while Chapman was attempting to push through changes at the highest level, proposing ideas for shirt numbers and floodlights only to be initially turned down by the FA, but introduced the now famous white sleeves on Arsenal’s kit, the Highbury clock and, in an almost unprecedented move, organised formal tactical sessions as a part of the club’s training regime.

From 1930 onwards, trophies flowed into Highbury at an incredible rate. A hat-trick of league titles were won in 1930/31, 32/33 and 33/34, those successes being supplemented by the aforementioned 1930 FA Cup and several Charity Shield victories. By the winter of 1934 Arsenal were on their way to a third title in four years and were unquestionably the strongest team in England despite rebuilding what had become an ageing squad.

Tragedy, however, was just around the corner as, shortly after New Year 1934, Chapman was suddenly taken ill with pneumonia and died on the 6th January aged just 55. His premature death rocked the football community, the game having lost its most visionary and pioneering manager. Arsenal went on to win yet another league title that season and again in 1935, Chapman’s enduring legacy being demonstrated by those who had played under him and still living on in Arsenal Football Club today.

I will leave the last words to Jonathan Wilson, who wrote extensively on Chapman in his book, Inverting the Pyramid:

“What was significant was not merely that Chapman had a clear conception of how football should be played, but that he was in a position to implement that vision. He was – at least in Britain – the first modern manager, the first man to have complete control over the running of the club.”

Shanks and Paisley, and in all fairness Fergie, should be higher on this list. Some of those managers are there because they made an impact in a short period, rather than sustained success, it seems.

So Rafa is looking good for a top 3 finish at least anyways eh?

Shanks and Paisley, and in all fairness Fergie, should be higher on this list. Some of those managers are there because they made an impact in a short period, rather than sustained success, it seems.

So Rafa is looking good for a top 3 finish at least anyways eh?

I think Wenger is going to be in the top 4.