LFC — Revolution of The Boot Room — Pt. 1. The History & The Truth
Here is the truth. A coin toss represents even odds, with a fifty percent chance of a heads or a tails result. In your hand is an historic coin from 1892. On the side of heads facing upwards — we have the liver bird of Liverpool Football Club. On the downward side of tails — we have the black cat of Sunderland Association Football Club. Let’s say the call you make on this coin toss will determine which esteemed establishment deserves your worthy support. If you were a betting man, you would say to hell with a coin toss, for inherently the odds seem to never be in your favour. Right? And if I’m already apart of the Liverpool or Sunderland fraternity, I dare not take such a chance at defecting to the lowliness of the other…right? Eureka! In the world of physics and scientific testing, a new study has come to find that there is in fact a fifty-one percent bias that a vigorously tossed coin will land on the side that is facing upwards before the toss is thrown (1.). So, theoretically, you could manipulate your call based on the original position of the coin and ever so slightly play the odds to your liking. So with this in mind, as eager as a sliver of hope, you toss the coin and call heads, praying for the mythical liver bird to take flight and gloriously land its talons into the black cat onto your palm. The coin shimmers in the air, teasing you with that extra hundreth as it precesses to its peak. The airborne cormorant challenges the leaping black cat, both of them exchanging blows in hope and uncertainty. And as they do, you start to contemplate the truth. That even though you’ve called heads, at fifty-one percent, you realise the odds are actually not in your favour. They simply aren’t. And this isn’t because fifty-one percent is miserly and meagre. It isn’t because the science is wrong and the gamble is just that — a gamble. It is because heads and tails are the same result. What? Liverpool Football Club and Sunderland Assoc. Football Club are the same result. And so perhaps your free will is illusory?
“It is because heads and tails are the same result.”
Liverpool and Sunderland are the two analogous sides of the same ill-fated coin. Just as the Tyne and Wear club are now the inconsistent pebble that ripples the mid-table through bouts of rising tides and receding ebbs, our Merseyside vessel mimics this flux at the top end of the table. Even through culture and history, Liverpool and Sunderland share their roots in the maritime heart of northern English trade, having a stoic work ethic and a commonality to evolve through adversity, as the urban revolution from the British proletariat to proclaim football as the nation’s key sport, intertwined civic and class-based solidarity within these parts.
As a pioneer, Sunderland A.F.C. has a rich history of footballing success to rival any of the perceived top football clubs of today. This began with their ‘Team of All Talents’ steamrolling through the 1891–92 season to win the League Championship in only their third year of existence, with Liverpool being conceived out of a land dispute that same year as the 14th team in the league. Sunderland defended their title the next season, breaking goal-scoring records that would stand for almost three decades, establishing their might as the new warriors of English football along with Aston Villa, despite the sport only twenty years into its renewed history of established competition in England. Sunderland alternated assuredly between strong first winners of the league and painful seconders until 1901–02, impressively winning a massive five league titles by WWI, a feat unrivalled and only marred by a controversial pay issue that saw Sunderland receive a large fine, with board members and then manager Alex Mackie receiving lengthy suspensions. This event was only symptomatic of the progression of formal pay regimes in professional sport as real wages finally began to rise.
During this time, Liverpool mirrored this rapid ascent by winning the Lancashire League among the northern clubs in its debut season in 1892, gaining successive promotions to the first division and nipping Sunderland to the league title in 1901 and again in 1906. And so began the exchange of blows between the rising cormorant and cruising black cat. And upon the renaissance of all things in the post war climate when football returned to England, Liverpool saw back-to-back glory in winning the league in 1922 and 1923. Guess who was second?
The Team of All Talents — Sunderland A.F.C., 1892
I might like to mention two key historical developments that made these footballing successes more palpable for fans, laying the foundation for our purist addiction in the world game today:
1) as infrastructure became industrialised in England with the development of the rail network and tram systems, the geographical scope for leagues and fan engagement grew and,
2) as football was reclaimed by the workers and funding for compulsory schooling began, this saw enhanced literacy rates and hence opened the market for newspapers and advertising which sustained the finances behind the sport whilst catalysing a forum for football culture and discourse.
Think driving up and down the motorways for derbies, flying across European borders for the Champion’s League or crossing international waters for a mere exhibition game or a major World Cup. Think the opinions of pre-match pubs, punditry on prime telecasts, podcasts and previews. How different and restricted would the game be if it weren’t for these advancements? In football and in all walks of life, there is always a seminal historic foundation and a natural need to innovate and progress.
The 1930’s saw Liverpool regress into mediocrity, embodying the façade of false prosperity in England’s imperial reawakening after WWI — we wouldn’t win another trophy until after WWII. That’s more than two playing decades. That is a very long time, could you imagine that? Actually, you probably could.
Meanwhile, if you thought Sunderland had already set in stone their might as one of England’s best, they were just getting started. As Australian football historian and writer Ian Syson (@IanSyson, neososmos.blogspot.com.au) once aptly said to me, “You do know that Sunderland was by far the greatest football team the world had ever seen in 36–37.” It wasn’t even a question. He stated it. Did you know? They won the league yet again in 1936 and the FA Cup in 1937.
It is in this period that we saw Liverpool suffer an extended lull with the losing habit hard to beat whilst Sunderland reached a strong pinnacle. Liverpool fans of the time might have been prompted to think, ‘This is a sure thing for us, we’re done for and we can’t come back!’ or Sunderland fans might have proclaimed, ‘We’ve reached the perch and we’re staying here for good as we’ll only improve and build a talented squad!’ But in the grand scheme of things, isn’t this just part of the endless flux? History and hindsight proves that it was.
But, as you might be thinking, the qualities and standards of competitive football in those times compared to the late 20th century and even today was still growing; all of game state intelligence and analysis, sports science, tactics, technique coaching and management structures were either in their infancy or entirely non-existent. In those times, teams didn’t even have what would be recognised as an archetypal manager of today, as a club secretary would be tasked with day-to-day management whilst a board of directors would select the team, method of play and captain. But this is a key lesson for today, for as we are equally critical of the development of the world game in the past, won’t those in the future — say 50 years from now- say the same of us? Before WWI, football management was not impervious to changes within the game and society but any change was slow and subject to each club’s management culture…and the same is true of today.
“Eureka! …the gamble…”
Tom Watson is a figurehead in English football, a true pioneer and prototype for the modern manager, who was club secretary of Sunderland A.F.C. before being poached by Liverpool F.C. around the turn of the 20th century. It was he who was in charge at Sunderland for six seasons from 1889 to 1896, winning three league titles as they forged the “Team of All Talents,” making him the most successful manager in their history. Watson moved to Liverpool in 1896, and it was he who won Liverpool their first two champion titles in the club’s history until his unfortunate passing in 1915 due to lung disease.
Watson’s pedigree for innovation came in his initial importance in catalysing the rapid growth of football in the Newcastle area, as he became the founder of the mid-Tyne Rosehill Football Club in 1881 before being elected to both Newcastle West End and East End as their honorary secretary. In his time here, he secured a lease for St. James’ Park, saw the infusion of funds into both clubs and as a result recruited several Scottish professionals by inducing them with a £5 signing-on fee plus the promise of a shipyard factory job in Tyneside — the first instance of player negotiation and signings of international professionals.
He also appointed athletic trainers from the military who specialised in physical conditioning, contributing to the very primal roots of sports science, whilst he also would appoint ‘spies’ to scout the vices of opponents as well as his own players (fatigue after a day’s work, excessive alcohol consumption at the local pub, instability in personal lives), reflecting the initial stages of opposition scouting and self-meta-analysis.
Day to day, he was tasked with the club’s finances, press releases and organising match day incursions and excursions. It paved the way for the professional modernity of a football manager, especially as the expanding press coverage of the sport saw the role gain a middle-class identity. And a lot of this Watson did in an ad-hoc manner by thinking outside the square, maximising his resources and finding new and creative avenues to gain a footballing advantage that defected from the limitations of the corporate tunnel vision of the directors.
It paved the way for the likes of Herbert Chapman (1878–1934) and his achievements in bringing clubs such as Northampton Town and Huddersfield back from the brink of economic failure. This was done by 1) investing more money in transfers that would correlate into seasonal winning and 2) funding stadium expansions, all collectively aimed at increasing attendances and winning trophies which would bring in further profits (even during The Great Depression with the local textiles industry collapsing) and hence propagate the club’s success.
Chapman was coined a ‘tracksuit manager’ who inserted tenets into how to play the role successfully — to develop a close relationship with the players to gain their confidence, to intricately coach the improvement of players’ technique & skills in a one-on-one fashion, remove their deficiencies, ensure a disciplinarian setting for players’ private and public conduct and employ psychological techniques to improve player morale/performance. Tactically, he defined wing play and a team-oriented passing style of play in the WM formation (2.), rather than the common emphasis by teams and directors on individual dribbling and having tactics devised on the spot by the captain during the game. And so, the manager’s position was born out of three key roots:
1) the football and time failings of the board of directors who were increasingly busy with their businesses and lacked the tactical knowledge and in-depth understanding of their own players and opposition
2) the innovation of honorary secretaries who revolutionised the management structures of their club from both a footballing and financial perspective
3) the enhanced entertainment aspect of the growing game that drew fan and media discourse for critiquing the football status quo
So if in 50 years’ time we were to look back on the revolutionary figures who transformed the management structures of football in the 21st century, who would we look to? And I don’t mean the likes of Guardiola who perfected the execution of the Catalan philosophy of Cruyff’s possession-football and nor do I mean long standing youth academies of Ajax or La Masia which have existed and excelled for a long time. I’m talking about what comes next in the management structure. Who will do what Chapman did? Who will do what Shankly did with the conceptual Boot Room of an expert inter-disciplinary management team? What is next and who will be the new pioneer?
- Tabish Aleemullah (@TubbsSnow)
(1.) Dynamical Bias In The Coin Toss — http://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf
(2.) WM Formation — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_(association_football)#WM
