What do managers do?

[Mors]

They were attempting to have a debate this morning on TalkSport regards to what managers do in a day, as a lot of them claim they're doing '12 hour days' virtually every day of the week. This sounds like bullshit. No one on talksport could give a straight answer to what they'd actually be doing for this 84hr working week.

As far as I'm aware, the players turn up in this country and do 4-5hrs training, in the morning and then go home? So that leaves 7 hours every day for other stuff for Klopp etal? So yes, he might have the odd hour here and there for:

Training prep each day
Tactical prep with the analysts
Tactical prep of the players
Chat with the medical team
Chat with the transfer comitee
Chat with the owners
Pressers

But does that really add up to 12hr days every day? I can't see it. Some of the above stuff might be an hour or two, but not every day.

 

[gkmacca]

That's a very passive view of managers, having a 'chat' with various groups. They do a lot of analysis themselves, on their own, sometimes for hours on end (their analysis team don't just 'chat' to them, they give them two or three hours of clips and sequences of various games and individual players), a lot of transfer talks on their own, and some of them do plenty of coaching, watching the various age groups, then there are loads of commercial, media, charity/community and admin chores. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that adds up to that kind of total. Then of course there are the odd few like Wenger and Rafa who would live in their office 24/7 if they could.

 

[Oliver Twist]

Most of them wing it and spend most of their time playing vids.

 

[Woland]

Ruud Gullit lived in Amsterdam when he managed Newcastle and flew in twice a week to make sure everything was ok (it wasn't)

Slur Alex used to personally interview the tea lady and micro managed every part of the club from the bottom up, before handing the coaching reigns over to whoever seemed to be the best coach in the world at that time.

What I'm saying is, you can't really generalise

 

[Insignificance]

Not sure how this ranks With others, but a friend of mine working in Rosenborg said that their previous headcoach (later national Coach for Sweden) Erik Hamren spent quite a few hours on finetuning the pep talk he was going to have With his players before every game. He also had a lot of Meetings With players agreeing set targets for each individual. And during real hard sessions when players looked like they gave only 98% he could give them a "friendly" reminder about their targets, and how reduced effort played into the aim of reaching these targets.

These days I Guess quite a lot of work is analyzing the few coming opponents and work on how to exploit their weaknesses and defend their strengths. I am not sure every day is 12 hrs, but I will assume quite a few of them will stretch out. You don't only have the first team, as you can't ignore the rest of the Club either.

 

[Mors]

That's a very passive view of managers, having a 'chat' with various groups. They do a lot of analysis themselves, on their own, sometimes for hours on end (their analysis team don't just 'chat' to them, they give them two or three hours of clips and sequences of various games and individual players), a lot of transfer talks on their own, and some of them do plenty of coaching, watching the various age groups, then there are loads of commercial, media, charity/community and admin chores. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that adds up to that kind of total. Then of course there are the odd few like Wenger and Rafa who would live in their office 24/7 if they could.

I wasn't being disparaging towards them, I'm just genuinely interested of how they can claim circa 84hrs, if only 6x5hrs, so 30hrs max is spent on training the players. Seems like there would need to be a massive amount of extra stuff padding the 50hrs. I'd find it interesting to see a documentary on what it actually entails to be a premier league manager, not that bollocks load of cringe we had with Rodgers.

 

[Dreambeliever]

I'd be surprised if it was only 12 hours.

Analyzing opponents and drawing up a game plan for each opponent would take so much time.

Mourinho gives each player a dossier of each member of the opposition.

Most managers at that level are obsessed.

 

[Insignificance]

I wasn't being disparaging towards them, I'm just genuinely interested of how they can claim circa 84hrs, if only 6x5hrs, so 30hrs max is spent on training the players. Seems like there would need to be a massive amount of extra stuff padding the 50hrs. I'd find it interesting to see a documentary on what it actually entails to be a premier league manager, not that bollocks load of cringe we had with Rodgers.

So no envelopes involved in Your documetary?

 

[gkmacca]

I wasn't being disparaging towards them, I'm just genuinely interested of how they can claim circa 84hrs, if only 6x5hrs, so 30hrs max is spent on training the players. Seems like there would need to be a massive amount of extra stuff padding the 50hrs. I'd find it interesting to see a documentary on what it actually entails to be a premier league manager, not that bollocks load of cringe we had with Rodgers.

Yes. As with Prime Ministers, it's really down to the individual how much or little they do. I'm reliably informed that Brian Clough, in his last two or three years, started the day at about 10am, by coming into his office, removing a bottle of whisky from his filing cabinet, pouring out a large tumbler for himself and a single into his dog's water bowl, then he'd put his feet up and chat to the local hack for about an hour, then he'd make a few phone calls, have a snooze, go off for lunch, and that would pretty much be that unless there was a real crisis. On one sunny afternoon near the end of a season he was found in a nearby field, fast asleep. How he staggered through that awful final season is something of a miracle.

Then you had someone like Houllier, post-illness, who became so paranoid he'd spend his first hour scouring every newspaper he could find to see who was 'plotting' against him. He would then be so obsessive that it was rare to see him leave Melwood before 8pm. If he didn't actually have work to do he'd patrol the place like some kind of security man.

 

[leftpeg]

It's all a bit finger in the air this isn't it? If you take our Jurgen as an example, we can probably hazard a guess that a typical working day will include coaching, analysis, meetings with health and fitness staff, one to ones with players, media work, talks with CEO and others in leadership roles, community-based stuff, sponsor engagements etc. I don't know how long he will spend on each but I'll bet in total he spends much more than 12 hours a day in his professional capacity as Liverpool manager. It's a great job of course, but I'm sure it leaves very little free time. If he had to do a timesheet I reckon Klopp would clock-up 90 hours a week as Liverpool manager.

 

[dantes]

The continual obsession with restructuring the entire club to their own taste, whilst also keeping everything ticking over day to day whilst undertaking this years-long project, probably explains and adds a lot of those additional hours.