Positional Play and manager metrics

Everyone knows the problems and the buzzwords. The theory is this: Teams are difficult to organise; individual magic is great but usually creates inefficiencies; a structure, aligned with meaningful goals, speeds up a team to being good.

Am I describing Positional Play or Agile project management?

For those unfamiliar with the term:

Agile is a collection of software development practices that built on existing ideas, grouped under an umbrella term, with courses and how-to books springing up for this now-a-proper-noun methodology; it is sometimes criticised as a management fad that is applied in cases it needn’t be.

Positional Play is a collection of football tactical practices that built on existing ideas, grouped under an umbrella term, with courses and how-to books springing up for this now-a-proper-noun methodology; it is sometimes criticised as a management fad that is applied in cases it needn’t be.

Good, we’re all caught up.

Now, don’t close your inbox if you’re not in software. Everywhere that there’s management, there’ll be theories and snags where implementation hits the road. Government, supermarkets, building sites, military theory. (Google ‘Sun Tzu business book’, you could start a library).

My point is that it’s easier to talk about football tactical approaches when you think about them in this way. The terms are more like genres than rubrics. Or schools of thought, within which there can be disagreements and room for leeway.

There’s an ‘analytics’ point we’re strolling towards, this isn’t completely a newsletter of amateur HBR-ing. First, though, we need to visit Munich.

Vincent Kompany, the current Bayern men’s team coach, has an unusual management career path. From Anderlecht to Burnley, with a promotion and relegation, and then to Germany’s dominant club. The style of play at Burnley translated well to their position as top team in the English Championship, very badly to their position as one of the worst teams in the Premier League, but, crucially, quite well to mega-teams like Bayern.

If we go back to the business management metaphor, what works for multinational corporations will be different, to some extent, to best practice at a neighbourhood Tesco Express. Bayern didn’t look at Kompany’s Premier League relegation as an abject failure, they’ll have seen it as a datapoint in his (sigh) management philosophy.

An advantage that football has over the rest of the business world is that a relatively wide range of manager metrics are easily obtainable. While they won’t be able to tell you for sure how good a manager is, they can at least narrow down the pool of talent to ones who ‘do Agile’, if that were important to you.

If you’re in a boardroom, that is worth paying attention to. For everyone outside, it’s the least interesting thing about football managers.

Here’s the actual interesting thing. Kompany joined Burnley and oversaw them be comprehensively promoted and comprehensively relegated. From Kompany’s perspective, you can see this as a chance to practice his Nasdaq C-suite methodology somewhere that the C-suite hirers were definitely watching, unlike Belgium. But from Burnley’s perspective, you do wonder a little more about the value in hiring a McKinsey grad for the mill town Sainsbury’s.

This is the interesting part. The amount of teams wanting to transition between playing styles is almost certainly quite large, almost certainly a difficult task, and almost certainly a very valuable one. Recent Championship-to-Premier League success stories tend to have something interesting tactically about them, either in their initial season or in their later evolution: Brighton, Leeds, Brentford, Bournemouth.

I wrote recently that I think ‘Possession Play’ football is more or less what the best teams inevitably play due to the nature of the sport. The theory is that football is about space and ball control in comparison to your opponents: teams with better players choose a style that maximises their controlling talents; teams with worse players choose a style that minimises the differences or disrupts opponent control. Better tactics or coaching can eke out edges in this battle, moving you up the table, and allowing the team to bring in better players who bring a more advantageous balance to the space/ball-control match-ups.

Who are the managers who are best at this, and does that show up in the data?

(There is a sort of ironic point to be made here too that, at a time when statistical analysis for head coach hires is taking off, there’s a trend for hiring managers in their 30s. The assumption is presumably that they’re both closer to tactical innovation and have room to grow, the latter being a similar logic to snapping up 21-year-old players.)

This brings us to a final point.

In business, it’s recognised that people who are good at scaling a company may not be the best at running it once it’s big. Not only that, but people who are good at scaling may not want to keep running things anyway. (admittedly ‘Neither Moving Fast Nor Breaking Things’ does sound like a bit of a buzzkill). Football doesn’t quite have this same type of appreciation, beyond occasional relegation-firefighter specialists. Managers who can switch up a team’s style but aren’t great at coaching ‘elite’ tactics are seen as limited, both in their aptitude and their career prospects.

If that doesn’t change, it feels like we’ll only get more teams turning their promotion-brand football straight into their relegation-brand football, because it’s the best way for the coach to get a decent job next time.

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A note on the Positional Play-to-Agile metaphor

Given that Agile is aimed at being, y’know, agile, it strikes me that the more literal metaphor would be Agile and ‘Relationism’, where the heavily process-dependent ‘Positional Play’ would be the kind of documentation-driven software practices that Agile was aimed at replacing. The metaphor is less of a 1:1 comparison, but still works on a ‘widespread methodology’ level. And now, the frog is truly dead.