Best Managers In Football of All Time

Best football managers

Best Football Managers in Football

Football is loved across the world for its explosive dynamism and the intensity every moment in the 90 minutes of each game holds. This fast-paced nature of the sport detracts many of our attention from the game that is played on a wholly different level outside the field – the game of formations, transfers, managing squads, detecting and nourishing young potential, recognizing and utilizing form, watching over the squad like the sole paternal figure: the manager. No matter how star-studded, technically gifted, or full of chemistry, a team without a potent manager will always fail to harness their full potential.

The manager, therefore, plays a key role in deciding the future of any number of rosters, and the football world recognizes them as such – the always watchful protector standing on the sidelines, the twelfth, and leading, brain in any team on and off the game time. Every successful team owes, to varying extent, immense debts to their managers, and the same respect, therefore, should go out to all the managers – who dedicate a lot more than we would like to admit, many of them even the remainder of their lives – to the betterment of the team they have committed to. That being said, here are the top five football managers of modern football that continue to shine even brighter than the rest.

#1 Pep GuardiolaPep Guardiola

A very prudent fashion to start off this list would be to highlight a duo of managers to take after the same team – none other than Bayern Munich, and why the tide of success they ride doesn’t necessarily be the end-all for their managerial merit. This is not a worry for the legendary proponent of the tiki-taka, Pep’s application of this possessive play in FC Barcelona is dubbed the finest rendition of the Spanish style. This 4-3-3 moved away more towards a zonal play from the conventional attacking football that was the standard for a few decades. But what truly made Pep great was the ‘six-second rule’ championed by Barca, with constant pressing football whenever possible – a collective pressing mechanism that was the love-child of Guardiola’s dexterity at drafting and Barca’s elite league of midfielders – the alliance of Spanish guile and Dutch art. After his exit from Barca, Guardiola’s next big gig was his three-season stay at Bayern from 2013 to 2016, in which he had, again, left his trace of possessive football, winning over the 2013 UEFA Super Cup shortly after his arrival, and breaking the records for the earliest Bundesliga season win with seven matches remaining for Bayern Munich.

#2 Carlo Ancelotti

Carlo-Ancelotti

The definitive matchwinner gaffer – perhaps even the finest to grace the world of football today, Ancelotti had raised concerns, buzz, and eyebrows after his sacking from Bayern, as, unfortunately, proved only a mediocre successor to Pep’s footprints in the 2016-2017 season. His inclusion in this list is definitely for his own merits of deserving to be called the best of the world, but this also acts as a reminder that the bumps of failure and years of obscurity cannot suppress a great manager’s masterworks. Ancelotti is one of the most unique is that his masterwork scheme is simply to win. That’s it. Ancelotti has no mainstay tactical anchor or defined inclination towards a style. Ancelotti shines, contrary to his reputation of the Bayern Munich season, at winning games – adapting to the situations and making out the best possible strategy. Ancelotti’s unmaking at Bayern was his attempt to take after Pep’s tactics because he is not possession-based steady development, but a more straightforward attacking football. The most pragmatic player of the coach, Ancelotti’s teams are known for scoring often and scoring a lot, rather than the possession records. His 6 domestic league titles and 7 cups, as well as the 3 UEFA Super Cups, prove this capability.

#3 Jose Mourinho

Jose Mourinho

Of course, the list would be incomplete without this ‘special one’, and so would be modern football. Mourinho’s versatility testifies to the proclaimed sobriquet: he has won domestic titles in 4 different countries throughout his career. Who can forget the explosive maiden season at Chelsea where both won AND broke the premier league point tally record (95)? The boy wonder, who dropped out from business school on his first day to study sports science, today sits on top of the football world with a plethora of records – most domestic league score points, most unbeaten home league games, and the longest unbeaten home run by a manager – 9 long years! Mourinho’s physically strong football is informed by his philosophy of keeping open avenues and a midfield emphasis – his stress on the potential in the 4-3-3 and 4-1-3-2 in his early Chelsea seasons over a pure diamond underlines this.

#4 Jurgen Klopp

Jurgen Klopp

Klopp’s relatively obscure, albeit successful, career at Mainz 05 (both as a long-time player and a manager) saw its promotion to the top league in Germany. But Klopp’s rise to fame is invariably associated with his three-year stay at Borussia Dortmund, netting them the league titles in the first two seasons against all odds. After getting his seat on Liverpool’s managerial chair, he famously dubbed himself ‘the normal one’ as a retort to Mourinho – and if so, this is indeed a heavy-hitting normal one. Under Klopp, Liverpool has been slowly working its way back to his glory days thanks to his signature Gegenpressing – the heavy metal football where the team wins back possession with high pressing up the pitch and transitions smoothly into a counterattacking goal.

#5 Sir Alex Ferguson

Sir Alex Ferguson

We have said ‘modern football’ on the list, but adaptability and consistency should play a large role in the making of a good coach as much as tactical genius and leadership should – and for all of these, Sir Alex Ferguson was the complete package. Whatever Manchester Utd is today, it is because of Ferguson. After leaving Aberdeen a tip-top shape forerunner of its realm with three Scottish titles, four Scottish Cups and a league cup, Ferguson had taken over the reins of Manchester United after the dismissal of Ron Atkinson. But what made him one of the best, unforgettable names of EPL, and in the history of football managers across the world, was not the 38 trophies in his 26 years, but the figure of Sir Ferguson the motivator – Sir Ferguson who truly became a father figure to his player, whose radiance and pep talk could bring every player on his edge, every underperformer to his confidence.

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