You’ll have probably seen the clip by now.
It’s from a glossy YouTube short put together by Ligue 1, the top division of French club football, about Strasbourg’s 1-1 draw with Angers early last season, and specifically their head coach at the time, Liam Rosenior.
Rosenior gets asked if he’s a manager or a coach, and this is his answer, in full:
“I’m both. Coaching is educating, coaching is wanting to improve players on a technical and tactical level. Management is making sure that you have a strong culture, that your players have rules and regulations, and you manage them in the right way. In English, the word ‘manage’ — if you split the two words, it’s man (and) age — you’re ageing men.”
Cue extended mockery. Social media had a field day.
From comparisons with The Office’s David Brent, down to the basics of that phrase simply not making any sense, this felt like the apogee of LinkedIn-style ‘management speak’. It was an example of the sort of language that, to many people, is an attempt to make a smart slogan or maxim, something repeatable that could be put up on a wall as an inspirational quote, something a middle manager might think would motivate their staff.
It’s not an isolated thing with Rosenior.
In a recent interview with The Athletic FC Podcast, he commented that “the future doesn’t exist — it only exists once you get there”. While in one of his first media appearances after getting the Chelsea job a couple of weeks ago, he said the “potential for this club is limitless, and I won’t limit limitlessness”. You won’t have to comb through many of his interviews to hear him say that “pressure is a privilege”.
He’s very much not alone, because this sort of stuff has been gradually growing in football for some years.
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta is a keen exponent, from the time he held up a lightbulb to his players during a pre-match team talk about connectivity and urged them to “go out there and turn the f***ing light on”, to an appearance at an event called ‘Empowering Leaders’ where he stated his most significant connection was not with another human being, but with a ball.
Gareth Southgate, manager of the England men’s national team from 2016 to 2024, has written two books that broadly deal with the subject of ‘leadership’ or inspiring people, the second of which is stuffed with slightly vague buzzwords like ‘integrity’ and ‘accountability’, and contains a surreal passage in which he compares his ‘scenario planning’ with England to the U.S. Navy SEALs unit who killed Osama bin Laden.
Then there’s U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes, who, when she was Chelsea Women manager and was asked a question about her Arsenal counterpart Jonas Eidevall, responded by reading a section from the Robert Frost poem Choose Something Like A Star.
Newcastle head coach Eddie Howe’s appearance on UK TV presenter Jake Humphrey’s High Performance Podcast is a goldmine for anyone looking for the sort of buzzwords and phrases that fit with this genre of management speak, with “vision drives decision” being a particularly notable example.
A few weeks ago, Thomas Frank, amid one of the numerous crises he has found himself in since being named Tottenham Hotspur head coach last summer, said: “In a storm, some are building fences and hiding behind it, others are building windmills and getting stronger and getting more energy and learning from it.” Which, when combined with his general unpopularity among the Tottenham fans, is why he has earned the nickname ‘David Brentford’.
Finally, Brendan Rodgers is perhaps the original, the poster boy for this sort of stuff, and there are dozens of articles out there that compile the former Liverpool, Celtic and Leicester City manager’s most-mocked quotes and buzzword phrases. A personal favourite is: “I don’t train players. You train dogs. I like to educate players.”
It’s very easy to pour ridicule on this stuff and, out of context, a lot of it is very funny. In the UK, certainly, the culture of puncturing over-earnestness and perceived pomposity through humour is strong: this sort of LinkedIn-style language is considered fair game for taking the p***.
But the thing is, does it actually matter? Does it make any difference to the actual job that, away from the context of football, some of this stuff sounds absurd? Does it only matter if this stuff works?
“I remember the first time I met Brendan, he came into the dressing room and straight away there was a presence, an aura about him, and the way he spoke grabbed everyone. That doesn’t happen with every manager.”
That’s Marc Albrighton, who played under Rodgers for nearly four years at Leicester, winning the FA Cup and finishing in the top 10 of the Premier League four times, and he raises a key point.
The ‘LinkedIn’ language seems absurd and infuriating because it screams of inauthenticity. It sounds like the language of the grifter, the hapless contestant on The Apprentice who has no substance to them but is just trying to style things out, of someone who has blagged their way into a position their ability does not merit. But it becomes slightly different when the person does actually have something about them.
Rodgers, for all that he became a figure of fun and thought of as football’s answer to David Brent, is an undeniably excellent coach.
He almost won the 2013-14 Premier League with a Liverpool team that had a few outstanding individuals but, based on overall talent, should have been nowhere near the top. He won four league titles with Celtic, three of which were part of domestic trebles and went unbeaten in the Scottish top flight in 2016-17, the first to do so since 1899. Then there was that record at Leicester. It ended badly for him at all three clubs, but then again most managerial tenures do. The public language may seem risible, but that is only a surface-level thing.
Equally, Arteta is on course this season to win Arsenal’s first Premier League title since 2004. Southgate took England to consecutive European Championship finals and a World Cup semi-final, and was objectively the team’s best manager since the 1966 World Cup-winning Sir Alf Ramsey.
You’d be reading for a while if we listed all the honours Hayes has won, but the headline is seven Women’s Super League titles in nine years. Last season, Howe delivered Newcastle’s first major domestic trophy since 1955. Frank, despite his problems at Spurs, did a brilliant job at Brentford, getting them promoted to the Premier League (a club who hadn’t been in the top division of English football for over 70 years) and not just keeping them there but finishing in the top 10 twice in four seasons and never being in serious relegation trouble.
The point is that most of the people in football who are fond of LinkedIn language/management speak/Brentisms/whatever you want to call it, have the achievements to back it up.
Rosenior doesn’t yet, but his managerial career is young.
It’s a problem of perception from the outside, and according to Albrighton at least, that tends not to permeate the dressing room.
“As a player, you get to know a manager more from his personality, rather than what you see in the outside world,” he tells The Athletic. “You’re obviously aware of how they’re portrayed in public, but when you’re working with them day to day, you notice things about them. You get to see if they’re real, and the personality that they show is their real one.”
Another question is whether managers will use this sort of thing in the dressing room, or whether it’s just external projection. The quick answer to that is: yes, they do. But in the sporting environment, it can make more sense.
Take the Arteta lightbulb thing.
Watching him give that team talk, you can see a couple of smiles being stifled as he waves his lightbulb in the players’ faces and barks about connectivity, but it’s more about the rhythm and energy in his voice than the actual words he’s saying. Everything builds to a crescendo as he moves around the circle of players, their arms draped around each other.
At the end, as the team head out onto the pitch, they’re clearly fired up. Is that because they’ve just been given a crash course in the life and times of Thomas Edison? No, it’s because their manager is an intense and engaging sort who is trying to raise their motivation and energy levels.
You suspect that, in situations like that, the words are not the important part.
The important part is the motivational energy of his speech, and Arteta is using a prop and an off-the-wall topic just as a point of difference, to keep their attention: one of the biggest problems managers have is trying to keep the message fresh, and not have people start switching off mentally. All of that said, it is worth pointing out that Arsenal lost the game he was trying to hype them up for.
We also have to entertain the possibility that the stuff we civilians find cringeworthy actually does land with footballers, particularly young ones.
That was something Rosenior found when he was Hull City manager from 2022-24: some of the grumpier, more grizzled older pros found his messaging slightly trying, but as a rule, their more junior team-mates loved it. In his next job at Strasbourg, he was working with an absurdly young squad (their average age was slightly above 22), yet they finished three points off the Champions League places last season.
One thing you’ll often see, when you get a peek behind the scenes at football clubs or really any elite sporting environment, is motivational slogans, often represented visually in some respect. Again, these can fall into the ‘needlessly cringey’ category, but they can work when used properly.
“If it’s shoved down your throat constantly,” says Albrighton, “and there are (ones) that are a bit cheesy, the message will get lost, but if it’s spread out a little bit, there are certain times when it will absolutely work.”
It was interesting listening to Keith Andrews, a young, first-time head coach who has enjoyed terrific and unexpected success with Brentford so far this season, talk about that this week: in the end, it comes down to authenticity.
“I use them on occasions — visuals to provoke thoughts about the next game or where we are in that moment,” Andrews tells The Athletic. “It can be a quote from one of the players — that can be quite powerful. I don’t like seeing them when they’re not put into practice. It’s absolute nonsense. It’s not authentic, it’s not real. You’re just trying to be something you’re not. It’s too easy.
“I think we’ve gone through an era when there was probably too much of that going on, where things would be plastered everywhere, and you would walk around and see that not being practised. That’s not for me. I just want authenticity in terms of what we do and how we go about things.”
Ultimately, it’s about communication between a manager and his players.
“You have to be very deliberate around messages you give and how you deliver them, (and) when you deliver them,” Andrews adds. “We’ve got a very multicultural dressing room, I know for a fact not all players will understand the first meeting on our game plan, as an example. So I need to identify who hasn’t quite got the key messages, and either me or the coaches or the analysts revisit with them. We learn from the individuals themselves about what makes them tick — we all learn differently, regardless of the language barriers.”
What underpins most of this kind of language is a sort of super-earnest, hyper-positivity.
That’s basically Rosenior’s whole persona, and it is at least partly true for most of the other examples cited here.
Arteta on the touchline is all about super-positive energy, towards his players at least. In that High Performance Podcast interview, Howe gets asked what he did to identify why Newcastle were rubbish when he was appointed in 2021, but he insisted that the first thing he did was focus on what they were doing right and tried to accentuate that, rather than concentrating on the negatives.
Again, this can come across as cringeworthy and inauthentic, but does it necessarily have to be true to be effective? If you tell a player they’re the best in the world, when they’re clearly not, but it nonetheless helps their self-belief and thus their performance, does it matter? It might make that player insufferable for those around them, but if it works, then how much of a problem is it, really?
None of this is intended to scold anyone who finds things like “vision drives decision”, or “you train dogs — I like to educate players”, or “you’re ageing men” funny. They are pretty funny, cringey, insufferable, or whatever other emotion some sales manager on LinkedIn inspires in you. It’s just that in some cases, it doesn’t matter if we find them ridiculous.
In the case of Rosenior, we don’t really know yet how much substance there is behind his words. He’s a promising young coach but there’s not enough evidence to know whether he is a good manager. But you can be pretty sure of one thing: his success or otherwise at Chelsea will not rest on whether he occasionally comes out with a meaningless statement he read in some book about leadership.
Who knows, maybe he’ll age these men all the way to the Champions League final.