Clubs hire football managers based on their style of play. But when results go badly, should coaches change their principles for a short-term gain?
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00:00The world's top football coaches are defined by their team's playing style, which is fine when they play well, but when it goes badly, does sticking by the same coaching principles become stubbornness? Let's take a look into how and when managers and coaches choose to evolve and adapt in modern football.
00:21Hello and welcome to Football Now here from the Albayt Stadium in Qatar. A key part of being a great football manager is the instinct to adjust playing tactics as and when is needed. This can either come in the form of subtle tweaks during matches to gain an edge or overhauling entire systems to improve long-term results.
00:48So, how important is adaptability when it comes to being a great coach?
00:54For me, it's the key. Being flexible, adapting in every single aspect in football. I think that is the important thing. The most important thing is to try to adapt in all the circumstances.
01:08To understand why managers can be so reluctant to veer away from their primary style of play, we must first understand the work that goes into developing their philosophies when they are starting out.
01:21We spoke to Turkish football coach Corey Palaz and asked him if there is such a thing as a direct route into the managerial side of football.
01:30I think personally the best part is to go into academy and get a couple of years under your belt because playing is completely different to managing. It has no relevance. The only relevance that there are is actually the training times. That's the only relevance.
01:47Apart from that, it takes a lot of leadership skills and then you have to have a game for yourself which you have to implement. Where does that come from? That comes from working with various managers throughout your playing career and then you start picking up best training sessions, then you start picking up a game methodology and then you start working on that.
02:09In the Premier League, two coaches have come under intense scrutiny this season for being reluctant to adapt their style of play in the face of difficult results.
02:20And Postacoglu at Tottenham and Ruan Amarim at Manchester United have implemented their ideas and have found it difficult.
02:29Unfortunately for them, both clubs currently reside in the bottom half of the Premier League table.
02:35So should managers like Postacoglu and Amarim adapt their ideas to get better results in the short term or should their employers trust the process and hope that by implementing their philosophies over a longer period of time, it will eventually bring success further down the road?
02:53I've just got a lot of admiration, personally speaking, for coaches who know exactly what they want to do and are good at doing and set about achieving it.
03:02And I've also got admiration for clubs who decide that's what we want as well.
03:05I also think it's something that clubs just kind of have to go through these days to get places.
03:10For me, the disasters happen when clubs bow to the noise.
03:13It would be madness, and Tottenham are a sort of testament to this, is to go down one road a little bit and to encounter some trouble and then decide, no, no, we want to go down a different road.
03:24And then you go down that road for a bit and that works out for a while, but then you hit another wall.
03:28And so it's like, no, new manager, different road.
03:31The top end of it is so good at the moment that the only way to get there for clubs who aren't on that side is to crash through.
03:38And whether you can crash through with the same manager, ideally you do, sometimes not, but it just needs to be a commitment for me to an idea.
03:47And multiple people can execute the same idea, but as long as you're going down that same road, you don't have to keep overhauling your squad to bring in different types of players.
03:55That's the way for me.
03:57As a younger generation of coaches begin to grab the spotlight, they have to prove they are worthy of getting the opportunity to take on big jobs.
04:05Belgian coach Vincent Kompany faced criticism last season as he was the head coach of Burnley FC because he refused to divert from his expansive style of play.
04:17Ultimately, the team were relegated to the championship.
04:21Well, it didn't end too badly for Kompany as he moved to Germany last summer to become the coach of Bayern Munich.
04:28As it's felt that his style of play could be better suited to players with more quality.
04:34Fast forward by nearly a year and he has the club on track to reclaim the Bundesliga title.
04:41So how has he developed the tactics he was playing in Burnley to become successful at the elite levels of European football?
04:50I think the best managers come in with a philosophy, but they adapt to what they've got.
04:56And the fact that Kompany didn't really succeed with his style of play between the championship and the Premier League in that transition is perhaps an indicator that he's still a young manager, learning.
05:07And at Bayern, he fell on that a few times at the beginning.
05:11Some of the defensive mistakes that Bayern made, particularly before Christmas, were due to tactical errors by Kompany and a little bit of naivete.
05:21Now, to his credit, I do believe that in the year 2025, he has changed that approach and solidified Bayern defensively.
05:30This showed that for the rest of the world, that they're a team to be reckoned with, but also that Kompany is a coach who has taken that extra step.
05:40There's a balance to be found when trying to be one of the world's best football coaches, as some of the biggest names in today's game have found out.
05:48Let us know when you think tactics should be evolved and adapted using the hashtag FootballNowCoachingPhilosophies.
05:55That's all we've got time for, though, here this week. We'll see you next time. Bye for now.