Ryan O’HanlonJan 27, 2026, 05:00 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on X
play1:31Ruben Amorim’s last Manchester United press conferenceRuben Amorim’s tense final Manchester United press conference, after drawing 1-1 with Leeds United in the Premier League.
Ruben Amorim’s last Manchester United press conferenceRuben Amorim’s tense final Manchester United press conference, after drawing 1-1 with Leeds United in the Premier League.
Ruben Amorim’s tense final Manchester United press conference, after drawing 1-1 with Leeds United in the Premier League.
Back in 2004, Arsenal had just won their second Premier League title in three years. More important, though, was what they didn’t do: lose. Twenty-plus years later, the Invincibles are still the only Premier League team to survive a full season without a single defeat.
They’re also the last Arsenal team to win the Premier League — in large part because of what happened after that historic season. Construction began on London’s first-ever spaceship, the Emirates Stadium. Although the intimacy of 35,000-person Highbury was beloved by fans, a new 60,000-person stadium was supposed to unlock a new level of revenue that would allow the Gunners to continue to compete with the commercial giants at Manchester United and the Russian oligarch who’d just bought Chelsea.
You’ll never guess what happened next: Arsenal got worse. They finished second the following season, but never got that high again until 2015-16, and even that felt hollow since the team that finished ahead of them was tiny Leicester City. So diminished were the club’s expectations that manager Arsene Wenger infamously said, “The first trophy is to finish in the top four,” after a 2-0 loss to Sunderland in the FA Cup in 2012.
Wenger had such influence over everything that happened at Arsenal that the banks refused to loan the club the money for the Emirates unless it could guarantee that he’d remain the manager for another five years. The Gunners, essentially, used their powerful manager as collateral to pave the way for a future that suddenly doesn’t seem too far away: one where powerful managers no longer exist.
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In basketball, coaches are constantly making substitutions and drawing up new plays whenever there’s a timeout. They’re actively affecting what happens on the court. In American football, coaches are literally designing the game. An offensive coach picks a play, a defensive coach picks a play, the center snaps the ball to the quarterback, and all of the players on the field act out their individual orders.
Historically, managers had their biggest impact by making large-scale changes outside of what actually happened on the field. At Arsenal, much of Wenger’s success was driven by the fact that he trusted foreign players more than any other manager in the league. This allowed the club to sign superstars like Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira without much competition from anyone else in England.
Wenger was the first coach in league history to select an entirely non-English starting 11. He was also the first coach to tell his players that it might make sense to start taking care of their bodies.
“When Arsene arrived, he changed things,” Vieira told me back in 2018. “You weren’t allowed to eat chips with brunch. You weren’t allowed the butter. You were doing all the stretching. He’d bring a nutritionist to make us understand how important it is to eat properly.”
Combine those two factors with Wenger’s preference for a more attacking, fluid style of play and Arsenal’s general financial advantage over most of the Premier League, and you get most of the way to understanding why his team was so good.
“Although I was always trying to disprove it, I believe that the cycle of a successful team lasts maybe four years, and then some change is needed,” he told the Harvard Business Review in 2012. “So we tried to visualize the team three or four years ahead and make decisions accordingly.” He added: “The goal was to evolve gradually, moving older players out and younger players in.”
Ferguson had an innate understanding of the length of a player’s prime — four years — and when it typically started. Analysis from the Harvard Business Review found that Ferguson’s United signed a higher proportion of players under the age of 25 than any of their closest competitors.
United had more money than anyone in England, and they had a coach who better understood the patterns of player performance and what drives long-term success than anyone else. On top of that, he also had a better understanding of the competitive incentives — that a win is worth three-times as many points as a draw. His team specifically practiced for the moments when they needed to chase games, and he would always make aggressive subs if the match was tied or they were losing.
“I am a gambler, a risk-taker, and you can see that in how we played in the late stages of matches,” he said. Over his final 10 seasons, United won more points than any other club in matches that were tied with 15 minutes remaining.
In the 1997-98 season, the earliest for which the accounting firm Deloitte has published data, Manchester United brought in €132.4 million of revenue. They were the richest club in the world. Fast-forward to today and Real Madrid’s world-leading revenues are €1.61 billion.
If we step out of the corporate mindset for a second and just focus on trying to win, then the dwindling power of the manager also makes sense.
It’s obviously the latter. And a version of that kind of structure is what took Liverpool from bordering on midtable mediocrity to becoming the best team in the world for long stretches of time. But even that power-balance proved tricky to maintain. Toward the end of Jurgen Klopp’s tenure, almost every key front office decision-maker left the club. And it’s not a coincidence that many of them returned right after Klopp left.
Most other clubs now want their own version of this hierarchy, where the coach fits into the decision-making structure, rather than building the decision-making structure around him. Look at how many coaches even have the term “manager” as their title today: just five of the 20 currently in the Premier League.
Most coaches, though, didn’t get into coaching because they wanted to integrate advice from the medical team, listen to data nerds, or tweak their tactical approach because it’s what someone in a suit told them to do.
Ruben Amorim’s last Manchester United press conference
Both coaches were fired because they envisioned themselves as powerful managers, and both of their clubs don’t think that role even exists anymore. We’ll see who United hire next, but by hiring an inexperienced coach from what is essentially their farm team in France, Chelsea seem to be telling us that “doing what we tell you to do” is one of the main requirements for the guy on their sideline.
It feels like we’ve finally hit an inflection point, where what coaches and clubs expect from each other is no longer aligned at all. So what might happen next?
There are a number of big-name coaches who will be wrapping up the main requirements of their current gigs this summer. Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino and Julian Nagelsmann are all currently coaching national teams who will be at the World Cup, and they theoretically should be in-demand for all of the top club jobs if they decide to leave after the tournament.
But if Amorim and Maresca — two inexperienced managers with no track record of any success at the highest level — couldn’t handle their lack of power, then why wouldn’t bigger name coaches with much more impressive résumés have the same kinds of issues?
At Manchester City, Pep Guardiola is closer to the traditional ideal of the manager than anyone else coaching one of the richest clubs in the world. And he’s unlikely to be at the club for more than another full season. But if he leaves, the most likely outcome isn’t that Manchester City give the next coach as much influence as Guardiola has. No, it’s that they hire someone whom they don’t need to give as much power to.
Now, club structures are beginning to mirror the corporate bureaucracies that these new owners are used to working within. Chelsea, as Gab Marcotti pointed out recently, have eight sporting directors — eight! Tottenham finally realized maybe they should have only one. And at Manchester United, the balance of responsibilities within the hierarchy seems to change every couple of days.
Perhaps, then, it’s fitting where this Premier League season is likely to end up, with Arsenal winning its first title since the Invincibles did it.
When Wenger left Arsenal, he wasn’t replaced by a manager. The club named Unai Emery the “head coach” and when that didn’t work out, they replaced him with another head coach. The club’s operations staff ballooned in size after Wenger left, and they made a bunch of terrible decisions.
Today, the approach to making decisions appears to be a little more streamlined, if still much more modern than it was in the Highbury days. There are representatives from ownership, there’s the sporting director, and then there’s Mikel Arteta. He was hired as a head coach and, eventually, promoted to the role of manager.
Unlike in the United States, the idea of a publicly funded stadium would’ve caused a riot, so the club had to find a way to pay for their new digs. Since every club that’s trying to win trophies has to reinvest the majority of its revenue back into player wages, Arsenal had to take out a $350 million loan from the bank. And since Arsenal suddenly had to pay off the interest on a loan that cost four times the then-world-record fee Real Madrid paid to acquire Zinedine Zidane from Juventus, the Gunners had to stop spending so much money on players.