Erik ten Hag lost his job at Manchester United for a multitude of reasons but, in his own analysis of what went wrong, there was one particularly striking observation. “The generation I grew up in had much thicker skin – you could be much more direct,” said Ten Hag. “If I would do that with my current group of players I would demotivate them. The current generation find it offensive. Criticism really gets to them.”
It did not take long for Ten Hag’s words to find support. “The tail is wagging the dog,” declared Graeme Souness, who highlighted players’ media exposure, contractual power and what he called the “wokeism that permeates” society. “All of those elements make it extremely difficult to manage the modern footballer,” said the former Liverpool and Rangers manager in his Daily Mail column.
Cristiano Ronaldo hardly saw eye to eye with Ten Hag but, upon departing Manchester United, even he appeared to have some sympathy by claiming that younger players “have things more easily” than his vintage.
Attention spans getting shorter
A world-renowned coach in another major team sport also told Telegraph Sport how he has consciously changed the way he speaks to players, notably the time he takes to disseminate key information. Attention spans, he believes, have become shorter among Gen Z, a development that is the subject of some debate among academics but is believed to be linked to an information overload in this age of smartphones and social media.
That accessibility of information, however, is perhaps also critical in understanding why the underlying dynamic has evolved, arguably for the better. Athletes are more knowledgeable. They are more connected with each other and have far more points of comparison to other coaches. It means that the days of blindly just following someone’s instructions are gone.
Bill Beswick, a 79-year-old sports psychologist who counts such uncompromising winners as Sir Alex Ferguson, Roy Keane and Adam Peaty among his former clients, advocates discipline, consistency and a “fighter” rather than “victim” mindset. But he also emphasises the huge positive changes he has witnessed.
“My generation… if the coach said, ‘Run around the track 14 times’, you ran around the track 14 times’,” he told the Mulligan Brothers podcast. “If he said, ‘Run through a brick wall’, you ran through a brick wall. Now, this generation says, ‘Why?’ It’s more challenging to a coach and a coach has to become more empathetic, more people focused, more sensitive and certainly more skilled at the art of coaching.
“The key quality is empathy. Emotional intelligence is very important. This generation coming through is a wonderful generation because they are comfortable with feelings.
“They will reshape thoughts about the process of winning. [But] certainly a lot of coaches now are in trouble because their values are not in tune with the 18-year-olds they are going to coach.”
No more expletive-laden feedback
Communication has certainly evolved from the days when Brian Clough declared that he would like to be “the perfect dictator” and might lace humour with a literal fist in the stomach. Or technical feedback that did not extend much beyond telling a misfiring player that “they want bloody shooting”. Fear was an undoubted tool for many of the most successful leaders, especially in football, where direct, personal and expletive-laden feedback was commonplace.
“You were scared of the manager and, if you did something wrong, you were told – usually loudly,” says one former professional footballer who moved into management.
“You can’t work like that any more. You can’t shout or threaten people or throw teacups around the workplace. And that’s a good thing. But most players do still want critical feedback – it just needs to be constructively delivered. One to ones are more common. If you humiliate someone in front of the group – something I saw regularly as a player – you will almost certainly lose that player now.
“The subject of criticism is nuanced too. Yes, it is certainly less direct now than it was but we didn’t have social media to deal with so there is less escape now.”
Michael Caulfield, a psychologist for Brentford in the Premier League, believes that those “threats and stressors” for young people are actually greater than when he was young. “I think they have it harder than the ‘shouting’ times when it was right in front of you but you might not have had a landline let alone a mobile phone,” he says. “Online life ensures this constant cycle of comparison and that is very testing.”
People management
Technology also throws up new issues for coaches, who increasingly exercise caution when communicating via a mobile device and are more likely to leave conversations around subjects like nutrition, weight or mental health to experts in the relevant field. British Gymnastics issued guidance on weighing athletes for the first time only 18 months ago after the Whyte Review found that more than half of athletes felt they were subjected to emotional abuse that included withholding food, public weigh-ins and humiliating fat-shaming comments.
It was very clearly unacceptable but there is a wider debate about whether the line is being redrawn in a way that could make genuinely relevant and constructive feedback impossible. Telegraph Sport has been separately told of coaches in other sports being reported to governing bodies over training and nutritional advice that an athlete might simply regard as misplaced or negative, as well as swearing. A storm blew up in women’s cricket last year when the BBC pundit and World Cup winner Alex Hartley said that some players were not fit enough and lagging behind the Australians in their physical preparation. Hartley says that she was subsequently “given the cold shoulder” by players and coaches, although it was stressed that there was a divide in who took offence. The England team duly lost all seven matches of their Ashes series.
It all points to the need for a bespoke approach; something that Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows have tried to implement with their M11 Track Club Group that includes Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson.
A straight-talking former rugby league player from Wigan, Painter does not hesitate in saying that “people management” has become more important than all the technical and scientific expertise he brings to the job.
“We do coach everyone as individuals – we try to focus on the human being rather than the athlete,” says Painter who, rather like Alex Ferguson with Eric Cantona, openly admits that there is more flexibility with what he calls “a free spirit” like Hodgkinson. It had meant encouraging her interests outside of athletics and accepting a propensity to be late in exchange for knowing that, when it really matters, she will deliver.
“It’s the free-thinking, free-spirited Keely who races with not a care in the world and makes great decisions when 80,000 people are screaming and the pressure is on,” he says.
In Olympic sports, the willingness of Gen Z to speak out on social issues has also become ever more striking to their coaches, with the 18-year-old running prodigy Innes FitzGerald recently highlighting concerns about climate change.
FitzGerald’s coach Gavin Pavey also guided his wife, Jo, to five Olympic Games and, like Painter and Meadows, has been adopting a light touch by encouraging interests and an identity away from sport. “If she goes off to a nightclub, or goes to the beach all day, as far as I’m concerned, that’s brilliant,” he says.
Ferguson knew two most important words
In football, it is fascinating to consider those coaches who have boomed and those who have faded as Gen Z – defined as those born between 1997 and 2012 – has been reaching adulthood. Carlo Ancelotti, an avuncular people person, seems to constantly connect with ever younger players. Harry Redknapp was similarly adaptable and thinks that an arm around the shoulder has always been more effective than the hairdryer anyway. “Sir Alex would say that the two most important words that a manager can ever use are simply, ‘Well done’. I couldn’t agree more,” he says.
The highest-profile example of a manager whose stock has fallen over the past decade is Jose Mourinho, an all-time great in his field who is now at Fenerbahce in Turkey. At the mention of his name, one leading sports psychologist told Telegraph Sport: “Once it becomes too much about you [as a coach], I think you are done.”
The author Ben Lyttleton spent time with the new England manager Thomas Tuchel when he was still learning his trade in Germany and believes that he came to represent a new style of collaborative leadership that has become hugely effective.
“He was very keen to talk about developing players as people first and athletes second,” says Lyttleton. “It is the prototype of a modern manager whereby the player buys into a project and it’s seeing how far you can go on that journey, learning and improving all the way. It’s holistic.”
Other managers who have epitomised a style of leadership in which Gen Z seems to prosper include Eddie Howe at Newcastle United, Thomas Frank at Brentford and the former England manager Gareth Southgate.
Howe uses individual feedback extensively and, like Tuchel, has inspired great success by encouraging players to invest with him in their own voyage of improvement. “One of my most common conversations with footballers is, ‘How can I not be in the team because I am better than him?’” says Howe. “One of the most constant things I say is, ‘I am talking about you and I know that you can give me better. I would rather you judge yourself against yourself’.”
Like Pavey, Southgate encouraged his players to express themselves on issues outside of football and, while some will argue that a more direct style might have ended England’s near 60-year trophy wait, he went much closer than anyone before.
‘Only a stupid person would not adapt’
Frank and Southgate have both also worked with Michael Caulfield, who transitioned into elite sport psychology after 15 years as the chief executive of the Professional Jockeys’ Association.
Caulfield’s impact at Brentford has evolved to the point that he has his own bench at the training ground where young players, as well as the first team, can drop by for a chat. He has also worked with sportspeople that span characters as hardened as Steve Bruce and AP McCoy (who actually suggested the career change) to the teenagers now in the Brentford B team.
“When I started with the B team, I did think, ‘We are so different – how can this possibly work?’ but it’s been the most uplifting experience of my life,” says Caulfield.
“Society has changed – only a stupid person would not adapt – but that is not to say that you abandon good principles. I can learn as much from a young kid starting their career as sitting with someone like Sir Gareth Southgate, but I do notice shifts.”
And what are those shifts? “What they have that is so different is knowledge,” says Caulfield. “They can say, ‘look at this’. They are informed and educated. You can’t just say ‘Do this’.
“Attention spans have changed – you haven’t always got long – and many people do prefer to learn visually. But I think that is the same for everyone because there is so much information coming at us.”
So what is the key when communicating? “Young people want one thing – the truth,” says Caulfield. “If you take the time to notice them, to listen to them, they will respond. I find they are just as interested in me as I am in them. They want to learn from yesteryear.
“I have worked with so-called hard-nosed, old-fashioned coaches but the phrase ‘old school’ is wrong. Someone like Steve Bruce is not old school – he is right school. He had the touch of a heart surgeon when it was required. I’ve spoken to people who played under Bill Shankly. He was revered for his kindness. The players have to know that you have got their back and the best way to connect is through trust, building stories and humour. I like to work outside. Face to face and looking people in the eye – that is still where the magic happens.”
Emotional intelligence and accessibility to information is also stressed by Richard Kilty, the 35-year-old former world champion sprinter who is now coaching Louie Hinchliffe, Britain’s fastest man in 2024. “The athletes now can do any research they want, they can train themselves,” says Kilty. “Every generation is different – the generation before me was different too. You’ve got to evolve or die.”
Evolve or die. It is a phrase that feels telling and, as some rail against what has changed, it is those who adjust, all the while staying true to timeless principles, who now thrive.
