Life provides us all with many reminders that we’re getting older.
Your body aching for no ostensible reason. The increasing realisation you have no idea what music is cool anymore. Hangovers appearing after a couple of quiet beers, rather than a big night out. Measuring the time since you last visited a nightclub in decades, rather than years.
For us football fans, there’s another: managers getting younger.
And in the Premier League, they are getting much younger. The average age of the 20 managers/head coaches in the English top flight as you read this is 47 years and 116 days, which is the lowest in 20 years, and seventh lowest since the Premier League came into existence in 1992.
That is partly thanks to new Brighton head coach Fabian Hurzeler, who at a deeply upsetting 31 years, is younger than the Premier League itself. He isn’t the youngest man to ever take charge of a Premier League game — that honour still rests with Ryan Mason, who was 29 in his first temporary spell as Tottenham head honcho in 2021 — but the German is the youngest permanent manager/head coach the division has seen.
Hurzeler is one of three bosses in their thirties, the others being Ipswich’s Kieran McKenna and Russell Martin of Southampton, both 38. There are more of the 20 under the age of 50 (11) than over.
Perhaps just as significantly, there aren’t any old-timers. Tottenham’s Ange Postecoglou, who turned 59 a few weeks ago, is the oldest man leading a Premier League side. This is the first season there hasn’t been a manager over the age of 60 since 1998-99, when Ron Atkinson had his brief slapstick spell in charge of Nottingham Forest and passed that milestone a month before their relegation was confirmed and he resigned effective the end of the season.
Roy Hodgson held the title of the division’s oldest manager for seven straight seasons and was still going with Crystal Palace at 76, making him comfortably the oldest in Premier League history. Last season we also had David Moyes, who had turned 61 when he left West Ham at the end of it.
The drop in average age could be written off as a slight statistical quirk, and it is clearly significantly affected by the unusual event of losing the competition’s oldest-ever manager while gaining the youngest. But it is representative of a trend: the average age has been getting lower over the past decade or so, from a peak in 2015-16 when it was a few days short of 53.
The line on the graph since isn’t entirely smooth, but managers have basically been getting gradually younger ever since.
It looks like a trend, and almost certainly a deliberate one too.
It’s worth noting that every Premier League club who changed manager this summer brought in someone younger or the same age, in years, as their predecessor.
Julen Lopetegui is only three years Moyes’ junior but Liverpool recruited a 45-year-old Arne Slot (now 46) to fill 57-year-old Jurgen Klopp’s shoes, Hurzeler is 14 years younger than Roberto De Zerbi, and the 52-year-old Mauricio Pochettino was replaced at Chelsea by the 44-year-old Enzo Maresca, who was in turn succeeded by Steve Cooper, also 44 (though two months older).
This is not limited to the Premier League, either. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the two biggest clubs in Germany, had vacancies to fill and gave them to Vincent Kompany, 38, and Nuri Sahin, 35 (now 36).
In Spain, they have seasoned veterans in Carlo Ancelotti, 65, at Real Madrid and Real Betis’ Manuel Pellegrini, who turned 71 this month, but there’s also Inigo Perez at Rayo Vallecano, Claudio Giraldez (both 36) at Celta Vigo and 39-year-old Borja Jimenez at Leganes. Will Still has been around for a little while now, so you forget the France-based head coach, now at Lens, is still only 31 (for another couple of weeks anyway). Serie A bucks the trend slightly, but there’s still 37-year-old Cesc Fabregas at the Como helm.
Cooper, 44, replaced Maresca, who is the same age, at Leicester (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Another club with a record of favouring younger managers are Belgium’s Union Saint-Gilloise. Their current head coach is former West Bromwich Albion defender Sebastien Pocognoli, who is 37 (36 when appointed), and three of their past six coaches have been 40 or under at the time they arrived.
“We have an unofficial ceiling of 55,” Alex Muzio, the Brussels club’s president and majority owner tells The Athletic, when asked about his policy when it comes to appointing managers. That’s not definitive, and they would consider older managers, but it’s a loose framework to start from.
The major underlying factor in this shift towards younger managers is the fact that not many of them are actually ‘managers’ anymore, in the traditional sense of the word. The days when one person essentially did everything themselves at a club are long gone. Those in the dugout tend to be only in charge of the first team with many other duties that were part of the job back in the day now covered by someone else. This narrowing of responsibilities, plus the fact they have more protection and support, means the drawbacks of appointing a younger, less experienced figure are lessened.
That’s the theory, at least. “It needs to be the right club, it needs to work in the right way and have the right support network,” adds Muzio. “But if there’s not the network there, that’s when you’ll have a big issue. (The 42-year-old) Mikel Arteta at Arsenal, for example, is very well protected and looked after.”
Younger managers can be more attractive to a club because they tend to be more pliable, more likely to, for want of a better phrase, toe the company line and fit with the broader goals, rather than traditional managers, who will tend to try to take everything over themselves.
“The older person is more from an era of, ‘Leave it to me, I’ll handle it’,” says Muzio. “That’s not the case so much with younger managers. The younger guy will, in general, be more willing to listen to external advice of all kinds.
“For us, a lot of it is about being open-minded,” he says, explaining that it’s not necessarily about dogmatically going for a younger option for the sake of it, but more about being open to other possibilities.
There’s also the undeniable fact that people like to look clever, and one way for owners/presidents/chief executives/sporting directors to look clever is by appointing someone nobody else has thought of.
There are other more mundane explanations, such as the appointments that came about through circumstance rather than necessarily great forward-planning.
Take McKenna at Ipswich: he joined when they were midway through their third season in League One, the third tier of English football, after almost two decades in the division above — a club at a low ebb. At that stage, they probably couldn’t attract anyone other than a young coach who wanted a chance as a No 1. It’s worked out pretty well for them, with successive promotions, but many other similar examples haven’t.
McKenna has done brilliantly at Ipswich (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
It’s also worth considering the number on a manager’s birth certificate is not the only way of judging their ‘age’, in football terms at least.
Hurzeler raised an interesting point at his introductory press conference at Brighton. “I am a young man, but I am not a young coach,” he said.
His playing career essentially ended at 23, so even though his early days were at a fairly low level in Germany, he has been a coach for eight years. That’s more than Martin, Maresca, Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola and Gary O’Neil at Wolves, and the same as Arteta. It’s much more useful to judge a manager’s experience on how many years they’ve been in the game, rather than how many years they’ve been on the planet.
Muzio explains that there are more managers now who weren’t players, or at least didn’t have significant playing careers. They didn’t have to be a pro for 15 years to legitimise themselves in the game, so by definition they have been able to start coaching at a much younger age— Hurzeler being the most obvious example in the Premier League.
Additionally, clubs are simply being a little more imaginative with their appointments.
For many years, there was a carousel of ‘proven’ veteran managers who clubs would turn to in moments of need, and thus the same faces would cycle through the same set of clubs. Sam Allardyce has managed nine Premier League clubs, Mark Hughes six, Hodgson, Steve Bruce, Harry Redknapp and Alan Pardew five, and Moyes four.
But of the current set of 20, 12 hadn’t previously managed a Premier League club before taking their current jobs, while a further six are only on their second. Only Nuno Espirito Santo (Wolves, Tottenham and Forest) and Marco Silva (Hull, Watford, Everton and Fulham) come close to journeyman numbers. Premier League experience has become less important.
“It used to be a world where you got by because you knew people, and the merry-go-round was quite prolific,” says Muzio, to illustrate the point. “You don’t need a ‘football man’ anymore to succeed.”
All of this could change.
Should a series of these younger managers completely flame out, clubs could turn back to some older, more experienced heads.
The age graph isn’t necessarily going to keep going down: for one thing, the new generation of managers whose job title is head coach and are used to operating in the ‘modern’ way, will get older and could easily keep these roles, thus the average age will go back up.
But many of the trends that have resulted in the age of managers going down, are not likely to disappear.
So if you are one of those people who grows gloomy at the increasing youth of managers in the game, as a measure of your own ageing process, then the bad news is going to keep coming.
(Top photo: CameraSport via Getty Images)
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