Soccer managers’ latest source of inspiration? The rugby pitch

In early February, one of my football-loving, rugby-despising colleagues came into the office and moaned, just like he does every year. The Six Nations, Europe’s premier international rugby competition, started Feb. 5 and runs until mid-March, and England face Ireland on Saturday in a high-stakes clash. In between expletives, he complained about how his local pub will be showing wall-to-wall rugby, and not football, most Saturdays for the next several weeks. But whether he likes it or not, some of football’s top managers are looking to rugby for their latest stroke of inspiration.

Before England played New Zealand in their November rugby union Test match, Brighton & Hove Albion manager Fabian Hurzeler visited the England camp. The England players are used to having football managers visiting training: Antonio Conte and Gareth Southgate have been there in the past. Rugby managers visit football teams to do the same. But Hurzeler went away particularly struck by where the rugby coaches sit in matches — up in the stands.

“The head coach is always observing, not that emotionally involved on the sideline,” Hurzeler said. “It’s really more about overseeing things, like an analyst and making decisions from the stands. That’s something that might be the future in football as well.”

Over in France, since Paris Saint-Germain’s match against Lens in September, PSG manager Luis Enrique has been watching the opening 45 minutes of some home matches from the stands. “For a long time, I’ve seen rugby coaches analyze games from a very different perspective,” he said. “I like the possibility of improving things this way. I wanted to watch the first half from the stands, and it’s magnificent. It’s different. I can control everything.” He said it made his halftime talk more effective as he saw all the analysis in real time.

The practice is harder to continue overseas — Spanish regulations state the manager must be in the dugout — but it has carried over to how Luis Enrique watches training, too. At the vast Campus Du Paris-Saint-Germain, he watches some training sessions perched on top a six-meter-high scissor lift looming over the pitch. He said ahead of their Champions League final last season that it completely changes his perspective and helps improve his “team’s movement.”

Will we see this approach adopted in the Premier League? If you spot a manager in the stands these days, it’s usually because they’ve been reprimanded. But some prefer it — Sam Allardyce was doing this about 15 years ago, while there were others before him like Walter Smith, George Graham, Steve Coppell, Glenn Hoddle and Jim McLean, the legendary Dundee United manager who used to bark orders on a telephone from a glass box when handed touchline bans. Leyton Orient’s Richie Wellens has been a fan of watching matches from the stands in the past, but whenever Luis Enrique’s first-half perch is referred to, Allardyce is heralded as the trendsetter. He adopted the practice during his time at Bolton, Newcastle United and Blackburn, only to halt it at West Ham.

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From the early 2000s, Allardyce would regularly spend time with the England rugby team, looking at their strength and conditioning programs, use of data and how they trained. He also looked on with interest at how they managed the team. “Our psychologist at Bolton said, ‘Get in the stand, because all you do on the bench is jump up and down. So we got ear pieces and radios, and communicated with the bench along with the lad who coded the game,'” Allardyce tells ESPN. “We could then show visuals to the lads at halftime rather than me talking them through it. We had a TV on a 10-second delay so we could watch things back, and that helps take the emotion out of decisions. You just get a better view up there.”

That’s not to say some of the clubs liked him being away from the dugout. “They moaned about me being in the stand; they said I should be down there shouting at players,” Allardyce says. “You can be strong and stick to it, but if it’s causing aggravation and they’re talking about it in boardrooms, you just go back down to the bench. If I was managing now, I’d be in the stands, definitely. But there’s no right or wrong way.”

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You can see other little influences, too. Some managers are using terms taken directly from rugby, such as “bomb squad” and “finishers,” to describe the players who come on en masse to change the flow of a match. Former England rugby coach Eddie Jones disliked calling his bench “substitutes,” instead adopting the term “finishers” for the first time in 2017. Then in March 2023, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta started to speak of his bench as “impactors” or “finishers.” Jones and Arteta used to share a WhatsApp group that included Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur, NBA Hall of Famer George Karl and basketball coach Mike Dunlap. “We all go in and share our problems and everyone tells you what they think,” Jones said. “It’s fantastic.”

Arteta spoke about his preference for “finishers” after a 2-0 win over Athletic Bilbao in September. “I love it, because I don’t like other words to describe the players,” he said. “And I think, as the game is developing, they’re going to be more important. The quality of [their] minutes is going to dictate the quality of our season, for sure.”

That’s not to say that term was greeted with widespread acceptance, with ex-Watford striker Troy Deeney calling the linguistic switch “childish,” saying those who aren’t brought on would be left “confused and pissed off.” Can’t win them all.

Meanwhile, the Springboks (South Africa’s rugby union team, winners of the past two men’s World Cups) have what they call the “bomb squad” on the bench, a group that brings fresh physicality and momentum-shifting power. And after the England men’s football team beat Serbia 2-0 at Wembley in November, with Eberechi Eze, Jude Bellingham, Jordan Henderson and Phil Foden all making an impact off the bench, coach Thomas Tuchel was introduced to the phrase. “I have not named [the players] in a different way but I kind of like it,” Tuchel said. “I like ‘bomb squad’ a bit more than ‘finisher.'”

As for other aspects, you probably have rugby’s television match official to “thank” for some parts of VAR, both being flawed, time-consuming methods. Let’s forget about that one. But back to my learned colleague. When I told him about this idea and writing about what rugby is teaching football, he responded: “What, how to take over a pub and ruin my Saturday afternoon?”