“We’ve got pundits who have played at the highest level. They’ve got great knowledge of the game, and can speak from experience about what a player needs to do at a particular point in a game. But they can never be in the mind of a manager.”
The above quote comes from Michael Calvin’s Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager. It shows the difficult world that a football manager works in. It’s a world that only managers understand, a world that is volatile and life-consuming.
Calvin is arguably the top football writer in the UK, having enormous success with Family: Life, Death and Football (2012) and The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football’s True Talent Spotters (2014) in addition to working for the country’s top newspapers. He was clearly the right man to write about what being a football manager is really like. It’s a high-pressure life that is full of uncertainty.
One of the crazy stats that Calvin introduced is the average span of a Championship manager; it is a mere eight months.
You’ll hear about the highs and lows of being the man in charge. Winning games, getting promoted up the pyramid, and winning hardware are on one side. Managers battling depression, anxiety, and stress, always finding themselves on the move and looking for their next job are on the other. It’s a crazy life, not for the weak or timid.
I’m not sure if I ever truly understood the difficulties of being a manager. I now have seen a glimpse of their world and I certainly feel a great deal of compassion and respect for football managers across the globe. Their job is clearly not an easy one. They have to do a bit of everything: man management, being a role model, serving as a father figure, delivering bad news and good, among many other things. And they still have to deal with the challenges of everyday life.
Living on the Volcano exceeded our expectations for a great football title, easily finishing as one of the top titles for 2015. It’s more than just a book; it’s an immersive experience for those that want to understand the game in a more meaningful way.
