Manager burnout: Brutal truths about

“You kind of know when you’re not cut out to be a manager…” Niall Quinn says, the little chuckle as his voice trails off a hint that there is an anecdote to come. “I knew a few minutes into a game at Bury that this wasn’t for me.”

Quinn is recalling his brief and largely forgettable six-match stint in the Sunderland job, which included five successive defeats and ended with him praising “a good decision from the chairman to sack his manager”. That chairman was also Quinn, who had agreed to take on both roles at the start of the 2006-07 Championship season after a problematic search for a new manager.

It sounded tricky in theory and was even harder in practice. A League Cup tie at Gigg Lane, where Sunderland lost 2-0 to their fourth division hosts, proved to be the final straw and led to Roy Keane taking over the following week, two days after Quinn registered his one and only victory against West Brom.

“For a few days before the Bury game we changed things around and got a young Spanish player, Arnau Riera, in on a free transfer,” Quinn explains. “He played in the same youth team at Barcelona as Iniesta and Messi, and we thought we would unleash him.

“It was difficult at Bury — you had to go out the dressing rooms, up the stairs and back down to where I needed to be (on the touchline to watch the game). By the time I got there, Riera’s running across the pitch. I’m looking at him, going, ‘What’s up with him? Is he going to the toilet or something?’ The nearest person to me said, ‘He’s just been sent off, gaffer’.

“He’d swung an elbow at somebody and got sent off before I’d taken my place in the dugout. I actually do remember looking up (to the heavens) and thinking, ‘You don’t want me to do this, do you?’”

With experience of life on the touchline as well as the boardroom, not to mention an impressive playing career for club and country, Quinn has a fairly unique perspective when it comes to football management and the all-consuming nature of a role that he describes as “the toughest gig in the world”.

Keeping a lid on the pressure is easier said than done.

“I can’t do this bollocks any more,” Chris Wilder said out loud to himself after a 2-0 loss to Crystal Palace meant Sheffield United hadn’t won any of their first 17 Premier League games this season. A couple of months later, amid growing tension with the board at Bramall Lane, Wilder became another statistic — one of 41 managerial changes across the 92 Premier League and EFL clubs this season.

Was he burnt out? Only Wilder can really answer that question but the combination of poor results across a season, the imminent threat of relegation and a clear sense that the owner is not on the same page would wear down most managers.

Wilder, almost certainly, will be back in someone’s dugout somewhere. Others, such as Ricky Sbragia, never contemplate returning.

Appointed on an 18-month contract the previous December after impressing in a caretaker capacity following Keane’s resignation, Sbragia kept Sunderland in the Premier League on the final day of the 2008-09 season, despite losing 3-2 at home against Chelsea. Quinn, who was still chairman, wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

“I met Ricky for a cold beer in a room on our own, straight after he came out the dressing room,” Quinn says. “I said, ‘Listen…’ And he went, ‘No, I’m going to start this conversation. I’ve had enough. It’s not for me. And before you sack me, I’m leaving’. I said, ‘I’m not going to sack you, I’m going to talk to you about it’. Ricky never went back into management again.”

When Sbragia, who had been a youth and reserves coach at clubs including Manchester United then an assistant at Bolton and Sunderland, reflects on that experience now it is clear he was way outside his comfort zone: “I don’t know how people got my mobile number. But the first time I took over the job I got 168 calls, people asking me about players, agents saying, ‘I’ve got the best player in the world’. I thought, ‘Oh my god’. But then you also take that home with you. You don’t have a social life. You just wanted to switch off from football for an hour. But you couldn’t. You just couldn’t do that.”

Quinn and Sbragia were among half a dozen people willing to talk candidly to The Athletic about the mental and physical demands of managing a football club and how it can take its toll. We have even spoken to a manager’s wife and son, to get their take on a job that feels as though it should come with a health warning.

Only this week Cesare Prandelli, the former Italy coach, stepped down at Fiorentina after admitting a “dark cloud” has developed inside him. Aged 63, Prandelli said that he was going through “a period of profound distress which is preventing me from being who I really am”.

The fact that the League Managers Association (LMA) provides all its members with annual medical checks as well as confidential access to a team of in-house consultant psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, who can be contacted 365 days a year, says much about the nature of the industry these people are working in.

It is a precarious profession for anyone, but particularly for those first dipping their toe in the water.

According to the LMA, since the start of the 2012-13 season, 59 per cent of first-time managers have not been re-appointed in the top four tiers of English football or the equivalent leagues overseas. To put that another way, six out of every 10 new managers will only get to do the job for a living once.

Even for the more experienced, the sense of responsibility can easily become a burden. Brian McDermott talks about how he ended up “medicating” himself after falling into a well of darkness in the wake of Reading’s Championship play-off final loss to Swansea a decade ago. Feeling desperately low, McDermott put on a brave face at work for the best part of a year and somehow — and this is testament to his unwavering commitment to the job — won promotion to the Premier League in 2012 as champions.

It is interesting to hear Garry Monk, who lost his job at Sheffield Wednesday in November then saw successor Tony Pulis last little over a month, explain that relief is often one of the first emotions that managers feel after being sacked.

“It’s not that you’re happy with what just happened,” he says. “But it’s like the relief of… ‘I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and go and try to convince 50-60 people that working hard is the best thing that they should be doing’.”

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His voice is quiet and measured but there is a deep sincerity to everything that Brian McDermott says about football management.

“You never know what it’s like to be a manager until you’ve stood on that line. And you never know whether you can do it until you’ve stood on that line. It’s an incredibly intense job,” he explains.

“That feeling when it’s 1-0 to you and the whistle goes — the feeling of relief. And that feeling of emptiness when you’re 1-0 down and the whistle goes and you know your weekend is completely and utterly ruined, and the next couple of days after that, until the next game.”

Now aged 59, McDermott has managed more than 450 games, all the way from the Conference to the Premier League, including two spells at Reading and a stint at Leeds. The first match he mentions, though — the match he cannot forget — is one that caused him so much anguish. “To lose a play-off final… you could do a whole story on that,” McDermott says.

McDermott took that 4-2 defeat against Brendan Rodgers’ Swansea in 2011 personally. The overwhelming feeling that he struggled to erase from his mind over the weeks and months that followed was about “letting so many people down” at Wembley on that May afternoon. Alcohol, he says, became “a way of dealing with stuff”.

“I used to drink after games. A lot of managers do. I can’t talk for anybody else, but after a game when you lost it was like, ‘I could do with a drink’, because it does hurt. You know yourself, you have a drink and you medicate yourself, really, which is not a good thing. But after the Wembley final, I probably crossed over a little bit of a red line.

“I’ve not had a drink for six years now. So I feel good about that. I’m in a calm and peaceful place with myself in my life.”

Although McDermott is one of those people who has always gone about his work with the minimum of fuss, it seems remarkable to think that he led Reading to the Championship title the following season despite feeling so low that he admits it was hard to get out of bed at times. The only other person who knew what he was going through, he says, was his wife.

He must have done a good job of hiding how he was feeling? “I did,” McDermott replies. “I was struggling. But if you ask people who were around me at the time if I was struggling, I don’t think they would have known. I used to drive in to work and say (to myself), ‘Come on!’ I had to get myself going.

“It was quite a dark place at the time. That’s how it was for me and I just thought it was normal. I thought that’s how you’re supposed to feel — ‘I lost a massive game, I’m in a dark place, I’m sure it’ll be alright one day’. I just had to keep going, really. In my mind, I had a vision of trying to get promotion the following year but whether I could do it or not… I just took it bite-size, one training session at a time.”

McDermott did do it. Reading won 15 out of 17 matches at one stage during the second half of the season, losing only once, and were crowned champions, despite having sold their top scorer Shane Long and captain Matt Mills the previous summer after that play-off final defeat. The mistake that many people would make, however, is to assume that success suddenly put everything right for McDermott.

“If you think that some external stuff is going to fix you, like a promotion or being a Premier League manager, that wasn’t my story,” he says. “Great, we won the league. I was so pleased for the players and the supporters and the staff. But I never felt that for myself. It wasn’t about euphoria. It was just relief — ‘Finally, we’ve done it’.”

It sounds as though Sbragia can relate to certain aspects of McDermott’s story.

Sbragia talks about a March 2009 game against Tottenham at the Stadium of Light, when Sunderland had led 1-0 from the third minute, and were desperate for three points to ease their relegation fears, only to concede an 89th-minute Robbie Keane equaliser. That it came about from a Sunderland corner, when players had totally switched off, made it hard for Sbragia to accept. How can a manager legislate for that kind of thing?

“I thought, ‘I can’t go through this again’. I was dreading the next matches,” Sbragia says.

“One of my main things was, I’d been to Sunderland previously, from 1994-2002, before I went to Man United (as reserve-team manager), so I knew all the office staff, all the people that worked there, and my main thought was if we had gone down that year, over 30 per cent of people would lose their jobs — and that’s actually in my head: ‘It’s all down to me, we’ve got to stay up’.”

Sbragia sighs as he thinks back. “It came to a stage where I thought, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous’. My health suffered because of it. Mentally, I was tired. Physically, I was knackered. I put a wee bit of weight on. I was drinking a lot, but not to excess. I became unsociable at home, a bit narky. I’d never been like that as a coach.

“I came in and still thought about football, what we were doing the following day and the meetings we had. I thought, ‘I can’t keep doing this’.”

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“The physical and mental wellbeing of our members is of paramount importance to the LMA. Any sign of burnout, which could lead to severe health issues, should be addressed immediately by the individual, an employer (if applicable) and the LMA,” Richard Bevan, the LMA’s chief executive, tells The Athletic in an email exchange.

Niall Quinn pauses for a moment as he thinks about managerial burnout and the people he has seen over the years who appear totally worn down by the job.

“It’s the toughest gig in the world,” Quinn says. “Nobody looked worse than Fergie (Sir Alex Ferguson at United) in the early years. You look back at him, at the nervousness, the anger and the frustration, and for all the world he looked out. And he turned it around. So I always hark back to that.”

Quinn quickly adds a caveat. “Since those times, the pressure cooker has become 100 times hotter. The scrutiny is incredible. The media is intense, the online world magnifies it — there’s no hiding place at all. You dedicate your life to this. If you’re good, it’s fine. But if you’re trying to build something that’s struggling, and your star is fading, it’s a horrible place to be. That’s why TV is the best graveyard for football people — you can rekindle, start enjoying life and looking at football differently.

“I went back to that after Sunderland (he left the club in 2012). You might be getting a bit of stick on Twitter every now and then because you said something wrong, but that compared to the pressure of being a football manager is night and day. So I respect the managers who do it. They need to be confident. That confidence can look out of place when results don’t go well. You see others who panic.

“It never interested me, even though I got a sniff of it. Not because I was afraid of it. I was actually a little bit smarter than that for most of my life, to say, ‘I don’t think I’d be good under those pressurised circumstances’. I found myself wanting to pin players up against the wall in those first few days. And had it been player to player, in those days I probably could have done. But as a manager, I couldn’t. And the game has changed. I was brought up old-fashioned and I’m not so sure I could handle the holistic way of football coaching these days. I’m really one of the old brigade.”

At 42, Garry Monk is 12 years younger than Quinn. He has been managing since February 2014, when he started in the Premier League with Swansea, leading the club he’d played for over the previous decade (he was captain the day they beat McDermott’s Reading at Wembley) to an eighth-place finish in his first full season.

The opening game of that 2014-15 campaign was away at Old Trafford. It was also Louis van Gaal’s first match in charge of Manchester United.

“We won 2-1,” Monk says, smiling at what he is about to say next. “I went to shake his hand and I don’t think Van Gaal really knew I was the manager. You know when someone looks at you as if, ‘Well done, mate… whoever you are’, probably thinking I was one of the security staff at Swansea. I swear on my life, just from the look he gave me, I thought, ‘He doesn’t even know who I am!’”

Van Gaal was in demand that afternoon. Monk remembers there being 27 overseas broadcasters, each waiting in turn for their interview with the new United manager.

While that level of media interest comes with the territory at the highest level, it is easy to imagine how tedious the process can become for a manager who has suffered another defeat and is going through a bad spell. Perhaps that provides some context, if not an excuse, for Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp losing his rag a few times this season.

As for Monk, he led Swansea to their highest ever Premier League finish that season, but was out of a job by the following Christmas, after a poor run of results and amid weeks of speculation about his future. Dealing with that media coverage can be emotionally draining in itself. “Even if you’re shutting out the noise, which I’m good at, your family is listening to it,” Monk says. “So you can’t really get away from it. It’s constantly there.”

Monk has lived something of a nomadic existence since leaving Swansea, taking jobs at Leeds (one season), Middlesbrough (six months), Birmingham City (15 months) and Sheffield Wednesday (14 months). Lexi, his wife, and their three children have moved around Britain with him and, inevitably, that has a knock-on effect.

“When your kids have gone to six or seven different schools, when you’ve moved house, from my own experience year upon year, different areas of the country and with young kids, no settled life — we haven’t got a base; we own a home in Birmingham, but are we going to spend the rest of our lives here? No. It’s been seven years now managing. I said to Lex the other day, ‘Jesus Christ, where are we heading? Where are we going?’ You do think, ‘What is the end game here, what am I doing this all for?’”

It is a good question for any manager to ask themselves.

With Monk, it seems safe to assume that he has done well enough over the years for money not to be a motivation. So why does he carry on?

“Something deep inside you drags you back,” he says. “I think you just want to prove a point. I did that from a schoolboy at Watford to even now. And there are personal goals of my own. I was lucky as a player to get promotions and I’ve just felt that I want to taste that as a manager. How much do you pursue that? Football is in the blood and I love it. It’s been my whole life. But how much of a price do you put on that?”

It is a difficult trade-off at times, especially when it is hard, almost impossible in fact, to avoid taking the job home with you after a bad result.

“You plan a meal on a weekend, you lose the game and you’re not in the best of moods and you carry that around with you,” Monk says. “So you have to tell the family, ‘We’re not going now’, because if I go out I’m going to get abuse or I’m not going to be good company. There’s been plenty of times when we’ve arranged to go and do stuff and I’ve cancelled it. Or I’ve gone out and you’re not (really) there.”

In Living on the Volcano, Michael Calvin’s excellent 2015 book about the secrets of surviving as a football manager, Joe Dunne says that when he was in charge at Colchester United, from 2012-14, and they had lost, he would turn the two-minute drive home into an hour, going up and down the nearby A12 and even taking a detour into the countryside.

Sometimes, Dunne says in the book, he would park up on the side of the road or arrive at a set of traffic lights and have no idea which way to turn.

“When I get home, the missus’ll go, ‘Where have you been?” Dunne recalls. “And I’m like, ‘I don’t fucking know. But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know my team for Tuesday night. And I know what I’m doing in training next week’.”

Sbragia chuckles as he listens to that story and immediately thinks how his own commute between York and Sunderland often turned into a blur.

“I’d be driving and thinking, ‘Christ, how have I got here?’” Sbragia says, laughing. “I’m not even realising I’m driving the car.”

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“When Dad used to get home — he still does it now but not as bad because I think he realises that phones are fairly important; it was only four years ago that he discovered what WhatsApp was — he would just turn his phone off and he wouldn’t be available,” James Pearson says.

“Sometimes if it was urgent. Mum would have Andrew Neville (Leicester City’s football operations director) sending her a text saying, ‘Can you get Nigel to get in contact?’ A bit like Dean (his adviser) does now if a job comes up, so he still does it!”

James is the son of Nigel, whose managerial career has taken him all over the country, from Southampton to Carlisle and plenty of places in between, as well as a stint in Belgium. He is on a Zoom call with his mum Nicky, to talk about the world of football management from the other side of the fence.

Their family home has been in Sheffield for more than 30 years, going back to the days when Nigel was captaining second-division Wednesday to a League Cup final win over Manchester United and promotion in the same season. Although that can mean periods apart at times, especially during the week, there is something to be said for the stability and escapism that a permanent base away from the football club provides.

“Absolutely,” says Nicky. “To be able to come home and not have that (the pressure of being a manager at a club in the same city where you live) if we did go out. We still have a massive thing in Sheffield because he was the captain of Sheffield Wednesday, so we have it from a fan and a player side but not as a manager, and that’s why he’s always said that to manage in Sheffield isn’t what he wants because he likes living here and he wouldn’t want that to be affected.”

Although Nicky would go to the majority of matches in normal circumstances, and spend more time watching her husband on the touchline than the game itself, she rarely talks football at home. “It’s work, so I don’t ever really ask that much. If Nigel was a bank manager, I wouldn’t expect him to come home and talk to me about accounts,” she says, smiling.

With James, whose career as a professional footballer was brought to a premature end last year because of injury following a final spell with Macclesfield Town, it is different. Aged 28, he will often chat about a game with his dad, in the same way any father and son might, or a potential job opportunity, as was the case when Bristol City of the Championship came in for Nigel last month.

One thing James has really noticed over the last couple of years is just how much his old man has mellowed. “I think he’s completely changed now. Obviously, we all worry about his mental health. But ever since he took the Watford job (in December 2019), I would say that I don’t worry about him half as much because he’s changed the way he perceives everyone.

“Before, he used to call Twitter ‘Twatter’. He used to hate it. He used to hate social media. Not hate… he just didn’t get it. But he understands now that this is life, it’s a massive part of football. The fact that he’s on social media is weird. So weird. But it’s a good thing too.”

Age and experience probably have something to do with that shift, plus a willingness to embrace the media more generally in a way that would never have appealed to him in the past. James talks about how “the barriers aren’t up” any more and how his father seems more relaxed as a result, whether that’s speaking to journalists or bumping into football fans in a restaurant.

That is not to say that Pearson has let his guard down completely; there is a time and a place for speaking openly.

“When he’s being interviewed, I sometimes think, ‘Oh for goodness sake, talk quickly. You don’t talk like that normally’. We’re all thinking, ‘Come on, spit it out!’” says Nicky, laughing. “But I know that he’s doing that for a reason. He’s always thinking about what he’s saying in a live interview because he knows the scrutiny there is and that people will pick it apart if he just says one thing wrong.”

While dealing with the fallout from unfavourable headlines is one thing — Pearson had to do that a few times with Leicester during the 2014-15 season in the Premier League that included the notorious Night of the Ostrich run-in with one reporter — picking up the pieces in between jobs is quite another.

“I’ve seen Nigel at his lowest — Derby,” says Nicky, referring to his acrimonious 2016 departure from Pride Park, when he left the club by mutual consent after only five months following a bitter fallout with Mel Morris, the club’s owner. “It was awful. I‘ve always been Nigel’s biggest fan. I’ve always said to him, ‘You’re too good to give this up’. But I thought (then), ‘If he never works in football again, I’m with him’.”

James finds it hard to imagine that day will come and tells his mum that it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. “Dad has worked in football for 39 years, in a dressing room,” he says. “Yeah, he likes to take a break and go on holiday (at the end of the season) and he’s been travelling around the world and he enjoys doing that. But football, whether people like it or not, is a drug. It’s a complete addiction.

“When he’s in football, he might go, ‘I’m tired, this is hard, and mentally it’s tough’. When you’re out of it, all you want to be is back. And you see when he gets a job after being out of work, within half an hour he’s got a completely different mindset and he’s a completely different person.

“That’s because it’s the drug that is football.”

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When Eddie Howe stepped down at Bournemouth last summer following their relegation from the Premier League, it ended the best part of 12 years in management without a break. Howe has a reputation for being a workaholic too — first in, last to leave — so it is no real surprise that he has taken the best part of a year out. That said, what would have happened if an exciting job had come up during that time?

McDermott faced that dilemma almost exactly eight years ago when Leeds made an approach only a month after Reading sacked him. He could have done with a little while off to escape and recharge, but football doesn’t always work that way.

“I just felt that I had to take that job,” McDermott says.

“Leeds were losing a lot of games and they started to worry about getting relegated (from the Championship), and they wanted me to get up there. I wanted to take the job in the summer. There were five games to go but I thought, ‘I’ve got to take it because I might lose this chance to take it in the summer.’”

A year later, McDermott was physically and mentally spent after a chaotic season.

At one stage, he received a phone call from a lawyer representing Massimo Cellino, Leeds’ prospective new owner, to tell him he had been relieved of his duties. The following morning, the club’s existing owners said he was still in charge. It was a strange and difficult time at the club, and on top of that McDermott was dealing with the emotional distress of his mother’s poor health.

“I was kind of burnt out at Leeds at the end of it because my mum wasn’t well — she died in the June,” McDermott says. “I was living up north and not in a good place, particularly. There was a lot of stuff going on that was personal to me. I was trying to manage the team and I was trying to manage what was going on above me, stuff that you’ll never find on the Pro Licence (coaching course), stuff that you’ll never see on a course, and that you’ll only learn from experience.”

‘Managing up’ within a club can be one of the biggest challenges, especially for a coach who is inexperienced. Some owners and chairmen like to interfere, even if they have limited knowledge of the game. Dealing with that kind of thing — team selection suggestions and comments on training sessions or impromptu appearances in the changing room — can be wearing.

Niall Quinn offers an interesting view on that side of the job, mindful that managers were always answerable to him when he was chairman at Sunderland. “With Roy (Keane) I was just thinking, ‘Let him do his thing, let’s trust him, and I’ll hold off all the stuff that might cause friction or problems’. Holding him accountable for things that weren’t really down to him was never going to work. Holding him accountable as a young manager anyway was wrong (Keane was 35 when Sunderland gave him his first crack at management). It was about allowing him to find his way by taking the stuff that can be annoying and pressurised off him.

“I can remember I’d been down to (former club) Arsenal one evening and the pitch was in incredible condition. They had all these lamps out and it was eight or nine at night. I got to speak to the groundsman, who told me it was the way forward and that they were the first club to do it. I went back up and I can remember Roy saying, ‘Well, I’d rather money was spent on a player, you’ll never fix this pitch’.

“By the end of the season, the pitch was perfect. It was important that I didn’t have a row with Roy over that. I said, ‘Hey, listen, we’ll do both for you’. And I can remember him saying, ‘I hope you’re right’. And, in fairness to him, he did (later) say, ‘You got that right’. He’s good like that.

“I used to meet Roy and have dinner with him once a month, to see what help he needed and to support him with stuff. I wanted to let him grow as a manager. That was the plan. Not to be confrontational with him — the way some chairmen say, ‘You’d better do this, you’d better do that’. That’s not my style anyway.”

It is easy to understand why some managers focus more on the owner, or chairman, rather than the club when deciding where to work next. Monk has not exactly made life easy for himself in that respect. He talks about spending a lot of his time firefighting since leaving Swansea.

“But you just accept that’s what it is and you somehow manage your way through it,” he says. “The only mistake I feel I’ve made in terms of the decision to take a job has been Sheffield Wednesday, because it’s the only one where I knew in my heart before I took it that there were a lot of things wrong there. I think the reason why I took it was because of all the bullshit that Dong (Xuandong Ren, the chief executive) had said at Birmingham about me, publicly. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get back in to prove that wrong’.”

It didn’t quite turn out that way at Hillsborough, and now Monk finds himself waiting for another opportunity to jump back on board the managerial merry-go-round, knowing exactly what he will be letting himself in for before he walks through the door.

“You can’t compare football management to someone who is on the front line, doing surgeries and dealing with trauma,” Monk says. “But it is just… it’s just brain-fog.”