As clubs at the top of the European game continue to get richer and richer, they are looking for coaches with the one thing money cannot buy
The cascade of tributes that followed Terry Venables’s death last week all circled around a single quality that made the former England, Spurs, and Barcelona boss a coach of such glinting gifts: charisma. El Tel’s legendary talent as a man manager, tactician, and crooner, and even his notorious failures as a wig salesman and publican, were all an expression of this basic trait, his barrow-boy charm and scheming wit
As a species, up-and-at-’em managers like Venables – artful dodgers reinvented as practitioners of the flexible 4-4-2 – may have gone the way of the upfield hoof, but the basic alchemy that explains their unique strength – the quality of charisma – is very much still with us.
