In Bill Belichick’s dominance, hints of Alex Ferguson
It’s important to start with this post with a Mount Rushmore-sized disclaimer: I don’t know all that much about football. The American…
It’s important to start with this post with a Mount Rushmore-sized disclaimer: I don’t know all that much about football. The American kind, that is. But as someone who a) enjoys watching obscure sports so much that I treat the Olympics with the reverence befitting a major religious festival; and who b) believes that the best way to understand a country is to watch its favorite sport (as well as eat its national dish and drink its national beer (preferably all at the same time)), I’ve taken the opportunity to watch as much gridiron as possible for the past two seasons I’ve spent in the states.
By happy coincidence, the region in which I wound up — New England — plays host to some of America’s most famous and most successful national teams. Those two qualities — fame and success — do not always correlate: the Boston Red Sox spent about five-sixths of the twentieth century trying and failing to snap a winless streak, only breaking the ‘Curse of the Bambino’ in 2004.
But as far as American football goes, the New England Patriots have dominated the sport since the turn of the century. The stats speak for themselves: four Super Bowls since 2000, with a fifth on the line in a fortnight’s time; seven conference championships (i.e., Super Bowl appearances), including yesterday’s triumph; and a win percentage of 74% this century.
The Patriots’ success has a lot to do with the arrival of two key figures in 2000: the team’s head coach, Bill Belichick, and their star quarterback, Tom Brady. It’s difficult to find an analogy in European sport to the importance of the quarterback in American football. The quarterback is the lynchpin of a team’s attack, both mentally and physically — calling and initiating every offensive play.
Suffice it to say here that Brady sits comfortably in the pantheon of the greatest quarterbacks, and if successful in two weeks, would break the record for most Super Bowls won by a quarterback. More comparable to European sport, I think, is the role played by the head coach, who has to play many roles: master tactician, talent scout, and motivator-in-chief.
The Patriots’ head coach Belichick excels in each of these roles, and in doing so, greatly resembles one of (British) football’s greatest icons: Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s legendary manager. First, both managers can claim legitimacy through longevity. The owners of American football franchises are just as cutthroat in their defenestrative proclivities as their English football counterparts. When he retired in glory in 2013 (itself a luxury that few managers enjoy), Ferguson had been in charge for 26 years, making him at that point the longest-serving manager among English League football’s 100-odd teams. After nearly 17 seasons Belichick, too, has held the reins longer than any other of the NFL’s thirty two head coaches.
Of course, both Ferguson and Belichick held on due in large part to their superlative success. Ferguson won thirteen Premier League titles as United manager — or an incredible one for every other year he was in charge. Belichick’s four Super Bowls and seven conference championships is pretty comparable for a sport in which — owing to its oddly redistributive draft system and lack of a relegation threat — it is much harder to establish year-in-year-out dominance. The two men’s overall win percentage is also comparable: Ferguson’s 65% is lower than Belichick’s 74%, but evens out if you award him, say, half of the 20% of games he drew (ties are common in soccer but exceptionally rare in the NFL.)
So how did they do it? Given how different the two sports are, it’s impossible to claim any single factor as explanation. That said, the closer you look, the more similarities emerge between the two managers. First, and perhaps most significant, both men are notorious misanthropes. Though never afraid to celebrate success, Ferguson’s typical expression is the dictionary definition of dourness. If anything, his attitude darkened still further behind closed doors: so famous was his reputation for dressing room dress-downs of his players that they inspired the phrase “hairdryer treatment”. Belichick, too, is almost preternaturally curmudgeonly, known for obsessing over small failures even after dominant wins.
Crucially, this shared attitude extends to the pair’s treatment of star players. Ferguson got through several club captains while at the helm, and the departure of each led pundits to predict that the team would fail (most famously Alan Hansen, who suggested after Ferguson ousted captain Paul Ince and several other stars that “you can’t win anything with kids”; those kids included David Beckham, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, who ushered in a decade of dominance.) Though his relationship with Brady is said to be strong, Belichick has never been afraid to let his star player have it and, like Ferguson, has succeeded in getting the most out of seemingly average talent — especially when operating under limited transfer budgets.
This “no player is bigger than the club” attitude has helped both managers weather storms that would have sunk other teams. Several of these storms, it must be noted, have been self-inflicted. In 2007, Belichick apologized and was fined $500,000 (the highest fine in NFL history) for sanctioning the illegal recording of the opposing team’s coaching signals. Ferguson, meanwhile, experienced several controversies, from nearly blinding David Beckham to questions over his ownership of racehorses. Both coaches have enjoyed famously frosty relationships with the media, but have also skillfully manipulated it to their advantage.
Expert man-management, unquestioned authority, even the whiff of scandal — these, it seems (as well as a lot of luck) are some of the ingredients of long-term success in whichever sport you mean when you say “football”.