enjoys taking advantage of football’s conservatism, and derives great pleasure from signing unpolished diamonds like David Accam (now playing for Chicago Fire in the MLS) and Modou Barrow (now at Swansea). ‘We look to recruit players that don’t follow the others. They might seem strange, or different, but they have a brain that others don’t recognise. The conventional football environment kills geniuses. That’s where we can find players.’ He is particularly excited about an English midfielder, Curtis Edwards, rejected from Middlesbrough’s academy, but with a huge potential for development.
HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by DANIEL KINDBERG
1 Create the environment where everybody promotes creativity, initiative and courage.
2 Delegate decision-making.
3 End the blame culture.
Potter is preparing for the new season ahead. I wonder if it might be his last in Sweden, before an offer comes in that Kindberg cannot refuse. He has already rejected approaches from other teams in Sweden. In six years, Potter has turned around a club in a negative spiral to an upwardly mobile, community-bonding, booty-shaking success story.
The ÖFK identity has come a long way in a short time. ‘We embrace diversity as part of our identity and are open-minded around how we explore different parts of ourselves as a team to develop the individual,’ Potter says. ‘We play an exciting, interesting and attacking brand of football with players from all over the world. We are a team that people are proud of, that’s grown a lot and that has made a difference to a small part of the world.’
I can’t let him leave without one final question. What is the meaning of art? ‘It’s about expression,’ he smiles, with no hesitation. ‘It’s a way of expressing yourself. In some ways, football is similar. In its simplest form, kids and everyone else who plays the game express their emotions through it. It’s just like art.’
Potter has not followed the traditional path for English coaches, and that sets him apart from most of his peers (other exceptions are Paul Clement, former assistant coach to Carlo Ancelotti at Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, and Michael Beale, who left Liverpool’s youth academy to join Brazilian club São Paulo for a seven-month spell as assistant coach).
If there is a bias towards appointing foreign coaches in the Premier League, might it be because the English coaches lack experience outside of England? Potter has shown remarkable adaptability to cope with the serious challenges that ÖFK presented. We will look at the importance of adaptability, and how to develop it, in more detail in Chapter 2. It starts with a moment of stunning skill in Dortmund, in the presence of another culturally engaged coach who sees football as a true art form.
HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by GRAHAM POTTER
1 Make sure people feel they can improve in a learning environment.
2 Find out the unique advantage that separates you from the competition in the market-place.
3 Hire managers who understand people and relationships, even if others may have more seniority and experience.
THOMAS TUCHEL
Be a rule-breaker
Dembélé and adaptability / The Rulebreaker Society / Forget success / Power of small rituals / Talent, aesthetics, and Nietzsche / Segmenting motivation / Mistakes don’t exist / The Lemon Tart and curiosity
Ousmane Dembélé’s first touch was outstanding. He trapped the ball brilliantly, lifting his left leg above waist height and killing it dead. He was on the halfway line, and his next move was to knock it down the touchline and run past his marker to pick it up again. He was approaching the corner of the penalty area, at speed, when he did it again. He played the ball to the defender’s left, and ran around the other side – known in France as a grand pont, a big bridge – to leave his poor marker flustered and floundering. But would there be an end product? Dembélé had just run 50 yards at speed and beaten two men. He looked up and fizzed in the most enticing cross imaginable: at perfect velocity and height, eight yards from goal, a little too far for the goalkeeper to reach.
His team-mate Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang only needed a small jump to power his header into the goal. The move had taken only eight seconds. In that time, you could see just how devastating Dembélé could be. This was February 2017, and Aubameyang had just scored the winning goal in Borussia Dortmund’s win over RB Leipzig.
Dembélé: you may remember his name. He was the player I selected for the Guardian’s ‘Next Generation’ feature back in 2014. At that time, he had yet to make an appearance for his club, Rennes. I was told that this 17-year-old boy, as he was then, had a natural gift for dribbling; that he did so with grace, agility, lightness, fluidity and ease. In some ways, that run-and-cross against RB Leipzig could not have been more appropriate. His unpredictable way of playing is the antithesis of modern football.
I wanted to speak to Dembélé, but Borussia Dortmund was keen to protect its talent. Instead, my colleagues at French TV station BeIN Sports sat down with him for an interview in February 2017 and, on my behalf, asked how he felt when he was named in the Guardian’s ‘Next Generation’. ‘I don’t pay too much attention to it,’ he told them. ‘It’s not an extra pressure for me, it’s just what I do. I’m on the road I have to follow and I don’t think about anything else. I train to get into the team and I’m enjoying my football here in Dortmund.’
As well he might: in the Dortmund club shop, the name of Dembélé is the only one on the back of the shirts of the mannequins; not the top scorer Aubameyang, or the local Germany player Marco Reus, or the cult hero Shinji Kagawa.
In this chapter, I speak with the two managers who hold Dembélé’s future in their hands. I went to Germany to meet his club coach at Borussia Dortmund, Thomas Tuchel, and to France to see national team coach Didier Deschamps. They were excited about Dembélé and his potential. It’s their job to confirm that into talent.
As the season went on, it was clear that whatever they were doing was working. Dembélé provided some of the outstanding moments in European football: a dribble, burst of pace and outside-of-the-boot cross for Aubameyang to score in a Champions League knock-out tie at Monaco; a cutback, which left his marker David Alaba dizzy and grounded, and a curling left-foot shot, which went in off the crossbar, to win the German Cup semi-final at rivals Bayern Munich (and a nice celebration to follow, running straight to Tuchel for a hug). He repeated the move in the German Cup final, scoring a similar goal in a Man of the Match performance to seal Borussia Dortmund its first trophy for five years.
On the final day of the Bundesliga season, he pulled off an outrageous assist, scooping the ball over five Werder Bremen defenders for Aubameyang to volley home another goal. He was outstanding in an end-of-season friendly against England, scoring the winning goal in a 3–2 victory. In late August, just a few weeks before this book was first published, Barcelona signed Dembélé for a reported £135 million, a fee that made him the second-most expensive player in the world. (His new coach would be Ernesto Valverde, formerly of Athletic Club de Bilbao.)
Dembélé was not our only topic of conversation. Both coaches gave me a unique insight into the challenges of modern leadership. Their stories can
