The Greatest Football Managers of All Time

Arguments about the greatest manager usually come down to trophies, and trophies matter. But the managers who changed football are not always the ones with the most silverware. They are the ones whose ideas outlived them, copied by coaches who never met them.

Three names appear on almost every serious list, each for a different reason: Rinus Michels for inventing a way of playing, Arrigo Sacchi for proving that ideas could beat stars, and Alex Ferguson for sustaining success over a quarter of a century.

Rinus Michels and Total Football

The Dutch coach Rinus Michels is credited with inventing Total Football in the late 1960s and 1970s, a style in which players swapped positions freely, defenders attacked and attackers pressed, all held together by an aggressive offside trap. He built it at Ajax, where he was head coach from January 1965 to June 1971, around a young Johan Cruyff, giving him freedom to roam anywhere on the pitch.

The results were spectacular. Ajax won four Dutch titles and three cups under Michels, lost the 1969 European Cup final 4-1 to Milan and won the trophy in 1971, beating Panathinaikos 2-0. Michels then moved to Barcelona, where Cruyff joined him in 1973 and the club won La Liga in 1973-74.

The great team that lost

Michels took Total Football to the 1974 World Cup with the Netherlands and Cruyff, and produced one of the most admired teams in the tournament's history. They lost the final 2-1 to West Germany, which only added to the legend. In 1988 he finally won with his country, leading the Netherlands to the European Championship, their first major title, beating West Germany in the semi-final and the Soviet Union in the final.

In 1999 FIFA named Michels its Coach of the Century. His influence runs through Cruyff's later Barcelona and much of modern football's emphasis on pressing and possession; our guide to football formations traces that line.

Arrigo Sacchi, the jockey who was never a horse

Arrigo Sacchi never played professional football and worked as a shoe salesman before coaching. When critics questioned his qualifications, he replied that he had never realised that to become a jockey you had to have been a horse first. His Parma side's cup results against Milan caught the eye of the club's owner, Silvio Berlusconi, who hired him in 1987.

At Milan, Sacchi won the Serie A title in his first season and then back-to-back European Cups, in 1989, beating Steaua Bucharest 4-0, and in 1990, beating Benfica 1-0, along with two European Super Cups and two Intercontinental Cups.

Pressing as a system

Sacchi's Milan played a fluid 4-4-2 built on zonal marking, intense pressing, a high defensive line and the offside trap, squeezing the space in which opponents could play. The team defended as a unit, a few dozen metres deep, and won the ball back high up the pitch. The offside rule was not just a law to him but a weapon.

Later coaches such as José Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp have been cited as adopting similar ideas. Sacchi also took Italy to the 1994 World Cup final, lost to Brazil on penalties, and in 2022 received UEFA's President's Award.

His later career was a reminder that systems need the right players. A second spell at Milan in 1996-97 ended with the team 11th, and brief periods at Atlético Madrid and Parma followed before he became Real Madrid's director of football in 2004-05. The ideas outlived the results.

Alex Ferguson and the long game

Alex Ferguson first showed what he could do at Aberdeen, which he led to the 1983 European Cup Winners' Cup, beating Real Madrid 2-1 in the final on 11 May 1983, and then the European Super Cup. He was appointed Manchester United manager on 6 November 1986 and stayed until the end of the 2012-13 season, 26 years later. His Aberdeen players called him Furious Fergie.

At United he won 38 trophies, including 13 Premier League titles, five FA Cups and two Champions League titles, in 1999 and 2008. The 1999 win completed the treble, the first by an English club. He was knighted that year and in December 2010 overtook Matt Busby as the club's longest-serving manager.

Three kinds of greatness

Ferguson's genius was renewal: he rebuilt winning teams again and again, trusting young players such as the group known as the Class of '92 and moving on great ones before they declined. Where Michels and Sacchi changed how football is played, Ferguson showed how to stay at the top for a generation.

Any list of the greatest has room for argument, and modern coaches have strong claims of their own. But Michels' freedom, Sacchi's system and Ferguson's endurance are the three ideas most of today's managers are still working with, whether they know it or not.