Manchester City - Management Success - Essay Example

As a player, Mancini lifted four Italian Cups, the Serie A (1991 and 2000), the Cup Winners' Cup (1990 and 1999), the Italian Supercup, and the UEFA Supercup and was voted the Serie A Player of the Year and Italian Footballer of the Year in 1997. These achievements clearly manifest his talent and capabilities. However, it was the oddly immense powers that he wielded as a key player at Sampdoria that indicated early that he would get to be an excellent manager. Here Mancini, a 27 year old, often delivered the team-talk, sat on the interview panel for selecting the next manager and was also consulted when selecting the teams’ new kit.

In addition to that, he was invited to board meetings and had a say in which players where to be bought by his club during the transfer market (Taylor 2012). This early foray into team management roles gave him a head start as well as helped him build the skills needed to succeed as a football club manager. Working with top clubs requires a manager who can handle the pressure from the board, fans, journalists and even managers from the opposing teams. Kuper (n.d.) argues that one proven attribute of successful managers is their ability to, in some way for example via the media (Jackson 2012), lower the tension that players feel in each match so that they can be relaxed enough to enjoy the game.

His argument was that successful teams are those whose players enjoy the game (Kuper n.d.). The fact that Mancini played at the highest level in football gives assurance to his players that he fully understands what they are going through. Another important trait of Mancini is his ability to not only work with but also bring out the best from his troublesome players such as Carlos Tevez and Mario Balotelli at Manchester City (Walker 2012). Here it would be best to remember that as a player, Mancini was also not the easiest to work with.

Taylor (2012) argues that this could have been because he was so repulsed by failure and desperate to the point of having an obsession for winning. Like Mario Balotelli, Mancini was as skillful as he was hot tempered in his playing days. This could be the reason why he is able to work with the talented but difficult soccer players who join the teams that he is coaching. Finally, we believe that the greatest reason why Robert Mancini was selected to manage Manchester City is his track record as a coach.

He has brought cup glory for all the clubs where he has coached namely: Fiorentina, Lazio and Inter Milan. In fact, with Lazio and Fiorentina, Mancini managed to create winning teams in spite of the financial constraints that forced him to lose several key players. At Fiorentina he lost Rui Costa and Francesco Toldo at their prime while at Lazio he had to work without the services of Hernan Crespo and Alessandro Nesta. Nevertheless, it was at Internazionale where he proved capable of handling the pressure that come with managing a top club.

When the Abu Dhabi United Group purchased Manchester City in 2008 there agenda was to raise the club to the status of the other top clubs in Europe. Their strategy was first to attract top talent using their immense wealth, then a top coach and finally win the big trophies locally and abroad. Mancini was an attractive option because at Fiorentina and Lazio he had demonstrated his team-building skills and at Internazionale he proved that he could equally work well with a star-studded team. Furthermore the owners must