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Roles. Every person on this planet has a specific role. Even someone who sits on the street doing absolutely nothing is actually doing her/his role—sitting and doing nothing is her/his role.Shakespeare once said that the world is like a giant theatre where each person acts according to his part. I would further add that life is a script written and directed by the Almighty with us as actors.In the football fraternity, the guys within the lines on the pitch play the roles of footballers and the guys shouting from the touchline are the managers. The players play according to how their manager wants, or at least try to.Sometimes, the manager, it is said, makes great players while some people opine the entire opposite thing. However, both play a significant role in a team’s fortunes as a team that doesn’t have an intelligent manager and a good set of players are likely to not stamp their name in the pages of the history.Not all great players, though, make great managers and not all legendary managers were world beaters as players. In fact, if one looks around, she/he can easily see that the managers who were average as players are indeed the best tacticians in the game.However, what if some of the greatest stars in the world of football became the manager of the teams they are playing for? Here, we try to take a look, in a light-hearted manner, of what indeed could happen…
#1 Cristiano Ronaldo managing Real Madrid
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The Portuguese star has opined time and again that he doesn’t see himself wearing a suit and barking instructions from the touchline. However, we will let our imaginations run wild and assume he does take over the reins at the Santiago Bernabeu.
The first rule under him would be that each player must be posh and use a bottle of hair gel every day. They must also never have facial hair and a failure to abide by these rules would lead to punishments like changing Cristiano’s Jr. diapers.
Each player must spend a lot of time in the gym to build their thigh muscles. They must have thighs as broad as an oak tree. No player would be allowed to take penalties even in training. During any game, if Real Madrid win a penalty, then he will quickly sub himself in and take the penalty before subbing himself out again.
Finally, under his tutelage, no player would be allowed to consume alcohol and every one of them will have to put a lot of effort in training—especially the forwards—in order to be selected in the starting XI.
#2 Xavi Hernandez managing Al Sadd
The Barcelona legend might have gone under the radar since his move to Qatar, but he is still kicking it around at Al Sadd and given his intelligence of reading the game, it is highly likely that he would go down the way Pep Guardiola did.
The first thing he would do as manager is instruct his players to cuddle the grass for an hour every day in order to feel it. You see, Xavi just loves an evenly mowed grass turf and has always shown his fury towards clubs who show a lack of care in mowing the turf even.
So, each and every one of Xavi’s players must deeply be in love with the grass and make sure that they are of the correct length and perfectly even.
The second thing Xavi would preach is respect, or as Ali G says, ‘respek.’ Xavi is known for humble comments like, “the grass was too long and the pitch wasn’t watered properly,” whenever his team lost.
And he will disperse similar humility in his players by making them pick mushrooms. Xavi himself has a hobby of picking mushrooms, an act that has kept his feet on the ground despite being a legendary figure in football and it will be no different with his players.
Finally, he will teach his players how to pass the ball and set a condition of a 100 side and back passes-per-game for each of them. Failure to do would lead to drastic consequences like listening to an hour long speech from him on how football should be played.
#3 Sergio Ramos managing Real Madrid
He is the longest serving player of the club and it is highly likely that he will indeed manage a club someday. Defenders understand the overall game better than forwards for everything happens in front of them and Ramos has always been a leader.
However, his hot-headed nature has always got him into trouble and that’s the only thing skeptics can say in the negative light when his name comes up as a potential manager.
Keeping aside all the pros and cons, with Ramos at the helm, one thing will be certain: blood-rushing and leg-breaking tackles on opposition players added with a topping of ‘out-of-your-mind’ stupidity from players.
In fact, each player must get 5 yellow cards from rough tackles in the training in order to be considered for a place in the first team. In the case of defenders, they must, at least twice in every 5 games, mindlessly rush forward, leaving their zones open for the opposition to exploit.
#4 Sergio Busquets managing Barcelona
Among all the players on this list, he is highly likely to be the most successful manager. He can read the game like no other and it is because of this that he positions himself in such a way that the attacks of the opposition breaks down even before it starts.
As a manager, he would not ask his scouts to look for players at different clubs. Nope. He would ask them to fly to Hollywood and handpick the best child actors before bringing them to La Masia and groom them to become footballers.
As they were actors as children, they wouldn’t have to put much effort at playing peek-a-boo with the referee in order to get an opponent sent off. Busquets’ plan would be to forge a team of actors-come-players whose theatrics alone would reduce the opposition team to 7 players, making Barca automatically win games.
#5 Luis Suarez managing Barcelona
Luis Suarez the manager would be a football fans’ dream. I mean, just imagine a guy like him managing a football club. Actually, don’t. I will just write down what could possibly happen.
At first, he would sign a bunch of South America players and ask them to make racist remarks at black players in Spanish. Once they do that and get accused for being racists, he will come out to defend them by saying that they didn’t know that it was a racist term as it is used as a term of endearment in South America.
Suarez would then instruct his players to bite the bones out of anyone who would disagree with him and then it would begin. Camp Nou would become a zombie land where Barca players would bite the flesh out of opponent players if they are losing and feast on them along with Luis Suarez.
Talk about a fortress, and there couldn’t be a better one than Camp Nou.
#6 John Terry managing Chelsea
This is actually a big possibility somewhere down the line. As a club legend and a leader, there is a good chance that he would make a good manager. However, a man doesn’t change from what he truly is. Controversy has always followed him and it would be highly likely that a Chelsea player would come to his home and find his missus in bed with John Terry.
If that doesn’t happen, what could most definitely happen is John Terry making a new rule that players who share their other halves with each other are the only ones eligible to play for the club.
Oh, and finally, no black players will be allowed to play or the club under his stewardship as he doesn’t prefer to use the C word in every sentence.
#7 Zlatan Ibrahimovic managing PSG
A football fan that doesn’t want to see Ibrahimovic managing a team is no fan at all. The Swede is perhaps the best player among eccentric personalities and it is this alone that has made him a legend among fans.
As a manager, he would be no less insane as all his players will have to be taekwondo specialists in order to be eligible to play for him. In the dressing room, there will be 25 dart boards with Guardiola’s picture in the middle of them and the players who strike with the most accuracy would be an automatic starter for the next game.
Some players like to read the Bible before each game. However, Ibra wouldn’t allow that as each player would be obligated to read a chapter from his autobiography, ‘I am Zlatan.’
As Zlatan is the boss and likes to show it around, any player that defies him will be kung-fu kicked to the chest and sold to some 4th division Mongolian league for free. Finally, the stadium would be named after him and banners and posters with his face stamped on them will be hung all around the stadium—with each image having a quote by the man himself.
#8 Wayne Rooney managing Manchester United
Forwards rarely make a name as managers, but among all the forwards listed here, Wayne Rooney is most likely to succeed as a manager simply because of his outstanding versatility. In the past few years, he has been played in more positions than the number of marriages Kim Kardashian has had.
Anyways, if he ever became the manager of Manchester United, the first thing he would do is enlist all the bald players and get them a hair transplant. There can’t be any bald players under his tutelage for baldness is a sign of stress and he can’t have that black mark under his name.
Secondly, no player can have higher wages than him and if someone does, he will either get a wage hike himself or transfer the player out or hold the club ransom by threatening to leave if his wage isn’t hiked. The rest is the usual drill, and you all know that.
Finally, none of his players would succeed in international level as he will inflict his own shortcomings on players—playing like a Sunday Pub League player while on international duty. This way, his players will eventually be dropped from the national team and hence will be fitter during the season.
#9 Samir Nasri managing Manchester City
Outspoken players are hard to manage, but outspoken managers are hard to break. And Nasri will be one hell of an outspoken manager if he ever manages a team. Although he doesn’t really exude the manager vibe, one can’t help but wonder how a character like him would do as a manager.
First of all, let’s get one thing clear: Samir Nasri doesn’t like anybody, not even his own mother. Legend has it that he frowned at his mother the moment he came out of her womb as he wasn’t happy with the condition he was in there.
So, it would only be logical if he hated all his players and didn’t look eye to eye with them outside the stadium or training ground.
This would lead to his players hating him too. And then one of those players will call Cesc Fabregas and ask for advice on what to do. Fabregas will then instruct them to play like beer-belly jugheads and lose every game until he gets the sack.
And that is how Nasri’s story as City’s manager will be.
#10 Mario Balotelli managing AC Milan/Liverpool
I guess you all are now wondering how the world would be if Mario Balotelli became a football manager for real. Even I can’t fathom about the possibilities with him on the touchline because there are so many of them. However, I will give it a shot.
The first thing he would ask his players to get eccentric hairdos and the best 11 hairdos will be selected in the team regardless of their playing position. His players will have the old school OG (original gangsta) approach in terms of talking and playing.
For Christmas, he and his players will light up the training complex with fire from crackers gone wrong. After every win, he will personally drive a coach to take his players to a women’s prison to see what it is like. After their curiosity is satiated, they would spend the rest of the party time at pubs and strip clubs.
When, and not if, his team begins to lose a series of games, he would make all his players wear “Why Always Us?” shirts under their jersey and reveal it once they lose again.
But the most definite thing that will happen with him at the helm is that he would spend 80-90% of the time in the stand as a result of facing touchline bans whenever he is in the dugout.
