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“Who’d be a football manager?” writes Ian Holloway, the English soccer coach with over 1,000 games of management experience.

He continues: “It’s an emotional rollercoaster that when you’re riding it, you can’t wait to get off, but once the ride stops, you want to get straight back on again and feel that adrenaline rush. If you love the game as much as I do, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.”

In his book How To Be A Football Manager, Holloway takes you on the rollercoaster with him as he navigates life in the (mostly) lower levels of English football.

With chapter titles that include Anger Management, Centre Forwards: Handle with Care, The Managerial Merry-Go-Round, and Working the Chairman, Holloway’s writing is a refreshingly honest portrayal of an increasingly sanitary game.

“In the pages that follow, I’m going to try and explain what being a football manager is really all about,” he writes.

Each chapter has a section called “Ollie’s Tips” where he gives specific advice that he wants you to absorb. Here’s a collection of Holloway’s craft lessons:

• You have to explain how you want the team to play, but at a new club you have to assess what you’ve got first and what best suits those players. You can’t just come in with a style you want them to play – unless you think you can change them all, which is nigh on impossible.

• It’s really important you have things written down at home or etched in your mind to occasionally check ‘where am I?’ because it’s very easy to forget what your principles are. As a manager, if you have those principles and you don’t follow them, even just once, you’re dead. You do not cross your own lines, ever, because people won’t follow you. Ask Boris Johnson.

• Your scouts are the unsung heroes who keep you in a job, because they are constantly looking for and finding little gems for you.

• For me, striving to get better and improve is what life is all about, but you have to start from within first and that was what I did as a manager – I made sure that I could manage myself and lead myself before I could lead anyone else. That’s how it starts.

• For a professional footballer, if you don’t get five to six weeks’ full training into you before the new campaign kicks off, I believe you’re on your way to having a bad season as an individual.

• You might think you have a great pre-season event planned out, but with footballers around you always need to expect the unexpected.

• If you’re going abroad for a training camp, avoid at all costs the place with the all-night clubs and beer-fuelled holidaymakers. You might find some of your own players going AWOL.

• You just have to find a way and the frustrating thing about being a manager is you know exactly how you want your players to play, but they don’t. Some of the experienced ones get it straight away, but others don’t so you have to find a way of explaining, no matter how you do it because everyone is different, and your job and your duty is to try and make them understand.

• You have to be prepared to say if a player isn’t right for you, no matter how it looks from the outside.

• If you don’t have much money and the agents aren’t going to get what they see as a worthwhile cut, you have to be a bit more creative with how you convince players to sign and get deals across the line.

• I judge players by one mantra – what are they like when they don’t get what they want? That’s a big question I ask when I am about to sign someone. ‘Tell me what he’s like when he doesn’t get what he wants. Does he sulk? Does he moan? Does he throw his toys out of the pram? Does he get more determined? Does he get angry? Does he blame other people? Or is he a good, strong character who is ready to keep going no matter what?’ I’d ask my scouts to try and notice that by watching what they’re like if they get subbed. What’s their temperament like?

• As a manager you’ve got to try and make your team feel invincible, however you can; and the personal touches to help them, when things aren’t going well, are absolutely paramount to get the best out of everybody.

• My advice for any manager speaking to journalists would be that you have to be your authentic self in everything you say and do. If you don’t, you’re not living right because you can’t hold back. Say what you feel and think.

• The minute you sign a player, he is yours and you have to look after him, and that should go all the way down to whatever issues they have. As manager of a player in a tough situation, I always asked myself, ‘What would I do if it was my boy? What would I do?’ Luckily, I had children, so I understood that I had to look after this guy, and with any scenario that comes up, I always start with that same question.

• Missing out on players is part and parcel of management – all you can do is sell the club, your vision and yourselves to them, but ultimately the chairman or owner has the final say. And if the player you miss out on makes it big somewhere else, it’s never the chairman’s fault!

• I hate the phrase ‘losing the dressing room’, because I don’t really believe it is a genuine thing, but you can do that to yourself by signing the wrong player with the wrong character on the wrong money.

• Being a manager is about reassessing yourself all the time and being comfortable with who you are and how you’re doing the job – and that’s the toughest thing of all to get right. But managing your anger is essential.

• The bottom line is that fans can get away with saying whatever they want, but managers can’t – so my advice would be that no matter how much you feel aggrieved or think about reacting to provocation, it’s just not worth the hassle or the fallout that comes afterwards.

• It’s always best to count to ten before you do anything. I know that sounds easy, but it isn’t.

• Everyone has to be on the same page at the club, or else it’s a house of cards with a strong draught blowing through it. My advice to anyone with a football club is keep the distance between players and owners substantial because it never works otherwise.

• Essentially you need your agent to agree a deal right from the beginning when you first sign your contract, because it always ends in tears. Agree your compensation in advance for losing your job during the period of employment, with the caveat that it needs to be settled immediately – that’s the only way around gardening leave.

1:1 Coaching with Cody

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If you’re interested in working with me, the first step is to get in touch!

You can reply to this email, or head to codyroyle.com to learn more about my approach.