Tottenham Hotspur’s Italian head coach Antonio Conte reacts during the English Premier League football match against Southampton at St Mary’s Stadium in Southampton, England on March 18.
Coaches don’t quit, but Antonio Conte is coming close.
Conte is the Italian manager of that famous coaching graveyard, Tottenham Hotspur. He was supposed to be the guy to push them over the top. Instead, the team has gotten hold of him by the ankle.
Conte is one of the dozen or so soccer coaches who are immune to failure. That’s not to say he never loses. It is to say that losing does not attach itself to him. He’s won enough that people have him pegged as a permanent winner.
In the way of soccer, Conte also loses a lot of jobs. This is his fifth stop in 10 years. This season, the Spurs are bumbling along. They’re not a bad team, but they’re not a good one either.
Conte’s probably getting fired again. No problem. He’ll have a new gig 10 minutes later.
But befitting a man in his early 50s who’s had enough of this merry-go-round, Conte decided to quit first. Sort of.
Years ago, I also had a job I hated. One day, as a purgative exercise, I wrote out all of my grievances.
Stamps and envelopes were free in the supply room. I intended to mail this j’accuse to a friend overseas. But the printer was broken. I kept hitting ‘send’ and getting an error message. So, like any budding professional genius, I gave up and went home.
When I arrived back at work the next day, the letter was taped to my computer monitor. I sat there all morning while my colleagues avoided looking at me. I phoned a lawyer friend and asked him what to do. He said that I was not under any circumstances to leave. If I wanted to ensure that I got paid what I was owed, they had to make the first move.
So I sat there well into the afternoon. It was getting to two o’clock. This was beginning to seriously cut into my post-job-loss drinking binge. Finally, I stood at my cubicle, held up my hand to summon everyone’s attention, and asked, “Is someone going to fire me or what?” So they did.
I ask you – was I fired? Or did I quit via firing? If it’s between being the schmuck who had something is done to him or the even bigger schmuck who took action, I choose the latter.
Conte’s version of writing a letter (minus the part about forgetting to delete it from the print queue) was answering a question. It wasn’t much of a question – “Why do you think it’s like this?” – but it came after Spurs coughed up a certain win in the final minutes of a match last weekend.
“Why?” Conte said incredulously, and then made that particular Italian sound you know if you’ve ever asked a Roman in a hurry how to get to the Spanish Steps – “… Bah!”
Conte launched into a broadside against the club (“They are used to [losing] here”), his players (“They don’t want to play under pressure”), management (“Until now I try to hide this situation, but now, no”) and ownership (“Twenty years, there is this owner, and they never won something”).
Italian soccer managers in a mood do angry rants better than anyone anywhere. This was a real standout.
Conte’s position in the club has become untenable. But as of Tuesday afternoon, he still had a job. Every hour that passes makes the Spurs look more ridiculous and makes Conte look more right. If you can’t get rid of a guy who just told you to your face that he hates working for you, what else are you doing wrong?
However this ends, Conte’s reputation won’t suffer. In fact, he may have done some good. Right now, he’s not a guy who couldn’t the job is done. He’s an iconoclast who spoke truth to power.
It’s a lesson North American coaches might meditate on.
Thirty years ago, it made sense to stay in a bad job for as long as possible. Coaches made much less money. Showing up on one team could get you blackballed by all the others.
Those factors no longer apply. Coaches are paid like players. Since there are no original thinkers in sports, the same people keep getting all the same jobs. Peter Laviolette has coached five NHL teams. Ken Hitchcock had six top jobs. Darryl Sutter is on a mission to coach every team in the league.
If these guys want to call it a day on one job, current employment patterns suggest they won’t have trouble finding another.
I hear what you’re saying – quitters never win, stand and fight, and you don’t make it in sports unless you have that do-or-die attitude.
Bad news: Regardless of how vigorous your attitude is, you’re going to die. Coaching is the only profession in which you are guaranteed to be fired. Once you have begun to invoke your never-say-die attitude, someone is coming up behind you with a metaphoric axe.
It would be wonderful if just once in the midst of a season in which a club has blown three-quarters of its games and misplaced the team charter, a coach said, ‘You know what? This isn’t working. I’ve tried my best, but no dice. So I’m Audi 5000. Hasta la vista, suckers.’
And then left.
This imaginary hero doesn’t quibble about the money or try to justify himself. He just leaves. It’s not like anything would stop running. As jobs go, coaching sports involves very little actual work.
An assistant takes over and gets some exposure, the team saves money and the fans have something to talk about. Everyone’s a winner. Why would anyone be angry about that?
A coach who quit in a huff would become a legend. Theoretically.
I can think of about a hundred coaches (and executives) who should have done that, but stayed around another six months so that their partial humiliation could become total, then lost their jobs anyway. Most of them were in charge of the Leafs. Now that it’s over, I wonder if they’d do it the same way again.
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