In association football, the manager is the person who has overall responsibility for the running of a football team. They have wide-ranging responsibilities, including selecting the team, choosing the tactics, recruiting and transferring players, negotiating player contracts, and speaking to the media. In professional football, a manager is usually appointed by and answerable to the club's board of directors, but at an amateur level the manager may have total responsibility for the running of a club.
The manager's responsibilities in a professional football club usually include (but are not limited to) the following:
Some of the above responsibilities may be shared with a director of football or sporting director, and are at times delegated to an assistant manager or club coach.
Additionally, depending on the club, some minor responsibilities include:
These responsibilities are more common among managers of small clubs.
The title of manager is almost exclusively used in British football.[1] In most other European countries and rest of the world in which professional football is played, the person responsible for the direction of a team is awarded the position of coach or "trainer" is known as head coach. For instance, despite the general equivalence in responsibilities, Gareth Southgate is referred to as the manager of England, and Julian Nagelsmann is described as the head coach of Germany. Germany also has a team manager role that is subordinate to the head coach and is currently held by Rudi Völler.
The responsibilities of a European football manager or head coach tend to be divided up in North American professional sports, where the teams usually have a separate general manager and head coach (known as a field manager in baseball), although occasionally a person may fill both these roles. While the first team coach in football is usually an assistant to the manager who actually holds the real power, the North American–style general manager and head coach have clearly distinct areas of responsibilities. For example, a typical European football manager has the final say on in-game decisions (including player line-ups), and off-the-field and roster management decisions (including contract negotiations). In North American sports, those duties would be handled separately by the head coach and general manager, respectively.