Football slows down to watch the Sol Campbell car crash

Our man inside the game knows what football runs scared of men like Sol Campbell

don’t mind a bit of ego in football. I played with a fair amount of it throughout my career and it helped me to become the best that I could be at certain moments. Any psychologist will tell you that players who tell themselves that they are the best will eventually start to believe it.

Confidence bordering on arrogance can be no bad thing for the right player and those that project it such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo are all the better to watch for having that air of superiority about them.

And the same is true for managers. I am a fully paid-up member of the movement which believes that the most successful teams are the ones that have selfish managers at the helm. That is to say, managers such as Alex Ferguson had no trouble selling great players if it helped to maintain his authority by making an example of somebody. It’s about ego and control with the former leading to the latter.

The problem arises when that equilibrium shifts. For a player, his body may one day let his mind down and in the case of a manager his players always have the potential to undermine the confidence he has in himself.

All of which is what makes recent comments by former England defender Sol Campbell so interesting. Having retired from football in 2012 and seemingly having spent the last six years renovating expensive London townhouses with his wife – don’t take my word for it, they appeared on a TV series – Campbell is now of the opinion that the football world is once again deserving of his genius.

But unlike during his playing career he isn’t having it all his own way. Campbell’s sudden desire to be a manager is being met with a cold shoulder from one or two clubs that are nervous about the way he conducts himself. Recently, Oxford United interviewed Campbell for the vacant manager’s job but have seemingly decided on the no-brainer that is Craig Bellamy.

This upset Campbell, who took to an obscure Arsenal podcast to vent his anger: “I’m intelligent enough, it’s not like I played on a fox and dog pitch all my life. I can’t believe some people, I’m one of the greatest minds in football and I’m being wasted because of a lack of experience or ‘maybe he talks his mind too much’.”

It was an explosion of ego that one could perhaps forgive if only because Campbell hasn’t lost out on the job to an outstanding candidate but rather to somebody who used to live in his pocket.

I know footballers and I know that will be the main reason as to why Campbell is so hacked off.

On the face of it Campbell has everything going for him. He has won every domestic honour in England and played for his country on 73 occasions, making the FIFA All-Star team after the 2002 World Cup. He seems a coup for the right lower league club who at the very least could expect to boost its brand and the players that it might attract.

As fans, you may think that staffing football clubs is a closed shop and that players of the stature of Sol Campbell can simply walk back into the game when the mood takes them. But that isn’t true for more reasons than I have the space left to write in.

Broadly speaking there are a certain set of rules that apply to every player looking for a manager’s job, no matter who he is.

Has he been out of the game for too long?

Will he be a popular choice?

What is his standing in the game among his peers?

Is he genuinely hungry to succeed, or does he have nowhere else to go?

With respect to Campbell he has been out of the game for a while and despite collecting all of his coaching badges he is regarded in the game as somebody to be cautious around because he doesn’t accentuate the typical personalities and traits of a footballer. He’s a thinker.

But at a certain level of football Campbell will be a popular choice as a manager. Clubs in League One and League Two are generally starved of publicity and interest and everything else the Premier League has in spades. For the rest of us, Campbell’s managerial debut will be interesting inasmuch as slowing down for car crashes is interesting.

Many years ago, I guess when I was ten or 11 years old, Sol Campbell presented a trophy to me at a presentation night for my local club. He was a young Spurs player at the time and I only heard him say four words. But at the time those four words meant the world to me.

“Congratulations mate, well done.”

Throughout his career Campbell managed to carry a certain amount of that reserve about with him.

He was seen as quiet and understated for long periods of his playing career, as if he had a secret or thought he was better than everybody else. Since his retirement from football Campbell has been similarly economical with his breath, but when he does talk he generally blows hard.

Football clubs want football men, football men that live, breathe and bleed football. They don’t want interior decorators, they don’t want people running for the job of London mayor and they don’t want people who claim institutional racism at the FA was the reason they didn’t get to captain their country.

All of that tends to scare the owners of football clubs.

But if there is one truism in football it is that there will always be an owner with a big enough ego of his own who believes he can do what has never been done by bringing in a face that nobody at the club ever even imagined was possible.

It appears as if the Conservative councillor John Fenty, majority owner of Grimsby Town, will be the man to give Campbell his break in management.

Two self-made alpha male Tory millionaires trying to turn around the fortunes of a small seaport town in North East Lincolnshire?

It will only end one way. It’s just a shame for both of their egos that nobody will be paying attention to it.