Next season Michael Carrick, Xabi Alonso, Mikel Arteta, and Frank Lampard will all be managing in the Premier League. Three of them at Big 6 clubs too. We’ve almost watched a complete cycle in real time.
These were the midfielders we grew up watching dictate games, control tempo, captain sides, win titles, play in Champions League finals and now they’re the ones standing on the touchline building the next era. Football really moves fast. One minute they’re competing against each other on the pitch, now they’re competing philosophically as coaches.
Despite coming from similar footballing generations. Carrick leans towards calm positional football and control, Alonso feels like a blend of Spanish structure with modern flexibility, Arteta is almost obsessive with automatisms and spacing, while Lampard has always been more direct and emotionally driven in his approach.
It’s the natural evolution of football. The generation that learned under managers like Sir Alex Ferguson, Carlo Ancelotti, José Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Arsène Wenger are now becoming the managers themselves. And now a whole new generation of players will grow up seeing them as coaches first, not even remembering how good they were as players.
Boys aren’t jumping fences, riding bikes for miles, running from dogs, and jumping up and down cars all day while hooping multiple times per day either. All that landing, running, changing direction was building strength. As a kid, I didn’t even know what sore really was.