Less Than the Sum of its Parts

I wanted to start of my first post talking about the nature of successful football teams.  After watching the complete destruction of Chelsea at the hands of Manchester City on Saturday, I spent some time thinking about the difference between a group of players and a cohesive team.  If you take transfer window spending as a gauge of how a team ought to be performing, then City should be competing for every major title the are eligible for.  Even teams like Tottenham, Liverpool, and Aston Villa should be so far behind in the rear view mirror, they are mere specks on the horizon.  Yet time and again, the Citizens are struggling for even consistent performance as shown by the embarrassing loss to Stoke followed by the unlikely win at Stamford Bridge.  How can this be?

Normally, I am a staunch defender of coaches, I think they get left holding the bag for a number of problems which are so much larger than one man.  But, in this particular case, the coach is the glue that binds a team together.  You might say it is the most important job a coach has: to make the team better than the sum of its parts.  Yet, City aren't even playing close to level with the sum of the talent accumulated at Eastlands.  So, one can hardly blame City for switching from Pearce to Erickson to Hughes to Mancini, but at what point is the manager no longer the problem?

As Real Madrid are going through similar (though higher stakes) growing pains, it is evident that a stable full of high value horses does not win every race.  Bad analogy, but you get the idea.  Lastly, on need not look further than the recent departure of Robinho to his boyhood club of Santos in native Brazil.  With respect to the country who is currently the odds-on favorite to win the World Cup in three months, most members of the Brazilian national team, world class all, don't play in Brazil!  They play in England, Spain, Italy, France, Germany because that's where the money is, not in Brazil.  It would be like Shaq leaving the NBA to play Austrian basketball.  To refocus the point, when a player who cost approximately $50 million to sign leaves to play in a demonstrably lower league, something has gone terribly awry.  City are on their fourth coach in nearly as many years, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that when your car consistently steers in the wrong direction, replacing the steering wheel over and over again won't address the issue.