RSC Anderlecht

Anderlecht player-manager Vincent Kompany will no longer coach the team during matches after the club got off to a nightmare start under his tenure.

Per Goal, first-team coach Simon Davies will take charge of the squad on matchdays, and he said it's important the former Manchester City star can focus on being the best player possible:

"As players and staff we're trying to find which players suit the system better than some. There's always going to be change, especially at the start.

"We're trying a new project here. It's not going to happen overnight. This is a playing style that's new to the football club.

"We need some stability and one of those things that's going to change straight away is Vinny is going to be captain from the next game. He's going to lead the team and really concentrate on being a player on matchday.

"This is one of the things that we're going to try. We work so well as a staff during the week. Vinny and the club have a vision and we all work to it as staff.  But it's important he's a player on match day.

"If Vinny can be the best player in the league, which he is, and lead on the field and I can take the responsibility in terms of other things, how we play, if we need to change shape during the game – I will take that responsibility with the staff on the side."

Kompany has not been relieved from his role as player-manager, per Kristof Terreur:

If you look at the reactions, nobody has really got it: he won’t decide over subs or tactical tweaks during the 90 minutes, but that’s it. Kompany stays in charge during the week, before or after games and will keep on outlining his vision. A 6.9 days a week / player-manager. https://t.co/08mv5DcZcp

— Kristof Terreur (@kristofterreur) August 22, 2019

The 33-year-old left City to return to Belgium at the end of last season, hoping to revitalise his boyhood club. Anderlecht are Belgium's most successful side but finished in sixth place during last year's play-offs, losing out on a European ticket.

He has tried to implement the vision of City manager Pep Guardiola but has found little success:

Anderlecht losing to KV Kortrijk. The Vincent Kompany era has started with 2 points out of 4 games. pic.twitter.com/kIV00vwGsa

— Kristof Terreur (@kristofterreur) August 17, 2019

After two consecutive scoreless draws, Anderlecht suffered a heavy defeat in their fourth match of the season away to Kortrijk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIDYO-UgL2E

Les Mauves have a difficult stretch of matches coming up, with fixtures against defending champions Genk, rivals Standard and Club Brugge and Antwerp, the biggest risers during last year's play-offs.

Anderlecht have a young squad with several of Belgium's top prospects, including Yari Verschaeren, Sieben Dewaele and Elias Cobbaut. They also added international stars Samir Nasri and Nacer Chadli in the summer, but the many changes have made it difficult to implement Kompany's vision.

Kompany spent part of his youth in the Anderlecht academy and made his senior debut for the club at age 17. He won two domestic titles before embarking on an international career that led him to City via Hamburg. At the Etihad Stadium, he won four Premier League titles and the domestic treble in his final season with the Sky Blues.    

For a professional football manager, telling a player he has lost his place in the team is one of the most unpleasant parts of the job. Even more so when you're the player who will be playing in his place.

Andy Preece found himself having just that kind of conversation midway through his first full season as player-manager of English lower-league side Bury. The Greater Manchester club had succeeded in signing striker Jon Newby on loan from Liverpool, and Preece felt that it should be he who partnered the new recruit up front, rather than strike partner Paul Barnes.

"It was a really, really difficult situation, and I really felt for him," Preece told Bleacher Report.

"Jon Newby played up front and I decided that I was the best partner for him. Paul Barnes was gutted because he felt Newby would have brought more out of him. It was a tough one, because I could understand exactly where he was coming from. But you can't allow those feelings to affect your decision."

Preece was ultimately vindicated as his strike partnership with Newby helped Bury avoid relegation to England's fourth tier at the end of the 2000-01 season. But dropping people never got any easier. The former Crystal Palace striker describes the process of distancing himself from his former team-mates as the "most difficult" aspect of the switch from player to boss.

Learning how to straddle the divide between team-mate and manager is just one of the challenges that now awaits Vincent Kompany following his return to formative club Anderlecht as player-manager.

The player-manager has become an increasingly rare creature in modern football, and should Kompany pause to consider how some of his contemporaries have fared in the role, the former Manchester City captain could be forgiven for having second thoughts.

Successful player-managers popped up now and again in the 1980s and 1990s—Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool, Graeme Souness at Rangers, the trio of Glenn Hoddle, Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli at Chelsea—but the handful of recent examples will not fill Kompany with much confidence.

Gennaro Gattuso lasted less than three months at Swiss club FC Sion in 2013, while Ryan Giggs' four-game stint as caretaker player-manager at Manchester United in 2014 was best remembered for his uninspiring team talks. Kevin Nolan made a good start to life at Notts County after his appointment in January 2017, but he was sacked just over 18 months later following a six-game winless run.

Brazil great Romario's spell in charge of Vasco da Gama in late 2007 proved predictably eventful. He took on the role two days after revealing he had tested positive for a banned substance (which he blamed on a hair-loss product) and lasted only five games after falling out with club president Eurico Miranda over team selection.

In what was unquestionably the most curious player-manager appointment of recent times, former Juventus midfielder Edgar Davids came close to keeping lowly Barnet in the English Football League in 2013 but then veered off track completely: giving himself the No. 1 jersey, refusing to travel to certain away games, getting sent off three times in six matches and, ultimately, resigning.

While there have been some eye-catching player-manager appointments in the Indian Super League in recent years—Roberto Carlos, Nicolas Anelka, Marco Materazzi, Robbie Keane—all the players concerned had clearly reached points in their careers where they felt immune to the risks of reputational damage.

A former Premier League midfielder with Wimbledon, Gareth Ainsworth became player-manager of struggling English fourth-tier outfit Wycombe Wanderers in 2012 following the dismissal of previous manager Gary Waddock. Despite being 39 at the time of his appointment, Ainsworth remained an important first-team player, and he says his first objective was to prove to his squad that he deserved his place in the team on merit.

"It's difficult because you're a manager and you're picking yourself," Ainsworth told Bleacher Report. "It could be looked at as, 'He's only picking himself because he's the manager.' So you've got to prove you can still do it. If anything, you probably try even more."

Money was tight at Wycombe, and Ainsworth found his new role "really, really difficult." But he continued to play regularly throughout the 2012-13 season and puts that almost entirely down to the trust he had in his assistant, Richard Dobson.

"Delegation was 100 percent to Dobbo when I was on the pitch," said Ainsworth, who is still in charge with Dobson at Adams Park. "I had total trust that he knew how I wanted to play. Having a solid, strong No. 2 is the real key to the player-manager role."

Kompany has already taken steps to surround himself with familiar faces at Anderlecht, bringing in Manchester City's former head of academy coaching Simon Davies as his assistant manager and appointing former City team-mate Craig Bellamy as under-21s manager.

Preece became player-manager at Bury "out of the blue" in December 1999 after previous manager Neil Warnock left to take over at Sheffield United.

Bury were on the brink of going out of business, and Preece found himself working around the clock to keep the club above water, all while trying to maintain fitness and keep producing the goods in the opposition penalty area.

"I wouldn't say it's an impossible job, but it's a very, very, very difficult job getting the balance right," he said.

Preece was unsure how to handle his new role at first, initially dropping himself from the starting XI before realising that, as one of the best players in the squad, he would be better off on the pitch.

Crossing the white line did not stop him thinking like a manager, and he can still recall instances when he allowed his annoyance at a team-mate's failure to follow instructions to throw him off his own game. But he also felt that being on the pitch gave him a better feel for what was happening in the match than he would have got standing on the touchline.

"Sometimes managers say things and you think, 'That's not how the game's going. That's not how it feels,'" said Preece, who remained in his post at Bury until 2003. 

"Maybe it's, 'You're getting overrun.' And on the pitch, you think, 'We're not getting overrun.' Sometimes from the side you see it a little bit differently. On the pitch, you can get a good feel for what's going on and what might happen. I would say that's a big advantage."

After successfully steering Wycombe clear of relegation in 2013, Ainsworth called time on his playing days, although he came out of retirement for an EFL Trophy game in August 2016. He still misses playing but believes that the demands on the modern manager are now too great for the roles to be combined successfully.

"If you gave us another day in the week, we'd be able to fill it easily due to the workload. And I mean that," Ainsworth said.

"Going to games, scouting, hours sat in front of a screen watching videos, opening letters, talking to agents, counselling players, trying to improve players... Training people on the grass is possibly one of the smallest percentages [of what] we do.

"It's a great job, but in modern management now, the game has got so enormous and so important. I think the reason player-managers are dying out is because you just need managers. It's tough to combine that [with playing], even though I'm sure every one of us would love to be out on that pitch."

At the age of only 33, Kompany should still have a few seasons on the pitch ahead of him. But from now on, when he walks out of the tunnel, he will have the weight of a whole football club on his shoulders.

                   

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