There have been times this season when the country’s biggest pundits have spoken more like white-coated lab scientists than ex-footballers. Sucking their teeth, poring over graphs of league positions and talking fervently about a football club’s DNA as if these specific traits should be passed down unchanged, generation after generation.
It’s a comforting theory that particular clubs represent some fixed philosophy that never wavers. The problem is, it doesn’t really stand up.
That’s not to say there isn’t something there that former players can feel, it’s just that’s what’s described as club DNA isn’t embedded in a place or badge, it’s installed and removed by their managers instead.
The best example of this can be seen at Manchester United. When a conveyor belt of legends lines up to lament how the latest failed hire hasn’t “understood the club” or didn’t have “United DNA”, many are understandably harking back to better times during their playing days. When winning league titles was a habit and they batted away any pretenders for their crown.
It was a golden era for the Red Devils, all delivered under the 27-year dynasty of Sir Alex Ferguson – a man whose impact spread across the entire club, building a culture based on high standards and success for decades.
For that reason, it’s natural for the likes of Gary Neville and Wayne Rooney to look back fondly on those times when they see more recent United sides struggling to mount a serious title bid.
They’re missing their team win trophies regularly, they’re missing what it felt like to be part of that, they’re missing Ferguson.
Fans of Manchester United DNA will point to Sir Matt Busby’s tenure as an example of the similar values that brought prolonged success and it’s true: they both believed in giving youth a chance to shine, were savvy squad builders and were masters at man management.
But Busby didn’t directly spawn Ferguson. There was no direct football lineage between them.
They undoubtedly shared similar beliefs and came from the same stock, with Fergie heavily influenced by former Celtic boss Jock Stein, who grew up in the same interwar Scottish mining communities as Busby.
Stein’s Lisbon Lions famously won the European Cup in 1967 with a team of players born within 30 miles of Celtic Park and built his successes with local development and a strong culture as the cornerstone, making him and Busby bedfellows.
So when Ferguson arrived at Old Trafford, while his approach had hallmarks to Busby, he wasn’t a DNA hire, he was the best manager available. He’d developed his own methods based on his own influences and beliefs that proved successful at Aberdeen previously and it was that record north of the border that marked him out as the standout candidate when the United job came up.
There’s no doubting that the traits had made Ferguson attractive had echoes of Busby, but he was who the United board considered to be the best available man for the job – just as the likes of Tommy Docherty, Dave Sexton and Ron Atkinson had been previously, despite their difference in styles to Busby and Ferguson.
If anything, the attempt to create a continuous Manchester United legacy came when reserve team boss Wilf McGuinness was given the senior job after Busby retired, although it didn’t work out.
It’s in those instances when the club DNA tag makes more sense than some notional feeling. The fabled Liverpool Boot Room successfully managed that for the best part of four decades, with Bill Shankly – interestingly another manager with similar upbringings to Busby and Stein – handing on the baton to assistant Bob Paisley, then to Joe Fagan, Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Roy Evans.
But as soon as Evans made way for Gerard Houllier, that lineage quickly disappeared. Once more, it was the coaches and their influences that made for a continuous DNA, not the club itself.
It wasn’t until Jurgen Klopp started to deliver sustained success 20 years later that it was claimed anybody truly “got” what Liverpool was all about. That had less to do with him tapping into Liverpool’s mythical essence and more to do with him being a good manager and winning their first league title in three decades.
Similar threads can be seen in other clubs too, most notably with the so-called Tottenham Way, which was established throughout the mid-20th century in the methods of Peter McWilliam and spread into the pass-and-move approaches of his former squad members and future title-winning Spurs managers Arthur Rowe and Bill Nicholson.
But since that lineage broke off in the mid-70s, what began as coaching ideas becomes nostalgia, making talk about a Spurs identity more about remembering previous successes than reproducing it.
It’s a common thread and identifies where some clubs are going wrong. Talk about club DNA is talk about past managers rather than present realities because clubs don’t carry identity through time, coaches do.
