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Five things… That make Quique Sanchez Flores the coolest manager in the Premier League
1) Style
From the moment of Quique Flores’ first appearance in English football, when he was a largely unknown Spaniard elegantly patrolling the touchline at Goodison Park in Watford’s Premier League comeback game, he looked hipper than the average manager. Large-collared shirt with top button undone (sometimes the top two buttons), torso-hugging cashmere sweater, exquisitely tailored blazer, smart jeans, canvas trainers. There aren’t many 50-year-olds who could pull off that combination, let alone football managers. But on Flores the look came together as deliciously as beans and toast. If Roberto Martinez wore trainers with a suit he’d look like he was having a mid-life crisis.
2) Strength
Wearing jeans with a suit jacket doesn’t win you football matches, otherwise Jeremy Clarkson would be managing Bayern Munich. But Flores has quickly shown there is more to him than a suave exterior. The Hornets matched Everton, West Brom and Southampton in their opening three matches and beat Swansea and Newcastle in their last two. Their only league defeat was at Man City. Some Hornets fans criticised Flores’ defensive tactics in those first four winless matches, but with Watford now faring better than the other two promoted sides, his approach is being vindicated. At a club that went through four managers last season alone, a bit of durability is essential.
3) Ideals
Manager-speak is infamously dull and cliched, but Flores says things like, “We don’t have to change the culture of the past because we are creating one.“ Even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense, it’s spoken with a confidence that suggests Flores might be working on a higher plane. A thinker and a perfectionist, Flores’s English is more eloquent than anything you’ll hear in Watford town centre on a Saturday night, yet it is not good enough for him. "I cannot, right now, transmit what I want. I need to touch the hearts of the players,” he has purred, as if crooning a football-based power ballad. The man’s got soul.
4) Artistic background
Peel back the layers of most football men and all you normally find inside is more football. But not so with Flores, whose family history is the most intriguing of any top flight manager. His father Isidro was a multiple championship winner with Real Madrid - nothing unusual there. But his mother Carmen was an actress and his aunt, Lola Flores, was Spain’s most celebrated flamenco dancer. The man now plying his trade at Vicarage Road was brought up among lavish parties hosted by his aunt. These were attended, in Quique’s words, by “the most important artists and sportsmen in Spain”. Today he sees parallels between art and sport that pervade his work. “The theatre and the stadium are similar,” he has said. “You have to be creative. You have to make something for people whether you are a player or a singer, the coach or the director.” For an actor it might be a stirring portrayal of Hamlet, for Flores it’s a 0-0 draw with West Brom. It’s all art, in a way.
5) The competition
There’s no hiding the fact you don’t need to be Johnny Depp to be cooler than the rest of the Premier League managers. Brendan Rodgers and Arsene Wenger could clear a dancefloor quicker than a crate of non-alcoholic lager, while you can’t picture Steve McClaren going surfing or appearing in a hip-hop video. Even the young breed of bosses aren’t cool. Garry Monk and Eddie Howe are too studious, Alex Neil is too Scottish and Tim Sherwood is nowhere near as groovy as he thinks he is. Slaven Bilic come across like a dude in interviews, but the mask slips when he’s pacing about anxiously on the touchline. Jose Mourinho seemed cool when we first knew him, but those kinds of guys always do. As for Louis van Gaal, let’s not go there. All of which makes Flores the coolest manager almost by default. He’s still cool though.
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