Sheepskin Coats and Fedoras: How Football Managers Have Defined Their Own Style

Clothes have always been significant. For many years that camel-colored overcoat said: I am serious. And not just serious, but also successful and a man of means. It first ­appeared regularly in the 1970s as part of the uniform of the showman, the flash-harry and the hustler. Former Crystal Palace manager Malcolm Allison famously teamed the camel-colored overcoat with a fedora hat, creating a Chicago bootlegger template, the manager as outlaw aristocracy.

The tracksuit, on the other hand, said: I have ideas, I am ­rigorous. It's football's ­equivalent of the lab coat. Sunderland manager Bob Stokoe's decision to wear a tracksuit at the 1973 FA Cup ­final was perhaps the most famous example, his training gear decisively outflanking Leeds United's Don Revie's sober ­single-breasted suit. Stokoe and Revie had a ­famously hostile relationship and ­Sunderland were underdogs. On the big day Stokoe came barreling off the bus in a tight tracksuit twinned with a brown overcoat and a pair of formal black leather shoes. He looked scarecrow-like, but also compelling. Watching him march along opposite Revie for the pre-match pageantry, you sense there can be only one winner here. Stokoe's capering sprint across the Wembley turf at the final whistle is one of the great managerial ­moments. The grasping hands, the ­utter conviction, the naked ­ego­mania: those 50 yards expressed the managerial sensi­bility at the peak of its popular cult.

At the same time, the classic sheepskin was also popular. The sheepskin said: I hustle, but I am also socially mobile. It was a ­compromise ­between the outdoor and the formal. It looked good with a tracksuit; it passed muster with a suit. There's a famous picture of Bobby Charlton during his unsuccessful stint as ­manager of Preston North End during the 1973–4 ­season. He is hunched in the dugout dressed in a pristine sheepskin. He knows this isn't going to work out. We know. Even the ­sheepskin knows.

Later, Sven-Göran Eriksson would prove ­influential as ­England manager with his sharp designer suits, a level of fine ­tailoring never before ­associated with the ­touchline. Perhaps because rather than in spite of the ongoing embarrassing ­revelations about his sex life he was unusually close to his players. They ­admired his fame. They dug his threads. ­Eriksson may not have actually been a player, but he looked the next best thing: a playa.