There is, on the southwestern coast of Scotland, a small port that was home for many years to perhaps the strangest professional soccer club in Europe. Its name is Stranraer and its claim to fame, or rather sporting eccentricity, was that for 18 years it employed no manager. The team was instead selected by the dozen directors of the club.


It would be entertainingly seditious to report that Stranraer fared rather well without a manager, but alas the truth is somewhat different. In their managerless century they never won a single competition, nor had any player selected for the national side at any level.


I think of this Scottish club every time I hear people tut-tutting over one of those convulsive series of managerial changes such as Britain is at present experiencing. No fewer than seven Premier League clubs have brought in a new manager this season, four of them in the last month. To anyone who wonders why, "Stranraer" is probably as good an answer as any, but that does rather raise the issue: if we cannot do without them, what exactly are managers for?


The obvious answer is that they are there to assemble a winning team, coach it, and then re-assemble it as injuries, transfers and the passing years take their toll. To do this at the highest level you need one of two things: either the playing resources already in situ (which is why Brazil once won the World Cup with a manager who had only been in the job three weeks) or the means to acquire them. Lack these and your team might as well be playing netball.


This is not something which is normally recognized by those who appoint managers. They will talk a lot about "qualifications for the job" but what they are really looking for is someone who has traded his soul to the devil in return for access to the black arts of alchemy and mysticism. In other words, those who can take base materials and make them precious, or take the already promising and inspire it to greatness.


Few managers can work this magic, hence the ceaseless engagement and discarding that goes on. It is all a bit like a perfectionist's search for the ideal lover.


Perhaps the best example of a man who made the footballing earth move was Bill Shankly. Shankly took over at Liverpool when it was a faded Second Division side and created a force that dominated English soccer for nearly 30 years. His trademark was a talent for inspiring to greatness those players who seemed on paper only good to middling.


He did this by radiating a special kind of obsessive self-belief -- one that was always infused with humor. Shankly was the king of one-liners: "I've built a side so invincible that they'll have to send a team from Mars to beat us," "Football is not a matter of life and death, it's more important than that," and, to a player who had a degree, "The trouble with you son, is that all your brains are in your head." Another player, sold because Shankly believed he lacked courage, was dismissed as having "the heart of a caraway seed."


His team talks were priceless. His constant theme was the almost shocking inadequacy of the opposition and he once began a pre-match chat, "Boys, I've just seen them getting off the coach. They should be in hospital. The center-forward can hardly walk." His most famous technique was to have a Subbuteo field (for the uniniated a table-top soccer game with felt pitch and small plastic players with which one flicks the ball) set up in the dressing room. One end of this would be populated with a team in the colors of that day's opponents. He would pick up each tiny player and, with a dismissive remark, deposit it in a nearby trash can.


It is in the hope that they may stumble upon a Shankly that club chairmen incessantly reject managers. Given the difference such a genius can make, is it any wonder that they do?