Maley, Willie – The Greatest Manager (article)

Willie Maley once reckoned he'd travelled 300,000 miles in the course of a football life that saw him lead Celtic to 30 major trophies in 43 years. That makes him the most successful manager in Scottish football history, but the one thing for which all his players remember him is not tactics or team talks. Instead, it is for his hat. 'He was always immaculately dressed, always with a soft hat on,' recalls Jackie Watters, a Celtic forward in the late 1930s. The great Willie Buchan, scorer of Celtic's winning goal in the 1937 Scottish Cup final, also remembers Maley showing his stature through his choice of headgear. 'You always expected to see him well-dressed, with the soft hat, you know.'

The ability to project the right image was as essential to football managers a century ago as it is today and Maley, as the best in the business, was alive to that. A soft hat and a hard stare took him a long way.

Maley never worked with his players in training and they would see nothing of him for days on end. He watched games in stony silence from the directors' box. He never indulged in team talks or spoke to his players at half-time or post-match. Instead, the craggy-featured Maley would stand silently in the dressing-room, observing his charges 'like a statue', according to Buchan. Maley would not even announce the team: players learned if they were in or out through reading the line-up in the newspaper.

It is one of the great paradoxes of Scottish football that it was Maley, this cold, remote figure, who drew up the managerial blueprint for Celtic as a team who would win — and win consistently — with wit, verve and style. It was a blueprint that would serve Celtic well and create great Celts such as Patsy Gallacher and Jimmy McGrory in Maley's time, through to Jimmy Johnstone and Kenny Dalglish long after his passing. As Willie Buchan puts it: 'To me, Willie Maley was Celtic.'

It was in 1897 that the first board of Celtic directors appointed Willie Maley, at just 29 years of age, as the first manager of Celtic, on an annual salary of £150. Maley won the Scottish League title for the club in his first full season as manager, but he realised that his ageing side urgently required reconstruction.

The new manager had been a midfielder in Celtic's first team, in 1888, and he was fortunate in that two of his team-mates from the early days of the club, James Kelly and Michael Dunbar, became, in 1897, members of the first Celtic board of directors. Maley had also played alongside Kelly for Scotland — although born in Newry, Ireland, Maley, as a naturalised Scot, was proud to represent the land where he had lived since childhood.

Maley could trust Kelly and Dunbar, his two chief allies on the board, to back his judgement and he would need their support over the next seven years, when he would gamble heavily with the entire future of Celtic Football Club. Had he failed, there would almost certainly have been no Lisbon Lions, no nine-in-a-row and a good deal fewer of the great Hooped entertainers.

Celtic had been a buying club in their opening decade, spending heavily to bring highly-paid, established professionals to the club. Maley decided to scrap all that and, instead, rely almost entirely on recruiting youngsters fresh from junior football. It was a massive risk and had it failed, Celtic might never have recovered.

Instead, after half a decade of painstaking work and worry for Maley, he created a young team who would win six league titles in a row between 1905 and 1910 and the first Scottish League and Cup doubles. It was the finest team in world football, and that six-in-a-row record would remain unbroken until the 1970s.

When the stars of that side, such as the great centre-forward Jimmy Quinn, began to falter and fail, Maley simply used his formula to build a second team in the image of the first. This one housed the skills of the magnificent Patsy Gallacher and won four titles in succession between 1914 and 1917 and two more in 1919 and 1922. The recruitment of hungry, young players meant they could be cowed, disciplined and moulded into a team.

Celtic continued to gather trophies throughout the 1920s and in the mid-1930s Maley built his third great team — featuring such prize entertainers as Jimmy Delaney, McGrory and Buchan — a stylish side who won the league title in 1936 and 1938 and the cup in 1937. By then, Maley was approaching 70, but he was as gruff and tough as ever. 'He was law, he was the boss, an iron-fisted man,' recalls Johnnie Wilson, another Celt from the 1930s who also remembers Maley for his soft hat. 'He could make people afraid of him just by looking at them.'

On one occasion, winger Frank Murphy knocked on the manager's door to ask Maley for a pay rise. The manager rattled out the greeting: 'What do you want?' Murphy, quailing in his manager's presence, was too terrified to request a wage increase. Instead, he asked for some complimentary match tickets for friends. Maley gave him them, but said it would be the last time, telling Murphy: 'If your own friends won't pay to see you play, how can you expect other people to do so?' Murphy never did get round to asking for that pay rise.

Maley was forging new ground in management with every step he took and could not lean on any predecessor for advice or encouragement. He created three homespun teams who played in a style that would become feared the world over. Maley's template for success would serve the club superbly throughout the 20th century until Celtic changed tack in the mid-1990s and became a buying club again. No other manager ever stamped his identity on Scottish football so distinctively.

His mastery was in finding the right players, finding the right position for them in his team, blending them and replacing them when the time was right. His record stands comparison with any other and he created the platform for success that would lead to Celtic's 1967 European Cup win.

Maley's achievements should not be demeaned because they belong in the pre-television era and for too long his successes have been shrouded in the mists of time. In creating three world-class teams from scratch, making them play in a highly entertaining fashion, and forging a rich identity for his club that would last a century, Maley's management is unparalleled; not just in Scotland but worldwide.