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Watching the start of The Championship season and Wrexham’s trip to Southampton, it seemed that there was a frustrating uncapsulation about the two managers.

Will Still, the Brit bathed in European Culture, was the happier of the two when late goals gave the relegated Southampton an opening day home win. Still has arrived from RC Lens in French football aged just thirty-two. He cast the shadow of a modern manager, comfortable talking about tactics and projects, and it seems almost certain that he will rise in the game.

Opposite is Phil Parkinson, fifty-seven, is once again in this tier of football having taken a club to the second flight for the second time. Wrexham’s rise is perhaps less surprising than Colchester United’s way, but both are achievements. The resources at Wrexham’s disposal undersell the job which Parkinson has done, achieving three promotions in three years, and as the two late goals went in the idea of a fourth seemed fanciful, if not outside the realms of possibility.

Why then is it so absurd to think about Parkinson rising higher, and so easy to think of Still as a Premier League or England manager?

Natural

As it is with players football has fallen for the potential of managers. Appointing Phil Parkinson to a vacant Premier League, or even Championship, job would see a chairman beset with questions about how a manager who had to go down to the National League for a job could possibly be trusted with the ambitions of a second tier club. A history of success is often speckled with failure, and no one really knows why Parkinson’s Sunderland did not work.

Still arrives in England with some Ligue 1 seasons under his belt, but myopia ignores them, and so he is fresh and unsullied. It mischaracterises Still, in a way, to point at his comfortable use of the lingua franca of “Projects”. He might represent something new for football. A manager who has grown up in the language of the modern football world but injects a kind of warmth and humanity which perhaps is more natural to people who have grown up in a constantly online world.

Parkinson seems clunky when he speaks in comparison. The authority in the dressing room which we are told modern players do not respond to, but the three promotions in three years must question that. With Parkinson, you know what you are going to get, which is why no club seems to wants to get him.

Characterful

Parkinson’s football is a fine thing to watch, but it is attrition, and a lot of it is about never allowing a team to be out of a game. Still’s approach to play is relatively unknown, and unexplored, although he favours a high press and likes his build up mostly on the flanks. The latter is far more in keeping with the modern vogue of football, and more successful when deployed well.

Success though is a relative term, especially when talking about a manager with a CV like Parkinson’s, but one suspects that when a Brighton, or a Brentford, or a Leeds, or a West Ham comes loose, and they need someone who can robustly defend their Premier League status then they would turn to the man who plays the nice football in Still, rather than the man who grinds out results in Parkinson.

Which is the reason which one can never see Parkinson elevated beyond the position he can take a club to. The job fit him, but not the job description. No Premier League club wants to admit the best it can hope for it staying in games at 0-1 and nicking a point, and they all want to play football “the right way” with August promising rewards which so rarely arrive in Spring.

Broader

What does it mean then? That Parkinson’s experience is never going to be as attractive as Still’s potential? What does it say about the culture which has produced this situation? Nothing bad about either man, of course, but something about our relationship with expertise. The country which has “had enough of experts” have no interest in a manager who has ground out success, and plenty of interest in the manager as “Rise & Grind”

The idea that winning – the quality of being a winner – is innate hangs over appointments, and Parkinson’s chequered past questions throws confusion into that perfection. His experience becomes a confusing expertise, while Still’s story is more simple and underlines the idea that it is the capacity for hard work, not the work itself, which is to be desired. That there is no there, there. No expertise in football management that The Manager could show.

Data in football has demystified much, and to great effect too, but perhaps not the thing which The Manager does. With so much understood about the game, it seems out of kilter that a central figure may have an oversized and unquantifiable influence as The Manager does.