The pros and cons of being a long-distance football manager — SkimNews
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- Tony Pulis kept his family home on England's south coast while managing Stoke City in Staffordshire, logging round trips of more than 400 miles, and stretched his one-way commute to 320 miles when he joined Middlesbrough in 2017.
- Pulis turned the solo Saturday-night drive into his tactical war room — calling chairman Peter Coates (only after defeats), assistants David Kemp and Gerry Francis, and his chief scout about the next opponent before reviewing video footage over dinner at home.
- Frank Lampard splits his time between Coventry and London, Jose Mourinho lived in a London five-star hotel during his Manchester United tenure, and Arne Slot chose Hale, Greater Manchester — near Manchester airport for flights back to his family in the Netherlands — while managing Liverpool.
- Pulis said he never felt he was shortchanging his clubs, arguing that living away from family gave him "more space" to focus on management duties.
- Pulis admitted his daughters would say he spent too much time away from home, but said he would never have run a club remotely and insisted on being present for training during the week.
Why it matters: Pulis's account reframes the long-distance-manager setup from a personal hardship into a deliberate competitive tool — the quiet car ride became where Saturday-night opposition analysis and Monday-morning game plans took shape. For clubs weighing whether to accommodate a manager living far from the training ground, his testimony offers one of the few extended first-person defences of the arrangement from a manager who lasted 10 years across two Stoke spells.
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