It ain't no grave but it's a wake up…

Season Two of  Sky documentary is an object lesson is how not to manage

Of his many successes, ‘Video Arts’ is but a footnote in the career of John Cleese. Founded in 1972, possibly a hedge against his career longevity as a decidedly off-beat writer and performer, or to satisfy an innate intellectual curiosity, the firm specialised in making management and staff training films. It stood out in an otherwise dreary market, making full use of the writing skills of the late Sir Anthony Jay (who went on to co-write the ‘Minister’ series and much else), and Cleese’s prodigious comic talents.

Feeble-minded management theorists fretted the films were only memorable because they showed Cleese ‘doing it all wrong” and thus taught by negative example, which is a bad thing. Apparently. The market thought differently though, and the business was sold in 1996 for a tidy £25 million with Cleese trousering a rumoured nine.

I mention this only as much of Mission to Burnley 2 is an unwitting contribution to the library of vocational training material. On the one hand, a team of dignified professionals doing their best to eke out survival in “The Most Competetive League on Earth” with a toxic hand of a rocketing wage bill, dreadful results and demoralised staff. And on the other, the monstrous ego of toddler-tantrum-prone Vincent Kompany, the principal architect of the chaos, who emerges after four episodes with his already diminished reputation shredded.

Starting with the positive, the religious soundscape in the background of MTB series 1, is dialled down. Instead, the focus turns to some impressive back-room characters, all of whom exude competency, decency and clear-sightedness.

Chief Data Scientist, Lee Mooney is cooly articulate and able to present the predicament facing the club in a series of well-framed snapshots. The 300,000 or so players his crew of geeks track globally; the reach and relevance of the club and brand compared to the relative importance of the town, and the likely return-on-investment on a £15 million mid-season transfer (very low probability…). These are all vividly conveyed along with the grim reality that the collective task is raising the performance level of a team that should not be in the Premier League to the point they can cling on for another season.

Meanwhile, Chief Operating Officer, the trencherman-like Matt Williams, is candid on the pressure that failure puts on him, others and their families. Success is easy; failure: unreasonably hard. In another scene, Board Director David Checketts lays out his concerns to his fellow members with admirable clarity and cogency, pulling no punches but doing so dispassionately and without rancour.

In a community liaison meeting of some sort, Alan Pace exerts his position masterfully from a side chair, giving a firm but fair admonishment to a woman who questions his integrity in accepting gambling sponsorship. Acknowledging the personal offence he takes at her comments, there is no trace of man-splaining chauvinism as he justifies it as one of many ‘trade-offs’ he is forced to accept every day. Just part of doing business. Nothing more, nothing less.

Only when the action decamps to a swanky, bucolic Trough of Bowland location for a marketing-offsite, brainstorming, wankathon do these behind-the-scenes glimpses become toe-curling. This one yields the genius idea of a tribal drum to stop supporters walking out at the sixty-minute mark.

Overall, much of the four episodes seem like a documentary on a financial trading business. Huge reliance on market information. Huge investment in trying to find insight and opportunity in an ocean of data. And a myopic focus on nailing deals before the market closes. The coverage of the football and the players is almost an afterthought.

But it’s the conduct of Kompany towards the players when he has not selected his ‘PR Mode’ that will be what MTB2 is remembered for. It is simply awful and would be funny if it wasn’t so distressing to witness. A borderline psychotic David Brent in a tracksuit.

In one dressing room briefing, he starts to recite - word for word - Al Pacino’s, loin-girding  call-to-arms from ‘Any Given Sunday’. But he hasn’t quite learnt his lines so it descends into an obscenity-strewn diatribe of cliche and non-sequitir. This is not helped by his insistence on substituting the U in the F-Word for an O that just makes him sound a bit simple. Many Irish people do something similar - rather charmingly with an E for the U - but this conveys passion, without the offence.

But when he’s aware the camera is whirring, he switches back to well-reasoned, articulate baritone, turning on the charm with world-weary smiles from time-to-time. A study of grace under pressure, and what made him appear such an inspired choice two years ago.

In the scenes with Pace where he towers over the diminutive chairman, there’s the oblique passive-aggression of the calculatedly remorseful schoolboy, promising to try harder that wrong-foots Pace repeatedly who seems to be forever giving him the benefit of the doubt.

But It’s the eviscerating training session bollocking, screeched at Gudmundsson, that plumbs the lowest depths. Public praise and private criticism is a fairly sacrosanct management concept. It’s a proper way to treat other human beings and generally works for stimulating positive behaviour changes and subsequent results.

And there is evidence Kompany partially understands this, lauding Charlie Taylor’s performance against Luton to the team. But the inconsistency to the Barnfield hissy-fit is mystifying. Unsurprisingly, it’s totally ineffectual. Impotent rage. Just water of two ducks back to Gudmundsson and Cork who simply shrug as if to suggest that “She’s really lost it today…”

Oh yes, announcing to a packed dressing room the mental health challenges Lyle Foster is facing is probably not taken from an Institute of Personnel Management handbook either.

And on this subject, La Foster takes his lead from the master and attempts to get the troops to buck their ideas up, mooing and whining at them in a post-match, dressing-rooom dressing-down that only stops when Jack Cork intervenes. But he doesn’t really have the vocal presence to win the room. You need to speak from your diaphragm, Jack darling, when making your point…

Meanwhile, the rest of the ever-expanding squad appears lost and disinterested. My favourite watch of the summer has been the epic ‘Yellowstone’ multi-part drama. This features frequent expansive, sumptuous, drone-photographed landscapes, many depicting herds of expensive, prized livestock being cajoled and shoved around by a bunch of emotionally unstable cowboys. Given the cattle are beasts of the field, they don’t have any emotional connection with the ranch. Similarly, neither do the £200 million-worth of players on display here show much collective affection to Burnley Football Club.

It’s a point noted by a nice lady in the autumn of her years who laments the team no longer seems to represent the town and Pace, who confides to his wife, that he fears many are just collecting their generous paychecks and will then move on. You can’t blame the players; they are professionals with short careers who need to make the most of it. But the wistful view of the old lady and the exasperation of Pace are understandable responses to this mutually loveless picture.

And so it goes on, with the collective sense of abandonment and betrayal palpable as Kompany seals the Munich deal. All of which leaves one intriguing question behind: would Bayern have offered Vinnie the job had they seen this documentary?