Player-coach

A player-coach (also playing coach, captain-coach, or player-manager) is a member of a sports team who simultaneously holds both playing and coaching duties. The term can be used to refer to both players who serve as head coaches and as assistant coaches. He or she makes changes to the squad and plays as well.

Very few current major professional sports teams have head coaches who are also players, though it is extremely common for senior players to take a role in managing more junior athletes. Historically, when professional sports had much less money to pay players and coaches or managers, it was much more common to find them. Likewise, where player-coaches exist today, they are more common at the lower levels where money is less available, but not exclusively.

Player-coaches in basketball

The player-coach was, for many decades, a long-time fixture in professional basketball. Many notable coaches in the NBA served as player-coaches, including Bill Russell and Lenny Wilkens. This was especially true up through the 1970s, when the league was not as financially successful as it is today, and player-coaches were often used to save money. The practice fell out of favor in the 1980s (though Mike Dunleavy Sr., while an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, once came out of retirement and played several games when a rash of injuries decimated the team). Today, the collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the players' union prohibits the use of player-coaches, in order to avoid circumventing the league's salary cap, as coaches' salaries are not counted under the cap. Therefore, if a player is to serve as a coach, he would have to receive commission from his contract as a player. The player, then, is not technically an official coach of his team but instead simply a coach in name. One example of a player in recent years who was groomed for eventual official coaching duties using this practice was Avery Johnson.

Player Manager

Player Manager was a football management game, released in 1990. It was notable for being the first game to combine both managing the team and playing as a single player. The match engine borrowed heavily from the Kick Off match engine, which was developed by Dino Dini and Anco Software, who also created Player Manager. This was the first in a series of games called Player Manager.

A remake of the game is being made for iPhone.

Gameplay

Players would take control of a third division side as player-manager, acting in both managing and playing aspects. The latter option was optional, since players could choose whether to control the player only or the entire team from the outset. They can opt to do neither, if they choose not to play the matches personally.

The Player Manager universe is structured somewhat differently from real-life football of the same period. Many notable clubs are not featured in the game, as the programmers chose to have 10 teams in the top two divisions, and 12 in the third and fourth divisions, presumably due to memory constraints. There is also only one domestic cup competition. And, as with the majority of the football games of the time, the game is notable now for featuring no European football, due to English clubs exclusion from European competition owing to the Heysel Stadium disaster.