Watching Tony Pulis enter The Hawthorns pitch this past weekend may not immediately have struck many in attendance as watching the most successful brand in the Premier League at the moment.
Arriving for his first game in charge of West Bromwich Albion, Pulis is a man for whom the lack of a baseball cap didn’t so much quell discussions of his baseball cap wearing tendencies as serve to move those discussions from “why does he wear the baseball cap?” to the slightly more mysterious “where is the baseball cap?”
And yet, if you believe the rumours, it is almost certainly “Brand Pulis” that has interested more Premier League chairmen than any other when looking to fill vacant—or potentially vacant— managerial posts this season.
I think a marketing truism might well reconcile the two seemingly disparate ideas that Pulis embodies: A successful brand convinces you that the product behind it is cool, but a really successful brand convinces you that the product behind it is essential. “Brand Pulis” has everyone—fans, media and chairmen alike— convinced that the man behind the baseball caps is far more than merely cool; he is absolutely essential if you want to keep your club in the Premier League.
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Consciously or unconsciously or both, Pulis has positioned himself brilliantly as a kind of relegation guru. The Guy You Go to When You’re Desperate. The Premier League Survival Vaccine. The precise answer to the murky problem of how to avoid relegation. He has established himself, in the eyes of anyone who is anyone, as the person to call if you want an absolute guarantee that your club will be playing in the Premier League the following season and, quite simply, not many people feel as though they can afford to say no to that.
It’s obviously not down to a string of miraculous coincidences that this has happened either. It’s taken years, first involving some great coaching work. After getting his first coaching badge at 19, Pulis slowly built a name up as the lower-league manager who had never been relegated. Then, in 2007, he nabbed a promotion to the Premier League with Stoke City and kept the club up to become the Premier League manager who had never been relegated.
That was the long beginning. Then halfway through last season Pulis stepped in at bottom-of-the-table Crystal Palace, a team whose free fall had only been stopped by reaching the bottom, and, miraculously, kept that club up, too. He’d suddenly stepped it up. Here was proof—for many—of a skill that was transferable even into the least favourable circumstances and, with it, strong fortification for the idea that Pulis at the very least knew a little bit about not getting relegated.
But a decent product, alone, does not a relegation guru make and Pulis’ positioning is about more than simply his managerial CV. After quitting Palace on the evening before this season, deliberately or otherwise, Pulis played a branding-based-blinder.
Rather than jumping on television at every opportunity, winking maniacally as he tried to convince any chairman watching that they must have him, Pulis stayed quiet. He waited calmly and told anyone who came asking that he wouldn’t be cheap and—as West Brom has found—he wouldn’t compromise in taking a job. The impression he gave was of a man who felt he didn’t have to advertise his product, because it was so damn good. And the effect was that everyone believed him absolutely.
In the few days he has already spent at West Brom he’s continued along the same lines. He used his first press conference to describe, in relaxed but specific terms, the two weeks he’d need to know if he could keep his new team up—a neat way of pointing out that for him, avoiding relegation is not a speculative process, it’s an exact science; measurable down to the week and therefore transferable between clubs and therefore saleable across chairmen.
It’s the perfect act of positioning on Pulis’ part, with every move making himself that bit more desirable. And “Brand Pulis” will surely only be enhanced at his latest club, which wants “saving” but actually sits outside of the Premier League relegation places already. At West Brom, Pulis can shore up the notion of relegation-battling science without ever having to do anything as spectacular as he did at Palace, where he took the last-placed club up to eleventh in half a season.
The strength of his position is now such that he doesn’t need to take risks to strengthen it further. He’s so fashionable that he can pick and choose his jobs so as to maximize rewards without dipping into heavy risks. And all because Pulis, with his caps and relegation scraps, has made himself appear the opposite of cool; he’s made himself appear necessary.
Is he really a relegation guru? Maybe—I dunno—but almost everything he has done has made us think he is and that’s what makes a successful brand. The most successful brand in the Premier League right now, in fact.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter