His name is Diego Simeone, and in the football world almost nobody calls him that. They call him Cholo.
He’s Argentine, was captain of Atlético Madrid as a player, and took charge of the team in 2011. He took a club that lived in the shadow of Real Madrid and Barcelona and turned it into one of the most feared teams in Europe, with two Spanish league titles and two Champions League finals along the way.
On the touchline it’s impossible not to notice him. He always wears black, never sits down, crouches to get a better look at a play, points a finger at whoever forgot to close down a space, turns to the stands to fire up the crowd, and explodes at every goal. He seems to be playing every ball himself. The philosophy he built even has its own name, “cholismo”: work, effort, perseverance. For more than a decade, that team and that man became so intertwined that many people would say Atlético without Simeone on the touchline stops being Atlético.
The Final
In the first leg of the 2018 Europa League semi-final, in London, against Arsenal, Simeone was sent off after twelve minutes for insulting the referee. UEFA punished him with a four-match touchline ban. Atlético appealed and the appeal was rejected.
He watched the second leg from the stands. Atlético won 1-0 and went through to the final.
In Lyon, Atlético Madrid faced Marseille. On the bench, instead of the man in black, was his assistant, Germán Burgos, known as “Mono,” a former Argentine national team goalkeeper and Simeone’s right-hand man for many years. In the stands, Europe’s most omnipresent coach was reduced to a spectator, in the biggest game of the season.
Atlético won 3-0. Two goals from Griezmann, one from captain Gabi. And it wasn’t a hard-fought win: shortly after halftime, the result was practically decided.
What That Night Showed
The final in Lyon was won with what Simeone had built in the years before, far more than with anything he could have done that night. The team took the field knowing exactly what to do, how to press, how to close down space, how to react when the game got tight. Cholismo, it turned out, had left the touchline long ago and now lived inside the players. On the night he couldn’t be there, the team took it with them.
Maybe this is the most honest way to assess a coach, or a manager: what the team does when he can’t be there.
No One Takes a Manager Off the Bench
Almost everyone who moves into managing people after being good at individual work carries a risk they only learn to see over time.
When someone is good at solving problems, others start bringing problems to them. It makes sense from an efficiency standpoint, it’s the fastest path. And little by little the team’s circuitry starts routing through that person. “Ask them first.” “Show them before moving forward.” “Get them aligned.” Each problem, seen up close, gets solved quickly and well. The cost only shows up from a distance: the team learns to need the manager for things it shouldn’t need them for anymore.
In an earlier piece, about delegation and micromanagement, I argued that a manager’s presence should stop being necessary for the team to think and execute well. I still believe that. What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly AI would make that trap far more immediate and dangerous.
With Simeone, it was UEFA that took him off the bench. A manager has no one forcing them off. They can be on the bench for every game, every day, if they want. And that’s where things get complicated.
AI Puts the Manager on Every Bench
For a long time, there was a natural limit to micromanagement: time. A manager couldn’t read everything, review everything, follow everything, because the day didn’t stretch. That limit, as irritating as it was, protected the team from its own manager.
AI is removing that limit. Today, a manager can ask for a summary of a meeting they didn’t attend, analyze a file in minutes, find twenty problems in a prototype before lunch, prepare a proposed solution in fifteen minutes, and do all of this for several projects at once. Each of these feels like a win: it’s faster, they’re better informed, they reach more places.
And that’s exactly where the problem lies. Everything AI gives a manager to be more present is also a more efficient way of staying the shortest path to the solution for every problem. It looks like leverage, but it’s often just a bottleneck wearing a different face: more capable, with far more flows now running through it.
They can almost always do it. The question that matters is a different one: should they?
The Catalysts
Kellan Elliott-McCrea, who led engineering teams at companies like Dropbox and Adobe, wrote a piece that helps put a name to this. It’s called “Managers Are Catalysts,” and it starts from an uncomfortable observation: you increasingly hear that management is dead, that organizations should flatten, and that managers should go back to individual work or leave, an idea AI has amplified. And there’s a sense that management work has become harder and less rewarding.
The concern isn’t baseless. A study from Anthropic compared what AI can theoretically do in each profession against what it’s actually being used for, and management shows up among the categories with the highest theoretical coverage, even though real-world usage falls well short. Meta was among the first to bet on that possibility. In 2023 it flattened its structure and asked many managers to go back to individual work or leave. Three years later, it’s quietly asking some people in its applied AI division whether they want to become managers again, because, according to Fortune, building and running AI systems at scale still demands human leadership, coordination, and oversight.
Kellan’s answer begins like this:
“The point of a technology company is to create change. The point of engineering leadership is to increase your team’s capacity to create change. And managers? Managers are catalysts.”
He’s using the word in its chemistry sense, worth explaining for anyone who’s forgotten their classes. In a chemical reaction there’s an energy barrier that has to be overcome for the reaction to start, called activation energy. A catalyst is a substance that lowers that barrier. It doesn’t supply more energy, and it isn’t what we’re trying to produce. It creates an easier path for the reaction to happen, and comes out of it unconsumed.
“A catalyst lowers the activation energy necessary for a reaction to occur. That’s what good management does.”
Without a catalyst, Kellan says, change still happens. It just takes adding heat and pressure, that is, mandates. It’s possible, but by force. A good manager offers another path, and the things they do to lower that energy are unglamorous: building trust, reducing cynicism, connecting the team’s goals to the company’s bigger priorities, adapting high-level direction to each team’s context, investing in cohesion and people’s development.
Kellan also describes three types of manager who, with good intentions, do exactly the opposite and raise the energy needed for change. The umbrella, who thinks their role is to shield the team from change instead of increasing the team’s capacity to drive it (his original term for this is considerably blunter). The local optimizer, who resists change because their own small system is already working the way they want. And the pass-through leader, who just relays decisions from above without adapting them to local context, and in doing so feeds cynicism.
The Fourth One Missing From the List
There’s one missing from this list. One that wasn’t there because, until recently, it was harder to fall into.
It’s the manager who lowers the activation energy of every problem so much that the team never learns to overcome it on its own. They don’t shield the team from change, don’t resist, don’t just pass along messages. They’re always available, solve things fast, solve them well. And precisely because of that, they themselves become the path of least energy for everything. The energy of each individual problem drops to almost nothing, and the energy the team would need to function without them keeps climbing.
An excellent catalyst for work can be a terrible catalyst for autonomy. And AI, by making this role so cheap for the manager, makes this fourth type the easiest to overlook, because from the outside it looks exactly like good management.
The difference is in what’s left behind afterward. When someone brings a problem to a manager, there are, roughly, three possible responses. Solve it. Explain how to solve it. Or create the conditions so that, next time, that person doesn’t even need to ask. All three look like management, but only the third one scales.
And that means delegating more than tasks. It means delegating judgment, gradually, to people who don’t yet fully have it, accepting they’ll make mistakes along the way. To the lead who holds the title, and also to the one the team already follows without anyone having asked them to.
How You Measure a Manager
If Simeone can be measured by what Atlético does when he’s in the stands, maybe a manager should be measured in a similar way. Not by the number of problems they solve, but by the number of problems that stop needing them to be solved.
Four questions can serve as a mirror at the end of each week, with no claim to being a method:
- What did I unblock this week?
- What decision did I make that could have been made without me?
- What problem did I solve for the second time?
- What capability did the team keep after I stepped in?
The second and third are the ones that sting most. A problem solved for the second time is a problem that got solved without leaving anything behind. A decision that could have been made without the manager is small proof that, on that particular question, they’re still the shortest path.
The Stands
That night in Lyon, Simeone was somewhere no coach wants to be, far from the bench, unable to do anything but watch. The team won 3-0. Few nights will have shown his work as well as the one in which he could do nothing.
AI is going to make managers far more productive. What remains to be seen is how many will use that productivity to be on more benches, and how many will use it to build teams capable of winning the final with them in the stands.
Next time someone on the team says “ask them first,” it might be worth the manager asking themselves a different question: what would this team do if he were in the stands?
Sources
Kellan Elliott-McCrea, “Managers Are Catalysts”, September 14, 2026.
Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, “Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence”, Anthropic, March 2026.
Fernanda Tronco, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta bet that AI would shrink its management ranks. Now it’s quietly rebuilding them”, Fortune, September 12, 2026.
On Diego Simeone: Wikipedia and These Football Times, on the origins of cholismo.
On the suspension and the 2018 final: ESPN, Sky Sports, Wikipedia, 2018 UEFA Europa League final and Gulf News, on Germán Burgos.
The earlier piece, “On Delegation and Micromanagement”.