The workload of the job, the modern professionalism of football management requiring coaches to hold badges, and, frankly, the fetishisation of football managers have led to a staple of the early years of the Premier League, the player-manager, to become a near-impossibility in the modern game.

Ian Porterfield was the manager of Chelsea when the Premier League’s first games were played in 1992, and was the first manager to be sacked in the Premier League era when a relegation threatened Chelsea had gone 11 games without a win at the turn of the new year. He was replaced by David Webb, a former Blues player himself, but that was only on a temporary basis, and although he steered the club to safety, the next permanent managerial appointment Chelsea made was that of Glenn Hoddle as player-manager.

It’s a sign of how times have changed from the early years of the Premier League. From Hoddle’s appointment as Chelsea’s second permanent manager in the new era, until the arrival of Claudio Ranieri in September 2000, Chelsea were managed only by player-managers – Hoddle, Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli.

That might have taken the genre and stretched it a little further than most would have been comfortable with, but player-managers were hardly obscure curiosities in football back then. In the 1980s, Graeme Souness at Rangers and Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool won league titles in Britain as player-managers, whilst Hoddle himself took over at Swindon Town in the role before moving to Chelsea in 1993. Not long after that, names as big as Gordon Strachan and Bryan Robson took up the position at Premier League clubs to start off their managerial careers.

That changed after the 1990s, and indeed, Gianluca Vialli’s sacking at Chelsea seemed to sound the death knell of the player-manager as a popular concept. It wasn’t the incident to spark its decline, but the landscape had changed so much in the preceding few years that the world of football had become a very different place, and Chelsea’s player-manager was replaced by a coach of continental renown.

Chelsea had been managed by player-managers for the best part of a decade up until then.

Since 2000, when Ranieri was appointed, the Premier League has had only three player-managers, but all of them have been short-term stop-gaps. None were appointed as visionaries to lead the club to a new and glorious era, but as night watchmen until a real manager came along. Stuart McCall found himself in charge of Bradford City for two games in 2000 as a player-manager, and after the sacking of David Moyes, Ryan Giggs led Manchester United as a player manager for a few games to end the season.

Perhaps the closest we’ve come is Garry Monk, who was appointed player-manager of Swansea City in February 2014 after Brian Laudrup was sacked, ended his playing career at the end of the season after steering Swansea to safety. But he didn’t play any games for the club after his move from player to manager: in fact, he made just one appearance in the entirety of the 2013/14 season, in a 3-1 defeat to Birmingham City in the League Cup.

That means Monk doesn’t really count as a player manager on the grounds that he didn’t actually play, but more importantly, it shows that the role of player-manager these days is largely a stop-gap at the highest level. Although Monk certainly was a long-term choice for Swansea before his own sacking, he was only installed permanently once he’d officially hung up his boots.

There’s a reason for that. For one thing, dealing with the media, scouting, board meetings, strategic and tactical planning, and the planning of training sessions all mean that the job of the manager away from the training ground is already a full-time job, never mind taking the actual sessions themselves. It’s become much more difficult

Back in the 1990s and before, managers of top flight clubs didn’t really need to keep abreast of the transfer market across the world, just on the couple of divisions below. Nowadays that’s all changed. The role of the manager is so broad that there’s simply no time to worry about their own fitness and technique, too.

Perhaps the last real player-manager was Dennis Wise, who took over at Millwall in 2003. His time there was defined by the 2004 FA Cup run which saw his side make it all the way to the final where they lost to Manchester United at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. That day, unlike Monk at Swansea, Wise did indeed play himself. He played 89 minutes before substituting himself off for the final few minutes of the game with his side already losing 3-0.

More recently, Edgar Davids turned up at Barnet in an ill-fated spell as a player-manager, but it’s not the same. Such coaches are novelties these days, and for a name like Davids to turn up at a non-league club on the outskirts of London was surely something of a publicity coup for the club more than anything else.

In an era where managers are the subject of more and more scrutiny, and as the game is understood in terms of tactics and strategies, managers are the figurehead of the team in a way that a player-manager could never be. Even if you could find a player-manager who could deal with the workload, finding one who is also tactically astute enough to mix it with Antonio Conte and Pep Guardiola seems like a tough ask.

The days of the player-manager are over.