A co-worker of mine, a decade-plus ago, liked to announce, with mock solemnity, when things seemed completely out of control as we plunged towards the Armageddon of deadline:

“Everything is falling into place …”

Of course, often we had no particular plan, and how it came together was rather random. But his pronouncement inevitably made everyone laugh, because it was so absurd, and it punctured the pressure. A little.

In this case, however, when preparing a story on the astonishingly high turnover of soccer coaches in the UAE’s professional league … it really did come together as planned. And even moreso.

How often does that happen?

I mean, this is not a Pulitzer Prize winning bit of journalism. It’s not an APSE prize winning bit of journalism, (And The National is a member of APSE; true story; you could look it up; we paid our dues and a staffer named Ahmed Rizvi won a prize in the 2010 competition.)

But this coaches thing was a complicated story with a lot of moving parts, and it turned out really well because of all the people who got involved.

Background: The teams in the Pro League here fire coaches all the time. We’ve known that since the paper began publishing, in April of 2008, and from time to time we have done pieces outlining the issue and trying to name all the coaches who had worked in, say, the previous year.

But we had never approached the issue as a big-picture, all-inclusive project.

The news peg was the recent dismissal, by Pro League teams, of two guys with seemingly impressive credentials — the 11th and 12th coaching changes made during the current season — in a 12-team league.

The deputy sports editor suggested we look at it in a comprehensive fashion and got the ball rolling by asking three reporters to get quotes for the story and send them to me … and I would write it.

Already, that’s five people involved.  Then, when the sports editor mulled a way to illustrate the story, which had been finished the night before, he hit upon the always fun concept of — a cover with the mugshots of all 45 (!) men who have coached in the UAE since the domestic league went fully professional in 2008.

The sports photo editor knew we at The National certainly did not have pictures of all 45 guys. But the Arabic-language newspaper upstairs, Al Ittihad (owned by the same company that produces The National), might. Though he doubted it. I mean, 45 guys? Mugs on all of them? When some lasted less than a month?

But he went up there and, by gosh, he and the folks at the Arabic-language paper came up with mugs on all 45 guys.

Now we’re up to seven people involved in this story.

Then it went to our departmental designer, who painstakingly cropped all 45 photos so that their eyes line up evenly (check the photos with the linked story; it’s not the whole graphic, but that’s most of the rogues gallery) … and she did that very nicely and followed one of the oldest “rules” in layout — try hard never to have someone looking “off the page”. She had six guys on the right looking left, and nearly all the guys on the left edge looking right.

These sorts of graphic devices are always fascinating because even if you don’t know the guys, it’s fun to see … who didn’t shave … who looks like he’s posing for a police mugshot … who has ridiculous hair or a weird mustache …

So, she pulled all that together, and now we have eight people involved.

The story, and an accompanying opinion piece, a sidebar, a chart of all the coaches and two notes rails … all went through at least three levels of editing before all that got on the page. One of the levels was the SE, whom we have already counted,  but let’s add two more … and one more for the final read, the night editor. And one of those people wrote the headlines andcaptions …

And I count at least 11 people involved in a project that was very well-received, the next morning. One of our British staffers said The National’s sports cover this morning was held up by Sky TV (an English station) during its morning sports broadcast.

It’s not often that a concept goes from idea to finished product and turns out so well and has so many important contributions from so many people … but this one did, and I thought it should be noted.