Kieran McKenna shows Frank Lampard the value of education
The Ipswich Town manager’s injuries as a player meant he started his coaching career early – and he is now reaping the rewards in spectacular style.
So is this it, then, for Frank Lampard’s career in management? Is it just five more painful outings as Chelsea’s interim punchbag? Because who is going to touch him now?
Of course, we cannot know. So here is a better question. What does Kieran McKenna know that Lampard doesn’t?
McKenna is manager of Ipswich Town. They sign off tomorrow against Fleetwood Town, but they have already secured promotion to the Championship and they have already scored more goals than anyone in the league. With a win and a single goal tomorrow, they will be the first club in EFL history to do the double of 100 points and 100 goals. McKenna is already, arguably, the manager of the year. And he is 36 years old.
What he doesn’t have is experience as a player. He hasn’t got nigh-on two decades in the Premiership like Lampard or a century of England caps. In fact, McKenna didn’t play a single game of professional football.
He moved from Northern Ireland to join the Tottenham Hotspur academy when he was 16 and got as far as playing for Northern Ireland Under-21s. However, a recurring hip problem was his undoing. His last two years as a player were spent with physios rather than on the pitch. He was 22 when he woke from his last hip operation to a surgeon handing him the news he kind of knew was coming: enough’s enough.
In pretty much every interview he has given, he is asked about this — the pain of having his dreams of being a footballer snatched away from him. But he isn’t interested in engaging in that. He says that he’d had two years preparing for that moment. What he’ll be happier to discuss is that, within a week, he was back on the pitch, on crutches, working with one of the Spurs youth teams. He was no longer on the playing staff, but Spurs saw some potential and shifted him to the coaching staff instead.
So this is what McKenna has that Lampard doesn’t have: 12 years of learning to be a coach before he became a manager. His education started at 22; Lampard had one year between playing and managing. Yes, Lampard got his coaching badges. McKenna says that the education picked up with these courses is “good” but “fractional” compared to what you actually learn on the job.
He is not the first to begin his education this way. Julian Nagelsmann was 20 when a knee injury retired him as a player. Thomas Tuchel was 24 and, again, it was a knee; Brendan Rodgers was 20, also a knee. All of them moved on straight away into retraining in coaching, thus giving themselves at least a decade’s head start on those who would get a full playing career.
McKenna’s coaching career started at Spurs. Then he left for a sports science degree at Loughborough. Then, via brief learning stints in Canada and the US, it was back to the Spurs youth set-up before being recruited to Manchester United. Under José Mourinho, he was then promoted to a first-team coach, which is where he stayed until midway through last season when Ipswich offered him the job as a No 1.
In that time, then, he had the opportunity to watch and learn off the following managers: Harry Redknapp, André Villas-Boas, Mauricio Pochettino, Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ralf Rangnick. For different leadership styles, it is hard to imagine a broader education. Yet McKenna responds by saying that it’s not just the big names you learn from. What about when he was coaching non-League during his time at Loughborough? That is an education too.
Sure, Lampard played under two of the above plus some others who are among the most admired ever in the game. Yet he wasn’t in the room to listen to the debate, to hear the planning, to learn how it is done. McKenna was inside, Lampard outside.
The well-known quote on the subject comes from Arrigo Sacchi, the Italy coach who won two European Cups with AC Milan: “I never realised that to become a jockey you needed to be a horse first.”
Sacchi was initially considered inadequate as a coach because he had not been good enough to play professional football. When McKenna was at United, under Solskjaer, there were occasional murmurings of a similar criticism and that must have been hard to deal with, yet is also the kind of challenge that builds experience and confidence.
When I spoke to McKenna yesterday, I asked if he ever felt ill-equipped because he hadn’t had a playing career — if there were moments when he felt that the knowledge and experience of being a player were what he needed — and he seemed surprised by the question, as if he hadn’t really thought about it. “Not very often,” he said, failing to come up with a single anecdote before adding, on reflection: “It’s a different profession. Coaching and leading is different to playing.”
The answer has to be credibility. Yet that is an attribute a manager earns. Look at Mourinho, another manager without a playing record.
It is also something to do with expectation and environment. In England, players expect managers to have had a playing career, but only because that is the way it has always been done. That is not so much the case on the Continent. In Germany, McKenna wouldn’t be seen as a trailblazer. McKenna doesn’t see himself as trailblazing anyway. “Over the past few years, it’s changed,” he says. “There’s no barriers now, no matter your playing background.” He could point to Liam Manning, 37, now manager at Oxford United, who played mainly non-League football, had a career peak in the Icelandic third division, but quit the game early to devote himself to learning management instead.
It would be nice to see this as a movement. Sometimes it seems that the best of the English — or British — football managers are the septuagenarians who take most of the year off until the jobs for firemen are up for grabs.
McKenna is one of the leaders of a new breed. He would put his good mate Michael Carrick in that group. Carrick was alongside him at United, learning the trade as another first-team coach under Solskjaer; now he is leading Middlesbrough to the Premier League play-offs.
Yet is it really any surprise that experience and learning makes for a successful product? The Lampard entry route just doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe English football is starting to understand the value of education.
[Post edited 6 May 16:50]
