Gary Rowett: Keeping it real

Getting a team to be successful

Although he was a fine player himself, he does not believe playing at the top level is essential to be a top manager.

“I think some of the best coaches actually come through an educational background,” he says.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t draw on his own playing experiences. For example, he points to his time as a teenager at Cambridge United under John Beck as one of his formative experiences. The team enjoyed plenty of success, winning promotion to the second tier and enjoying FA Cup runs, but the style of play that Beck instilled in the players came under significant fire.

“Cambridge was a really, really interesting two years. I suppose it was a little bit like a version of the ‘Crazy Gang’ at Wimbledon, where everything from the outside was all about direct football, it was all about this team that found a way to win game after game in the cup, and climb the leagues.

“You forget about the style, and you think about some of the methodology and you think about how do you get a team to be that successful, and what are some of those methods? John Beck has had a bad rap, because I think he was ahead of his time in many ways. Training was structured in a different way to [what] I’ve experienced since. It was broken down into individual parts. If you were a midfielder hooking the ball on into the channel, whatever that looked like, that skill was isolated in practice under pressure, and performed continuously. So every sequence linked together and every player knew what the next player was doing.

“So regardless of what that looks like, for me, that is a team in synergy, that is a team that understands the style, whatever that style might be.”

He sees Beck as a pioneer of the use of data in football – with apprentices often tasked with collating in-game information such as the number of crosses put into the box.

“The statistical chance of scoring a goal from the edge of the box was far bigger than the chance of getting it wide and crossing the ball in the box, so you weren’t allowed to shoot outside the box. It was simple. You got about a yard away from the edge of the box, the crowd was shouting, ‘Shoot!’ and you had to go wide.

“You can argue whether all of these things are how you would want the game to look like. I think these are the nuances that your own individual preference shapes, but that shaped the whole style of play.”

“Players will remember how you made them feel”

There were some harsh lessons about player management that Rowett learnt at that time as well.

“As a young player, John saw something in me. I think he felt as though I was better than that level at the time, which was League One, and his way of dealing with me was just tough love all the time. I can remember pre-season winning a pre-season race against all the professionals, and he stood everyone on one side and made me run it again. And at the time I felt, ‘Why is he picking on me? What is he doing?’

“And he pulled me aside once and he said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to do more than everyone else. You are going to play in the Premier League.’

“And then years later I had someone like Trevor Francis, who would tell you how good you are, who would tell everyone else how good you are, and that made you feel amazing. That made you feel untouchable on the football pitch.”

Rowett also enjoyed his time working with Jim Smith at Derby County, who he describes as “probably the only manager I’ve ever known that you could be dropped, you could walk into his office absolutely raging, and you could come out laughing and you weren’t quite sure how he’d done it, honestly. It was so difficult. He was such a likable character, Jim, he had this way of turning the mood, turning how you felt into something that almost felt positive afterwards.”

And Rowett thinks that it’s something all coaches and managers could learn from.

“It’s how you make people feel more often than not; to me that’s what defines a really, really good head coach.

“Good players, good team spirit, make people feel like they can achieve something - and those are the things that stand out really with a lot of those managers.”

Creating a team of support staff

He also has plenty of praise for Steve McClaren, who was Jim Smith’s assistant, and adds that he would encourage all head coaches to make careful decisions when they assemble their support staff.

“When I went into Burton, I was a young coach. I needed some experience. I knew Kevin Summerfield reasonably well, but not that well. I knew Kevin experienced promotion six or seven times, so I wanted to have something like that to lean back on, to have someone to say to me, ‘Listen, I’m not sure you’re doing that right’, or ‘Maybe we need to do something else.’” 

Sometimes support staff come with the role rather than being the head coach’s selection – and Rowett says this has plenty of advantages.

“If you have a director of football, often their role is to create continuity within the club, and to create continuity, they need to have their own people, their own staff in place that they respect working with, that they think are the right ones for the club.

“I always say the same thing. You have to treat everybody else like they’re your staff the second you walk in. I’ve inherited staff walking into the building and [I] took them to other clubs because they’ve been absolutely brilliant, and sometimes you can walk in with [your own] staff and find people there that are actually more skilled and better.”

Celebrate your successes

Rowett believes it is important to review a role and one’s own achievements within it – mentioning that he is the coach with the fourth-most points in Championship history.   

“Sometimes you come out of a job and you think of all the things you think you needed to do better. Occasionally you also have to look at what do you think you’ve done well, what are you proud of? What have you actually achieved as well along the way? Celebrate some of the successes.

“I can’t coach something if I don’t really truly believe in it, or I’m not passionate about that way of doing it. So I have to make sure that it is everything that I believe in so that every time I speak to players, every time I share that message, it’s authentic. And that’s the first thing I’ve always tried to do. I’ve not tried to do something I’m not, I’ve not tried to have more possession just to look good or satisfy the norms of today. I’ve always felt as though I need to do what I think is successful. I think that’s a big part of me doing it for so long.

“OK, I haven’t had promotion and maybe that’s a reason why. But I’ve had longevity, which is just as important in some ways.

“It’s how you make people feel more often than not; to me that’s what defines a really, really good head coach”

“I don’t go into every club and say, ‘Right, I’m going to play 4-2-3-1. This is what I’m going to do. This is what I need it to look like.’ I always believe, particularly with clubs that maybe haven’t got as big a budget, you’ve got to find differences. You’ve got to find that USP - what is it that we think we can do differently to achieve success with this group?

“You have to win. If you don’t win, you don’t get longevity, you don’t get another job, you don’t stay in the first job.

“I would take those players and I would just try and do what they are good at. I’d put them in a position that just gets the positives out. And I think you can very quickly create value in a team without having to spend that much money.

“I’ve wanted the players to enjoy it as well: ‘Look, we’re in a fantastic league. We’re in a fantastic position, we’re in a fantastic profession.’

“I like to think players would enjoy working under me, whether we’ve been successful or not. It’s not just about winning, it’s also about enjoying and loving what you do.”