‘You very rarely get home properly’: Two Irish managers on the realities of a precarious profession

So begins another season of English league football across which 92 men will try to chart their path through the precarity of the impossible job.

The average managerial tenure across the Premier League, Championship and League One and Two is now one year and 10 months, and there were 43 sackings across the 92 clubs last season. Football managers don’t worry about being replaced by AI, they fret about being replaced by one another.

Conor Hourihane and Joe Dunne have each managed in England’s professional leagues and both were asked as to what surprised them about the role. They independently give identical answers. “Nothing prepares you for it.”

Which is not to say neither had done any preparation. Hourihane took charge at League One Barnsley at the age of just 34 last season, but he had been coaching during the last few years of his playing days at non-league level while playing with Aston Villa and taking charge of academy teams at Villa and Barnsley. Dublin-born Dunne retired after more than 300 senior appearances and joined Colchester’s youth set-up, rising through the ranks to be made permanent manager in 2012 after several interim spells. He stayed at Colchester until 2014, keeping them in League One on a small budget, and later took charge of Cambridge United in 2018. He also served as Graham Coughlan’s assistant at Bristol Rovers, Mansfield Town and Newport County.

“It’s a role that is just kind of fascinating,” says Hourihane, “and the people who succeed at it, I take my hat off to them because it is an extremely difficult position. Some people do amazingly well, some get a certain amount of time at it and some people don’t like it after the first time because it takes so much energy from you, emotionally and physically.”

Hourihane left Barnsley at the end of last season and has decided to continue learning as assistant to Russell Martin at Leicester City. He will return to management. Dunne, meanwhile, has come full circle and is now back coaching in Colchester’s youth set-up.

Dunne likens management to being adrift on an iceberg: you are isolated and aware there is much more going on than is visible above the water. “The touchline is a lonely place,” he says. “It takes a certain type of character to do that.”

Management is suddenly being seen as the guy responsible for everything. When Dunne stepped up to the top job, he suddenly found himself having to deal with owners, directors, fans, agents and journalists, along with players.

The first task is not to become overwhelmed by it all. Hourihane remembers going on holiday with his family before the start of last season and spending full days on the phone to players he did not ultimately sign. By the January window he had learned to better focus his energies and started putting his phone away for a few hours to be more present with his family.

“You very rarely get home properly,” says Dunne. “You spend a lot more time on the road. You’re constantly looking to improve the team by watching games, so you might take in three to four games a day. At times you don’t take days off. You’re always working.”

In the zero-sum world of professional football, nobody can be quite sure what a day will throw up. Dunne was working with Graham Coughlan at Bristol Rovers in 2019 when his boss rang him and told him he had got wind that one of their transfer targets was on the verge of moving elsewhere.

Dunne was instructed to hightail it down the M5 motorway to hijack the signing. When he asked Coughlan how on earth he was going to do this, he was told to figure it out. Dunne found the player in question at a petrol station, took him for a coffee in a nearby McDonald’s to make a pitch, and put him up in a Bristol hotel that night to give him time and space to change his mind. It worked. Bristol Rovers got their man, but Dunne still hasn’t had his expenses reimbursed.

These plans don’t always come together, however. Dunne recalls missing out on a player because a rival paid him an extra £50 per week. Every coach lives and dies by recruitment, and Dunne explains that survival as a manager is about living from one transfer window to another.

He learned some recruitment tricks over the years. When signing loan players, for instance, he targeted ones who already had one loan spell elsewhere, so at least the player had already experienced life in an unfamiliar dressingroom. Transfer windows, he says, are often as important for the players you move on as those you sign. A manager must therefore be the kind of person who will wake up in the morning and know they must make a decision later that day that will upset someone.

There is also hardly any time to pause for breath. With the calendar crammed with midweek games, there is little time for traditional, on-the-grass coaching, meaning the season’s rhythm is usually a lurch from pre-game preparation to post-game analysis and back to preparation once again. Hourihane describes the schedule as physically draining for coaches too, owing to an accumulated lack of sleep. He sought to get to the training ground at 6am every day, and while he would often try to get an early night at around 9pm, his mind would often race with the many permutations of the many decisions a head coach has to make, so he would often not drift off until around midnight.

“You can’t switch off,” he says. “‘What does this player think? I need to speak to that person.’ Your phone’s going off at half 10 at night because someone wants to speak to you. It’s just a relentless cycle.”

But of course football’s special ingredient is emotion. And as it swirls around him, forever intruding and buffeting, the manager must remain even-keeled.

“It is really important to be able to be in control of your emotions, whether you win, lose, or draw,” says Hourihane. “You can’t be really high or really low. You’ve got to be really stable and I pride myself on that. If you’re really high one day and low the next day, that interferes with your energy around the training ground.”

Dunne says it is impossible to escape the weight of emotion inherent to the job, explaining that a losing manager is responsible for letting down thousands of people who live around you. And yet the manager must be able to brush it all off and arrive at work energised and enthusiastic, as he is responsible for setting the emotional tone for everybody else.

“You’ve got to be self-driven,” says Dunne. “You’ve got to have the balls to be able to say: ‘F**k it, I’m getting up and we’re going again.’”

The best part of football for a manager is that there is always another game soon to which they can switch their focus. This is the worst part too.

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“When you lose, it’s difficult at times, but you get to move on from defeats quickly because you’ve got the next game to focus on,” says Dunne. “The term is: ‘I’ll park that.’ But when you win, you don’t enjoy the wins as much. It’s win, and it’s on to the next one. You don’t give yourself time to reflect, to give yourself a day to say: ‘Well done, enjoy that.’ It’s like: ‘Well, we have to do it again next week, and lads, we need more of the same again next week.’”

So, in summary: football management is a stressful job that takes over your life in the name of work that is judged twice a week by thousands of people who hold you responsible even for things beyond your control and to adapt to it you likely won’t have the time or security to be able to enjoy your wins.

So why would anyone want to do it?

“Management’s a great thing,” says Dunne. “It’s a great honour to be a head coach, to be leading any first-team. I enjoyed every minute of it, as hard as it was. It’s a great challenge for any individual. I’m 53 now and I’m still on the pitch running around as if I’m managing a first team.

“It’s in my blood. I love it. I speak to ex-managers who are still around the game and we always say: ‘It’s in our blood.’ When people ask what I miss most, I say I miss the battle for three points on a Saturday. I miss the outcome on a Saturday based on the work I put in.”

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