iNews 10/7/21 Euro 2020: How Howard Wilkinson’s sacking at Leeds United led England into a major final 25 years later
This is the untold story of England’s redemption – from laughing stock to European heavyweights
By Sam Cunningham
1996
Howard Wilkinson was sacked as Leeds United manager on 9
September 1996, and it would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to
England reaching their first European Championship final, a quarter of a
century later.
Back then, England still had a particularly old-fashioned
approach to football. Former managers and coaches can still remember finding it
amusing when foreign clubs or other countries visited and would have two
doctors waiting to run onto the pitch to treat players, and a masseur in their
ranks. They would think they were softies; this was football, English players
charged around the pitch and drank six pints afterwards.
But a few months after Wilkinson left Leeds, the Football
Association appointed him as technical director and his ideas still permeate England’s
success, years later.
He began the project that would become St George’s Park, the
national team’s hub of world-class facilities that they were so badly lacking.
At the time, there was no joined-up thinking in academy
football. One club did it one way, the next another. There was an element of
secrecy, nobody wanted to share ideas.
1997
It required an entire cultural shift and many say Wilkinson
was crucial in that. He created and wrote the blueprint that became the modern
academy system, named the Charter for Quality and published in 1997.
Now, while putting their own stamp on things, clubs largely
all work in the same fundamental way. Academy managers meet at St George’s Park
three times a year and discuss ideas. These days, club managers last so little
time that they do not have an input into the academy other than trying to
introduce its products into the first team.
As a result, when the players from all age groups meet up
with England they slot right in and do not have to be taught a different way of
training and playing.
Gareth Southgate is really the first England coach to
benefit from this.
1998
Wilkinson, a former teacher, is considered a disciple of
coaching and took the first group of aspiring coaches through their Uefa badges
in 1998. Alan Smith, the former Crystal Palace manager and Fulham’s first
academy director, was part of that group and remembers visiting Bayern Munich
to see how they operated. “It was clear we were so far behind in our system and
structure,” Smith says. “We had no sharing of ideas, everyone did their own
thing.”
There was also no true centre of excellence, no central
focus point bringing together all the strands of what the England team really
is: not just the manager and first-team squad, but the hundreds of staff and
youth players who feed into it.
The FA had fallen unforgivably behind, mainly due to the
political nature of the organisation that made change slow and difficult.
Italy’s Il Centro Tecnico Federale di Coverciano, based in
Florence, had been open since 1958. France had Clairefontaine, 30 miles outside
Paris, that they built in 1988. In 1996, the Dutch launched the KNVB Academy,
in Zeist, focusing on coaches. The Germans were a little later, responding to
disappointment in Euro 2000 by pumping money into youth and coach development
and opening scores of centres of excellence.
St George’s Park was Wilkinson’s “baby”, Smith says, even
though he has never gone to great lengths to claim credit for it. Before then,
England were all over the place.
The main youth training centre, Lilleshall, was opened in
1984 but by the 90s was staggeringly outdated. “It was archaic,” one former
academy director says. “It was like going to prison for two weeks. It put you
off going back.”
Club academies were superseding Lilleshall so England teams
spread everywhere and this continued until St George’s Park opened in 2012.
The women’s team could be in Walsall, the under-16s in
Burton, the 19s in Ipswich, the 21s in Loughborough. Coaches would be based in
Wembley, sat in offices next to one of the world’s best pitches but with no
players to train on it. The first team stayed at The Grove, in Watford, on
matchdays and often trained at Arsenal’s London Colney centre.
“It was splintered,” one former FA staff member says. “No
one had an anchor, no one had a base.”
2001
Initially convinced by Wilkinson’s dreams, the FA bought 330
acres of east Staffordshire national forest for £2 million in 2001. A year
later Wilkinson presented an architect’s model of what St George’s Park would
look like. But as costs of the new Wembley rose and the opening was repeatedly
delayed, St George’s Park had to be postponed until the stadium was finished.
There would be an 11-year wait before it opened and it almost did not happen:
the idea was delayed, then canned, then the decision to cancel it delayed, then
batted around some more.
Meanwhile, English coaches stalled. During the early 2000s,
as part of Denmark’s coach development programme they would send groups of coaches
to different countries to learn from their methods. One English coach who
hosted a cohort recalls 12 Danes arriving at their training ground, handing
over presents as gifts of thanks, then getting down to business only to
discover the Danes were far more advanced. “They would ask where the sports
scientists and analysis departments were,” the coach says. “We didn’t have any.
It was quite embarrassing.”
2011
All that changed at the start of the 2010s. As the academy
system continued to improve, Southgate was appointed as the FA’s new head of
elite development.
It was here that he grew an extensive network across
football, could be found in a high-vis jacket and hard hat having input at St
George’s Park as construction finally got underway and was a key figure in
revolutionising how children played: reducing the sizes of pitches, the numbers
of players on teams, the goalframes.
“He’s got an aura about him, but not in a classically
cliched way,” Scott Field, head of media relations at the FA from 2009-16 and
who witnessed Southgate’s work first-hand, says. “He’s played at the highest
level, but he’s statesmanlike, he listens as much as talks. All these things go
a long way. He’s got great empathy.
“You can well see how he was able to go around the country
and take an argument forward to say, ‘Look if we’re going to develop, we’ve got
to be better than putting six-year-old kids in full-sized goals and here’s
why’. It was logical and made sense, but he was human as well. He wasn’t the
only one who achieved this, there were others. Gareth was deeply embedded in
what the FA were trying to achieve. That was critical in developing a
generation of young people.”
2012
Two things came together a year later. St George’s Park
finally opened – a decade after Wilkinson had left – and Dan Ashworth was
employed as director of elite development.
A £6m government grant meant the nation was heavily invested
in the project, but when it was officially opened by the Duke and Duchess of
Cambridge, St George’s Park chief executive David Sheepshanks urged patience.
“What you see now is just the beginning,” he said. “I cannot emphasise strongly
enough that St George’s Park is an investment for the long term, the full
benefits of which should not be expected to be recognised for a decade or more.
“It’s a place to develop leadership qualities and team work,
to grow a culture of winning, for the long term, an ethos of continuous
learning and development, the never-ending pursuit of personal bests. Just as
France, Spain and Germany have done, we’re investing in the number and quality
of coaches.”
Sheepshanks is credited with getting the project over the
line, securing the deal with Hilton to build the plush hotel and getting
funding approved by the FA Council. It cost over £100m. “That was a big
moment,” someone familiar with the situation says. “This is the FA that
couldn’t agree on anything.”
Ashworth arrived from West Bromwich Albion, where he is given
kudos for building their academy from scratch. He did a similar thing at St
George’s Park, where he is one of the creators of the “England DNA”, creating
an elite group of coaches, medical staff, analysis teams. If St George’s Park
pulled all the strands of England together, Ashworth tied them into a neat bow.
2013
“Today I’m going to set the whole of English football two
targets, the first is for the England team to reach at least the semi-finals of
the European Championship in 2020 and the second is for us to win the World Cup
in 2022,” Greg Dyke said in his first speech as FA chairman.
It was a statement that would be derided often during the
next three years as England exited the 2014 World Cup in the group stage and
were knocked out of Euro 2016 by Iceland in the last 16. So was the idea to
have a digital clock counting down to Qatar 2022 installed in the coaches’
office at St George’s Park.
The clock was the idea of performance specialist Dave
Reddin, who arrived in 2014 from the British Olympic Association, where two
clocks counting down to the summer and winter Games are the first thing you see
when you enter the reception.
“Dave Reddin brought in a lot of ideas from other sports,”
Dyke says. “What they really said to us was you haven’t got a professional
enough setup here, you need all sorts of extra people. Dave Reddin came up with
a lot of that, with Dan Ashworth. What we did was listen.
“He gave a presentation to the board, and my job was to find
the money. That wasn’t very popular because it meant some people lost their
job. We restructured the place but we did save money. A lot of that went on the
English setup. We looked at different things we could do.
“It was quite expensive. My job was to sort out the FA and
make sure there was enough money to do what they wanted to do. It was several
million pounds per year to pay for additional staff.”
Dyke’s successor, Greg Clarke, took over in 2016 and at his
first engagement described the countdown clock as “ridiculous”.
2016
Clarke wanted the clock taken down, but it was saved by Sam
Allardyce, one of the major achievements during a 67-day tenure ended by a
Daily Telegraph exposé.
Southgate, by then the England Under-21s manager, turned
down the main job before Allardyce took it, but was offered it again and
changed his mind.
In much the same way St George’s Park revolutionised the
England setup, Southgate has changed the role of England manager from
part-timer picking up a golden payday, to a 365-day-a-year obsession.
One of his many strengths, his staff say, is that he has,
alongside assistant Steve Holland, continued to improve relationships with
clubs started by Wilkinson 25 years before. When not involved with the first
team or public duties, Southgate visits academies, shares a coffee with
directors and coaches, watches training, discusses the prospects of future
players.