Michael Skubala has trodden an unusual path – it makes him a fascinating coach - The Athletic 17/2/23

By Nick Miller

By traditional methods, Michael Skubala is probably the least qualified man in charge of a Premier League football team.

But he is, without question, the one with the most fascinating journey to the top of the game.

While all the other 19 top-flight managers either played in a top-tier league or spent years coaching professional teams before getting their top job (or, in many cases, both), Skubala became the Leeds United interim head coach’s role via teaching at a secondary school in Leicestershire, running the Loughborough University football programme, coaching the Great Britain University team to an unexpected silver medal, and taking charge of the England futsal team.

But even from those unusual beginnings, it feels like Skubala has been on a path that has led him to this position. Even if the path has been a little more… winding than most.

Take the very beginning of his career. Skubala started out as a PE teacher at Lutterworth College, at that time a year 10-13 (ages 15-18) school in the Midlands. Being a teacher is a pretty busy game, with the mountains of pastoral and extra-curricular work that tends to come in addition to the day job. But on top of all that, Skubala did part-time coaching in the academies of Coventry City and Nottingham Forest, coached at Barwell — a local non-League club — and worked in the futsal programme of Loughborough University.

Former colleagues describe him as not necessarily ‘ambitious’ in the traditional ‘I know what I want and will trample over everyone who gets in my way’ sense, but he’s certainly driven, in an understated, even unassuming way. And not always fuelled by his own personal goals.

“That was the case with everything really,” says Mike Hodges, who worked with ‘Skoobs’ (as everyone seems to call him) at Lutterworth. “He would always do additional stuff, like training the trainee teachers. He’d give up his time to help and support others. He always looked to go the extra mile to support people, whether it was football or otherwise.”

Skubala’s CV is a pretty remarkable read, particularly in relation to his new contemporaries. When Sean Dyche was winning his first promotion with Burnley in 2014, Skubala had not long started as director of football at Loughborough. In 2011, he was the assistant coach of the Great Britain Universities team that finished runners-up at the World University Games: as part of their preparation, the team spent time at Ostersund, then managed by Graham Potter. It’s extraordinary that, in the next few weeks, Skubala will be in the opposite dugout to both men in Premier League games.

He’s enjoyed a busy and varied career, but the most common thread that runs through it is futsal, the indoor version of the game played with a smaller, harder ball, popular in Brazil and Spain, which encourages closer, tighter control than its bigger brother. He did not play football at the top level but did represent England at the smaller ball sport, and his passion for that game extends way beyond that. He not only coached it at Loughborough (including setting up a futsal academy there) but also the Great British Universities and Colleges team, then went to work for the English Football Association (FA) and ultimately became the England team head coach. He even did commentary on the futsal World Cup for Eurosport and remains the chairman of the British Universities and Colleges Sport futsal advisory group.

“The evolution of football is getting closer to futsal principles,” says Raoni Medina, who was England futsal captain. Skubala joined as assistant coach in 2010, then when head coach Peter Sturgess stepped down in 2017, Skubala moved up.

Maximilian Kilman, now of Wolves, played under Skubala and is a walking example of the interchangeable skills between the two forms of the game, or at least shows there is a pathway between them.

“Teams are appointing set-piece coaches now,” says Karl Brennan, who managed the Loughborough University men’s team while Skubala was director of football. “I imagine his perspective and what he can bring from futsal will be far more than that.”

“He would always ask questions,” says Medina when asked about Skubala’s coaching style. “After games against higher-ranked nations, he would always approach the coach of the opposition and ask, ‘What did you do to beat us?’.”

That also applied internally to the players he coached. “He would say to us, ‘Look, man, I don’t know enough’. He’s not shy (about asking questions). And he’s not arrogant enough to think he knows it all. The final decision was with him, but he was humble enough to ask our opinions about things.”

That sounds like a useful quality for a man whose only experience in men’s club football has been the six months he has been head coach of Leeds Under-21s.

“One hundred per cent,” says Medina when that point is put to him. “He will never want to shine more than the players. He doesn’t want to be the protagonist himself. He will say, ‘Let’s have a conversation, you know more about this situation than me’. He will make his decision but it will be after he’s spoken to people inside the changing room who know more about the institution, more about the league, more about the situation around him. It’s a very wise and very correct thing to do.”

This collaborative approach to coaching and leadership comes up a few times when talking to people who have worked with Skubala before. “He empowered us to run the programme as best we could,” says Brennan. “He would always be supportive of the players.

“There’s a real freedom (at Loughborough) to develop and be creative and it’s relatively risk-free, so people can explore and experiment. He trusted people, which allowed them to grow and develop.”

He is not a demonstrative character, in sharp contrast to his predecessor in the Elland Road dugout Jesse Marsch. That is his personality, but it also seems to speak to assurance in his ideas and preparation: the idea he did not need to scream and shout because he knew exactly what he was doing.

“(He was) confident in what he was about and what he believed was the right thing to do,” said Hodges.

“He’s very measured. It’s just having the confidence to not respond with a knee-jerk reaction, just taking that step back and looking at it from a tactical approach rather than with a heart-on-your-sleeve sort of thing.”

“I don’t think I heard him scream or shout once,” says Scott McCubbin, who was vice-captain of the Great Britain Universities side. Skubala was assistant to James Ellis, who would go on to work for Fulham and is now at Arsenal and took that team to the 2011 World University Games in China.

The Great Britain team were not really regarded as having much of a chance, but against the odds, they reached the final, where they lost to Japan and claimed the silver medal. “We had no right to beat Brazil in the quarter-final and, to be honest, probably no right to beat South Korea in the semi,” says McCubbin, who puts their success down to the work Skubala and Ellis did.

“Every game we played brilliant systems and everyone bought into the process and what we were trying to achieve. They did an unbelievable job of making us believe we could beat those teams.”

As an assistant, Skubala would take most of the training sessions and McCubbin’s recollection of his coaching style reinforces the previous idea of a collaborative, rather than prescriptive, approach.

“There was always a great variety of training,” he says. “We would do the things we needed to do from a tactical point of view and a conditioning point of view, but then he’d also just throw things in there that he knew we wanted to do, which made it enjoyable.

“He would be brilliant at pulling you aside if he felt there was something not quite right, or maybe noticed something was up, or he just wanted to have a chat about something, whether it was football or not.

“I was captain for one game. He reminded me that nothing was different — ‘Just go out there and do the same things you’ve been doing’. Also, I gave away a penalty in the final and he was one of the first to console me post-match.

“That sort of thing probably further instilled that sense of respect from the players.”

Another remarkable element of Skubala’s progression is that things did not look great for him at the start of 2021. The FA effectively discontinued its futsal programme during the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially leaving Skubala out of work. But he was brought into the youth football system by Michael Johnson, the former Birmingham and Derby County defender who now coaches some of the England age-group teams. Around the same time, he also took on a role as a technical consultant for European football’s governing body, UEFA.

Just 18 months later, as Phil Hay wrote recently, he beat an set of impressive candidates to land the Leeds Under-21s gig, leading them to second in the Premier League 2 Division Two table.

And now, he is the head coach of the senior men’s team for the foreseeable future. Will he be a success? Logic suggests no, but the intriguing thing is nobody can really say because there is so little evidence to go on so far.

“He wanted to give folks like us a chance,” says McCubbin. “In many cases, some of that team had almost missed the boat to the pro ranks. Probably four or five of those lads from that squad went on to have a good league career and I think he took a lot of enjoyment out of seeing those improvements and journeys.

“He loves coaching and he loves helping people.”