Simon Grayson is sitting in one of the executive boxes at Bloomfield Road, contemplating “the big five-oh” ahead. It is a chance to reminisce. To dust off memories of his Leeds United manager, Billy Bremner, joining in with a youth team training session on a quagmire of a pitch despite being dressed in a suit and smart loafers. Or to recall his fellow Leeds substitute Eric Cantona’s perplexed expression as he struggled with Grayson’s dry Yorkshire wit on the touchline at Loftus Road.
The conversation takes in a coaching career that is already approaching 700 games, a tally rattled up almost on the quiet outside the top flight. Blackpool, reviving under new ownership, go into the weekend fourth and in the thick of the League One promotion race under the stewardship of a manager who achieved elevation from the third tier at the first four clubs he oversaw.
Grayson, the second of three footballing figures to speak with The Athletic as they approach their 50th birthdays, smiles when asked how he is different now to when starting out in the dug-out at 35. The answer is snapped back. “I’m balder.” He is also as enthusiastic, level-headed whether in victory or defeat, and ambitious as ever.
Football was not supposed to surprise him any more. Not after 31 years in and around the professional game, anyway. Yet there is one aspect to which he is still adjusting. Back at the start of last season, when Grayson was embarking on his only full campaign without a club since turning professional in 1988, he had returned to former employers Blackburn Rovers to watch his teenage son, Joe, make his debut for Tony Mowbray’s side in a Carabao Cup tie against Lincoln City. “I’ve become a footballing parent,” he says. “Watching my boy that night at Ewood Park was probably the most nervous I’ve been in football.
“I felt helpless. I could always affect the game as a player, whether that was by making a pass or kicking people, whatever. As a manager you’re on the touchline interacting with players, making decisions that influence the game. But from up there in the directors’ box watching my boy get the ball… I was just praying he got it from A to B. That he didn’t make a mistake. He did well that night, but I kicked more balls in that game than ever. It must have been awful for the people sitting around me.
“It made me realise what my parents went through. My mother’s suffered from multiple sclerosis for 30-odd years. When I lifted the play-off trophy with Leicester at Wembley back in 1994, she was in a wheelchair alongside the 39 steps up to the Royal Box, so she was one of the first people I saw as I went up. She and my dad had ferried me and my brother around – me to football, him to cricket – and washed our kit, kept us going. Now I can empathise with what they felt watching us: the disappointments, the nerves, the excitement, the pride.
“It does bring a new dimension to it all. Blackburn played us pre-season and Joe came on for the last 25 minutes, so I told my lads: ‘Play on him, he’s not very good,’ just loud enough so he could hear. There’s no way I would want to be preparing to take on a side who had my son in it in a competitive fixture. To be in a team meeting where you’re pinpointing the opposition’s weaknesses, and it’s your boy up there? No thanks. I hope we don’t have to come up against each other. It’d almost be tougher to see him make a mistake against one of my teams than if he scored against me.”
Grayson turns 50 on Monday, two days after he takes his resurgent team to Sunderland. If he can look back with satisfaction at so much he has achieved over his careers as a player and a manager, then it feels slightly inappropriate he should be dispatched back to Wearside, of all places, at a time in his life when he should be celebrating. He suffered over a brief stint at the Stadium of Light in 2017, like so many other managers have in recent times, hamstrung at a club infected by years of failure.
The difference with Grayson and his successor, Chris Coleman, was that their toils were broadcast, charted in minute detail over an eight-episode fly-on-the-wall documentary series. Netflix viewers worldwide watched an awkward blend of a team — from players still on significant money from Sunderland’s Premier League days who wanted out, to younger but inexperienced youth-team graduates — flounder through an 18-game tenure as they struggled to adjust to life in the second tier.
Grayson was filmed at fans’ forums in local pubs, a sponsors’ evening at the stadium and during the desperate search for reinforcements on transfer deadline day (“Why am I looking at ‘Ibrahimovic’ at the bottom of this list?” asks the chief executive, Martin Bain, of his recruitment department. “Have you found some money from somewhere?”). A manager who has excelled at virtually all the clubs he has overseen ended up serving the shortest tenure in Sunderland’s history, with it all caught brutally on camera. Mauricio Pochettino may already empathise. Jose Mourinho should take note.
“Some people will see I had a bad time at Sunderland and think I’m a busted flush, but a lot of good managers have found it very difficult up there,” Grayson tells The Athletic. “There’s a bigger problem than just the managers. I didn’t have any choice in the matter when it came to the documentary. (Predecessor) David Moyes said they’d tried to do it the year before and he’d stopped it somehow. They’d already agreed it when I arrived. It’s edited in a certain way – we were scoring goals at Norwich and there I am, celebrating in front of red seats at the Stadium of Light, not the green at Carrow Road.
“There was a throwaway line when one of my coaching staff (Glynn Snodin) went to watch a player at Scunthorpe and jokingly said, ‘We can’t sign him. He’s got gloves on in August.’ It was brought up at a fans’ forum, someone asking whether that was seriously a recruitment policy, but it was a tongue-in-cheek comment.
“At least the series made people realise what that club meant to people in the city of Sunderland, and how tough it was. (But) modern management is hard enough without cameras everywhere in-house. You’re not just dealing with a board of directors any more. You’ve got 20,000 people on Instagram and Twitter, and their opinions can snowball out of any context to make or break you. A couple of people say negative things, and it gathers pace.
“I banned Twitter when I was managing Leeds because Davide Somma, our striker, went to see a specialist and then posted on Twitter that he’d done his ACL. The chairman, Ken Bates, rang me up and asked why he didn’t know about this. I didn’t know myself! So we banned it. But you can’t do that now.
“Everyone is vulnerable as a manager in this day and age, because of social media. It’s frightening. People tell me I’m still getting blamed for where Sunderland are now. I left over two years ago. You have to have a rhino’s skin to be a manager. Even this year coming back to Blackpool, where I’d started out in coaching in 2005 and where things have gone well so far second time round, I’ve had people making a point of reminding me I resigned to leave for Leeds. And that I later managed (local rivals) Preston for four years. They won’t forget, and so you aren’t allowed to forget either.
“But the thing is, I can’t really imagine life without it. I guess I’d go off to Spain cycling, or carry on working in the media. I enjoyed the co-commentaries I did for radio during the year I had out of the game after leaving Bradford (following the 2018-19 season). That was a decent break, and I do have a life outside football: I remarried over the summer. But I still have the enthusiasm and drive to work. And the ambition to emulate managers like Roy Hodgson and Neil Warnock who have over 1,000 games on their CVs.
“Working pitch-side at the Derby-Villa play-off final (in May), I wanted to be involved. The same when I went to watch Ireland train under Mick McCarthy in March. I was ready to get back to work. And I gave my players a bigger rocket a few weeks ago at half-time in our EFL Trophy game than I’ve ever done before, so that passion’s still there. I still need the game.”
Grayson’s life has revolved around football since the quiet, shy boy from Bedale, North Yorkshire, left the rural market town for the big city lights of Leeds.
His father, a teacher, played non-League to a high level and excelled at club cricket, coaching future England captains Michael Vaughan and Joe Root in their youth. Simon’s younger brother, Paul, had trials at Leeds and Middlesbrough but chose cricket, and went on to play 181 first-class matches for Yorkshire and Essex, and two one-day internationals for England. “I played for Yorkshire Schools as a bit of an all-rounder — I got a couple of hundreds for Bedale — but I’d rather go into a tackle that’s 70-30 than face a ball whizzing past my head at 95mph,” says Simon. “Paul always says I made the right decision because I made more money than him, but he played for England and I never did.”
He did, though, play for the club he still supports even now. Life as an apprentice at Leeds brought him out of his shell, and there was good fortune in being allocated the coaching staff’s room – cleaning boots and mopping the floor of the open-plan gym, corridor and manager’s office – when it came to his chores at Elland Road. “I’d spend a lot longer doing my job, not because I was meticulous but because I was gobsmacked listening to Billy Bremner telling his stories. It was fascinating. He wasn’t the best coach or the best manager, but his enthusiasm was infectious.
“That time he joined in with the youth team in his suit and shiny shoes, he was still the best player on the pitch. I’d wash the floor and Billy would appear, get the ball out and say, ‘Right, we’ll have a circle’ and start playing that game with two people in the middle chasing the ball. I’d just got it all clean and he’d mess it all up again. But who was going to pass up that chance to play with Billy Bremner? I was lucky. Eddie Gray signed me at 14, and Billy gave me my debut at 17. Two of the biggest names connected with Leeds.”
That first appearance was a goalless draw with Huddersfield Town – “I cramped up after 65 minutes” – though the right-back turned central midfielder had to move on to secure regular game-time. “I was a sub at Queens Park Rangers on the night before I left for Leicester and Howard Wilkinson told me to go and warm up. There was this big round of applause from the away end, so I turned to the other lad who was with me and said, ‘Oh, that’ll be for me, because I’m leaving.’ He raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘What are you on about?’ I really don’t think Eric Cantona got my dry sense of humour, to be fair.
“I had a tear in my eye leaving that club, but I had five visits to Wembley and a relegation from the Premier League in my six seasons at Leicester, and two player of the year awards. I learned things, good and bad, from Brian Little and Martin O’Neill – a real throwback to Brian Clough – John Gregory at Villa, and Graeme Souness at Blackburn.
“It was Souness who had me training in the bomb squad, away from the first-team, and never explained why. I later found out Villa were owed another lump sum if I played one more game. I would have accepted that if someone had told me. I’ve been doing this for 14 years myself now, and always tried to be as open as I can be.”
Not that Grayson envisaged embarking upon his own career in coaching. His was never a loud voice in the dressing room during his early playing days. It was football which coaxed authority out of him, and even sharpened his edge. “I never thought I’d have the characteristics to be a manager, the ruthlessness and confidence, but they grew with time. I realised there was another side to me, one which allowed me to leave players out, release them from contracts, and make big decisions that affect people’s lives. I suppose to play for 20 years professionally you have to have a certain single-mindedness and discipline.”
The promotions with Blackpool, Huddersfield and Preston remain a source of pride. As does leading his beloved Leeds back into the second tier, or knocking the then Premier League champions, Manchester United, out of the FA Cup in 2010. All the successes were achieved on tight budgets — “Even Leeds wasn’t a club flush with money” — and he turned down two offers to coach in the top flight to remain at Elland Road. He maintains even now that he would have taken them back into the Premier League in 2011 had Bates pushed the boat out to secure either Gareth McAuley or Kaspars Gorkss, available for around £300,000, at mid-season.
His future, though, is orange. Or, rather, tangerine.
Simon Sadler’s takeover at Blackpool in the summer has offered the club a fresh start, a chance to develop and build a new training ground, while repairing relations with a fanbase who had felt disenfranchised by Owen Oyston’s toxic ownership. Sadler acknowledges it will take a steady investment of £10 million to hoist them into proper contention. For the team to be excelling at such an early stage owes much to Grayson, who had interviewed for the role at the crack of dawn in early July ahead of a dash across to Leeds to watch the great Chris Gayle open the batting for West Indies against Afghanistan at Headingley in the Cricket World Cup. Gayle was out for seven. Grayson signed a two-year contract.
“Things are changing here,” he adds. “I came to Bloomfield Road for their FA Cup tie with Arsenal last season. The ground looked derelict, and there were hardly any home fans. The atmosphere was poisonous. It felt as if the club couldn’t go any lower. But, with Simon in place, we’re on the up again now. We have four groundsmen — there was only one working across both the stadium and the training ground last year — and there’s grass on the pitch. Lots of the people who had left behind the scenes are back. We have a chief executive in Ben Mansford who left Maccabi Tel Aviv to come here – swapping one seaside resort for another. There’s that much positivity around the place.
“We had over 11,000 in for the first game of the season against Bristol Rovers. Moyesy (David Moyes) and Mark Lawrenson came to watch the other week and the first thing they said afterwards was, ‘Wow, the crowd. They don’t half back the team.’ It’s because they’ve got their club back again. There’s a reconnection between town and football club. Now I have to progress it, and that will take time.”
There is the incentive. At 50, none of the enthusiasm has dissipated. There is plenty still to achieve.
(Photo: EMPICS Sport — PA Images via Getty Images) | |
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