This is an interview exploring football management through the insights of Ian Holloway. But first the interesting, and far more important stuff. Holloway has four children, three profoundly deaf. All are fully functioning adults now of whom he is immensely proud.
He should of course take as much pride in himself and wife Kim for the gold star parenting they provided. The experience of negotiating a life-changing development ultimately informed his management since it forced upon him a radical shift in ways of seeing, triggering sensitivities he didn’t know he had.
Speaking to Holloway about this is best managed with tissues to hand. “When you are first told they have lost a sense and you don’t know what that means. It is like doing a jigsaw without the picture on the box. We have some secrets now. We know the answers,” he told i.
“If your kids have a hearing loss make sure their eyes are okay and teach them a visual language. They will learn from their own perspective. We didn’t find out our twin daughters were profoundly deaf until they were 16 months. We did not give them one sign, not one. We were signing to my youngest daughter from the moment she was born. She has nine GCSEs and three A Levels.”
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The characterisation of Holloway as a football eccentric, or even crank, is born of many things, not least a crushing prejudice that leads us to discount those with regional accents from a particular social class and of low educational attainment. Heartbreakingly, it is often those dearest to us that play the biggest part in blocking progress since they buy into the very prejudices that hold us back.
Thus was Holloway, a working-class lad from a Bristol council estate, forced to overcome the low expectations of a loving father, who could not conceive how his son might escape the parameters that traditionally enclose the demographic.
“Anybody my age wanted to please their dad but it was impossible. My dad never said well done to me. He thought that would make me weak.” His old man would be spinning through the afterlife were he to see his boy now, reflecting on a successful career in football as well as indulging a life-long interest in art, which is productive enough to yield work for an exhibition instead of being stuffed in a cupboard were he ever to consider himself worthy.
To prosper Holloway has had to be resourceful, innovative, and committed. Though these might sound like adjectives nicked from a sales executive’s CV, they describe the lived experience of an extraordinary figure.
He has not managed since leaving Grimsby two years ago. At 59 he would love another shot but accepts it unlikely, and is resigned to the emergence of others younger than he. To guide them he has written a self-help manual How To Be A Football Manager, a kaleidoscope of anecdotes and detours packed with wisdom acquired on the hoof.
By understanding there is more to footballers than appearances suggest and by finding the right keys Holloway has vastly improved outcomes for individual players as well as his teams. It took more than the bounce of the ball to get Blackpool promoted to the Premier League and to the play-off final immediately after relegation.
Had chairman Karl Oyston greater faith in Holloway’s vision and backed him, Holloway might have prescribed the ground subsequently trod by Graham Potter, ie a talented English manager given the chance to coach at an elite club.
“My career would have been different if I’d kept Blackpool up,” he says. “Going down on the last day of season and losing the play-off final to West Ham the following year changed everything. I realised I had to move. I went to Crystal Palace, managed to get them up through the play-offs but only had eight games the following season. I ended up going to Millwall, which just didn’t work out.”
It is tempting to categorise Holloway as a Pep Guardiola of the lower leagues. His attention to detail, a track record of making players better, expressed in the profits generated at the point of sale, the use of specialist, individual coaches, the personal touch in attracting players, his willingness to adopt unorthodox methods, and his appreciation of boardroom dynamics, all of this on a budget, are attributes that in a higher setting with the right infrastructure might reap commensurate rewards.
In other words, if he had a Charlie Adam-equivalent he could have used in the final 20 minutes of Blackpool matches he might have kept them up. Guardiola sends for Ilkay Gundogan or the like when Kevin De Bruyne needs sitting. “My horses ran out of legs seven miles shy of Bristol. I didn’t have others of that quality to get my carriage home on time,” is how he puts it.
Holloway is too modest to accept the Pep comparison. He is, however, an advocate. “He is a magnificent man, so driven. And he knows how to deal with top-class players, treating them as ordinary people. His empathy for his players, how he gets them to conform yet maximise what they are. You get found out if you have a doubt about yourself. The top managers don’t have any, or if they do they shake it out. They are superhuman.”
Guardiola takes his place in Holloway’s list of familiar greats alongside Clough, Ferguson, Stein, Shankly, Paisley, all men, he says, who understood community. “They are all from humble backgrounds. They know how hard it is for people. They are leaders. Football is a wonderful game but it is also more than a game.”
Ian Holloway’s managerial career
Clubs managed:
- Bristol Rovers (1996-2001)
- QPR (2001-06)
- Plymouth Argyle (2006-07)
- Leicester City (2007-08)
- Blackpool (2009-12)
- Crystal Palace (2012-13)
- Millwall (2014-15)
- QPR (2016-18)
- Grimsby Town (2019-20)
Honours:
- QPR (Second division promotion, 2003-04)
- Blackpool (Championship play-off winner, 2009-10)
- Crystal Palace (Championship play-off winner, 2012-13)
Holloway’s sensitive treatment of Clarke Carlisle 19 years ago during his time as QPR coach, a period when mental health had zero purchase in professional sport, identifies him as a perceptive manager with the qualities he so admired in the list above. Holloway didn’t have the answers but he recognised the necessity to act.
“It was terrifying because I did not know how to help him. Fortunately, I knew a man who did, Peter Kay at the Sporting Chance charity. I’m glad Clarke trusted me. We know how to train people physically in football but not a clue how to help them mentally. How many players have screwed up their lives? George Best and Paul Gascoigne are two of the best players we have seen and look how they struggled. I made sure the club nurtured Clarke, paid his wages. The players saw that and it had a huge impact.”
Holloway’s popularity has guaranteed huge media engagement around this book, including some serious treatment in the broadsheets. “What am I love?” he shouts to Kim searching for the word one writer used to describe him. “Idiosyncratic,” she says. “That’s it. I’m Idiosyncratic,” he said. “I had to look it up.”
Whatever he might be we leave him contemplating a life full of riches and hoping to cross one last threshold. “What people think about me and know about me might be different. I have lived through some terrible things and some marvellous things. The most important commodity I have is time. I’m 59. My dad died at this age. I’m hoping I make 60. Once I’m past that I will have some celebration I can tell you.”
How to be a Football Manager by Ian Holloway (Headline, £22)
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