Mike Williamson did not give the impression he was a man in a rush.
The view from the office at Gateshead’s International Stadium was dazzling, the autumn sun stretching across the pristine playing surface.
His club – Gateshead – were flying high in the National League, on an upward trajectory that began when Williamson took over as player-manager four years ago at the age of 35.
We spoke about his family, his love of taking training and then picking up his children from school across the city, how he managed to retain perspective and his boyhood enthusiasm for the game through the “carnage” at Newcastle United and how he offered to pay teammates’ mortgages during Gateshead’s darkest days, when bankruptcy seemed certain.
And then there was a long, fascinating chat about his football philosophy and how he had turned the club with the smallest budget in the National League into one of its most attractive teams. As we shook hands on the staircase, there was an open invite to return in the future to watch training.
Then four days and 200 miles later, he was being unveiled as the manager at League Two club MK Dons.
“Football really is mad,” Williamson tells i over a phone call from his new office in Buckinghamshire. “It was not on the cards when we spoke the first time and it all moved fast. It’s one of the few industries where it could happen – you get a phone call and you just go. You’re halfway across the country, away from your family but that is the industry,”
There is a buzz around Williamson, a coach whose philosophy and style of play has turned heads in the National League. After defeat in his first game, his MK Dons snapped a nine game losing streak by thrashing Bradford City 4-1 on Tuesday in a performance of attacking verve. Williamson’s methodology requires time and buy-in, but the early signs are it could be the start of something special for both manager and his new club.
“Of course it was a wrench to leave Gateshead, I didn’t necessarily see it coming but as soon as MK Dons spoke to me, I knew it was a good fit. The club itself has got a way of playing, an identity and that aligns with what I want to do,” he says.
“The short conversations we’ve had have been really good, there’s a project here and the people too. It appealed and all came together. It’s a huge challenge but I’m looking forward to getting on with it.”
Williamson’s stock has been rising sharply since he first took the job as player-manager in 2019. Pride of place on his CV is promotion from the Conference North with Gateshead, but that only tells half the story – he was a player at the club when it came within hours of extinction. The club has turned itself around thanks to a consortium of local businessmen and fans, but their budget is still a fraction of the Conference’s big hitters. The work he and his coaching and recruitment team have done has been really impressive.
So, few at Gateshead were surprised when the call came. Many expected Bradford City to knock after links to the job there had surfaced a day or two before i spoke to him.
But there was no contact from West Yorkshire. Instead it was MK Dons who decided to move for a man who was producing results while playing an exhilarating passing game that is very easy on the eye.
One of their team goals, a Marcus Dinanga strike that came after 37 consecutive passes, went viral for its quality. The club started to call itself, unironically, “Iron Mike’s Entertainers”.
3⃣7⃣ passes
— Gateshead FC (@GatesheadFC) September 20, 2023
1⃣0⃣ players involved (sorry, @ha11nno)
1⃣ ridiculous goal
Iron Mike's Entertainersare a joy to watch
#WorClub
pic.twitter.com/YfLYC9v417
Talk to Williamson and it does not take long to see why it has come together for him in management. His personality is measured but he is clearly a deep thinker on the game. He says, with no hyperbole, that when his team play the way they are set up to play they are “unstoppable”.
“The starting point for me is hard work, having the right values,” he says.
“Being humble, honesty, transparency – these are words I use when I’m looking at players about what we want to be. I want my teams to be honest, hard-working and we want to dominate the ball and off the back of that we have evolved in terms of the patterns and the way we play.”
I first met Williamson when he was at Newcastle, completing a remarkable journey into the Premier League for a centre-back who had mostly spent his career bouncing around the lower leagues. Before St James’ Park, 100 appearances for Wycombe Wanderers represented the bulk of his experience.
He managed to bridge that gap in class, he says, because of a commitment that transfers easily to management. Williamson reckons he has been an “unconscious student” of the game for most of his career.
“I was never blessed with the genetics or the ability to be able to coast through games, I had to make effort and in that situation I needed to find the one per cent extra to get me to the best level,” he says.
“All I knew was working hard in the gym, being the fittest I could be and I tried to give myself a platform to be the best I could possibly be. I had to read the game as a young lad playing centre-back so maybe it’s that. But it was in my mid to late-20s that I really started to have an opinion on things and think about the decisions that were being taken, on and off the pitch.”
He admits he wasn’t always the easiest player to manage. His relationship with Alan Pardew at Newcastle was “difficult at first” because he was unhappy at not playing, before recovering in the later years when the pair developed mutual respect.
The problems stemmed from the fact he was not one of Pardew’s first choices but now he manages a squad of players he understands the difficulty of maintaining harmony in a group. More than that, he credits Pardew for the way he kept “outside noise” from the dressing room. “I’d really like to sit down and chat with him now, see what I can glean from him because I’ve got a totally different perspective on it now,” he says.
But he is his own man and one thing is non-negotiable. “Attacking football is my philosophy but that’s because I think it’s the best way to win games,” he says.
“My attitude at Gateshead was always: why can’t you play that way in non-league? The quality now at our level is the result of the money at the top filtering down. The industry is saturated with young, hungry athletes so the level of player in the Conference and Conference North is much, much higher.
“There’ll always be a place for different types of identity but once you get to the top level there’s no secret that Manchester City, Brighton, Arsenal, Liverpool and now Tottenham – they play this way because it gets results, not just because it’s attractive. Of course you can do that in the Conference if you have the right personnel. It won’t change wherever I go and whatever level I’m managing at.”
Trusting his players, he says, is key. His coaching staff work hard on supplying them with the information but then are happy to hand them responsibility on the pitch.
“If we can simplify the detail so much then the decision-making becomes easy and it becomes unstoppable,” he says.
“You need to have lads who are willing to play with courage but are also able to identify things when the game is going on because the style we play you have more decisions to make during matches. So you’ve got to make sure you have lads who are capable of making those decisions well.
“We believe in it. If we lose games we won’t go away from it. Instead we’ll watch the games, realise why it went wrong and work on it.”
Most managers will tell you the job is all consuming, a 24/7 vocation that takes over everything. What sets Williamson apart is that he is open about the different approach he has.
“I’ve always had perspective in my career. There are moments that consume you because that’s football but for me the most successful people are the ones that have their values aligned with their daily, weekly plan and where their time is spent. That is success,” he said.
“People say he’s the most successful manager in the game but if Pep [Guardiola] wants a quiet life living in the hills in Italy then he’s not succeeding at the moment, is he? Maybe there’s someone in League One who is succeeding and getting that balance as well.
“I joke about it but it’s true, this isn’t really a job is it? Getting a coffee, speaking to the guys in the office, going on the training ground. It’s not as though it’s a grind. I just thoroughly enjoy it. Of course you lose games and there’s things going on – fans aren’t happy – but I don’t struggle to switch off. I don’t really feel the pressure so I’m lucky that way.”
When the Dons approached Williamson, they said they had been monitoring him long before they made their move and they are not the only ones. Williamson’s management career is most certainly one to watch.
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