A smartly coiffured haircut, yet to show any signs of greying, and matching stubble, succeed in making Oxford United’s Des Buckingham look like the archetypal, modern head coach.
Football management is increasingly a young person’s game. Clubs up and down the pyramid are scouring the market for up-and-coming coaching talent armed with innovative ideas and emotional intuition. At 39, Buckingham fits the mould, but while young he has already accumulated a wealth of experience spanning over 20 years.
Buckingham had shown promise as a young goalkeeper but decided to prioritise coaching over playing in his late teens, inspired by the late Mickey Lewis, an Oxford legend on and off the pitch.
He spent a decade honing his craft at Oxford, his hometown club, initially in the academy and later as part of Chris Wilder’s first-team setup, before embarking on an enviable world tour: Wellington to Auckland to Melbourne to Mumbai. His achievements abroad paved the way for his homecoming last November.
“I was very aware of how fortunate I was to be in the environment that I was in and have the support that I had [at Oxford],” Buckingham tells i. “I can’t speak highly enough of the support that Les Taylor, the academy director at the time, Mickey Lewis and Chris Wilder wrapped around me.
“[But] I knew I wanted to be a head coach. I’d spent 10 years in the same place at Oxford. At that time, as a 29-year-old who hadn’t played, the opportunity to be one [in England] wasn’t going to come very quickly or easily.
“Just by sheer chance a job in New Zealand came up and a guy called Owen Prosser, who I’d coached with at Oxford, had made the move to work with the New Zealand FA and he sent me a job spec. It was almost like it was written for what I was looking for.”
Buckingham uprooted his life and flew to the other side of the globe to become a coach at Wellington Phoenix, a club based in New Zealand’s second-largest city but that plays in the Australian A-League. After a couple of years, he earned a promotion to the top job, becoming the youngest manager in the competition’s history aged 31.
A brief spell at Stoke City followed before he returned to New Zealand, this time to work with the country’s youth teams. In 2019, he led the All Whites’ U20s into the last-16 of the World Cup, beating a Norway team containing Erling Haaland 2-0 in the group stage. Later that year, he led the U23s to qualification for the Tokyo Olympics. Cutbacks precipitated by the pandemic meant he didn’t get to manage them at the tournament.
“I loved my time in New Zealand. I spent three years in Wellington and three in Auckland. It opened up a whole raft of footballing experiences that I certainly wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed in England.
“I left Oxford at 29 years old but everything that I knew about life had been what it was like where I’d grown up. The experience to see how others do things both from a work sense but also a life sense and see different cultures opened my eyes up to different things. That was a really special six years of my life.”
Coaching is often an all-encompassing vocation, but Buckingham managed to find the time to become a qualified pilot during his time in Wellington.
Friends and colleagues bought him a flying lesson for his 30th birthday after an off-hand remark he had made about pursuing a career in aviation if he hadn’t got into football. While up in the sky, Buckingham’s instructor (successfully) laid out his sales pitch.
“He made it sound so simple and so cost-effective,” Buckingham recalls with a laugh. “Neither of which over a three-year journey in Wellington it was! It was 100 hours at least of flying, six or seven theory tests, practical exams when you’re up in the sky as well. But three and a half years later I passed my test and got my pilot’s license.”
There may not seem an obvious link between the two professions, but the need to remain calm while airborne is a trait that Buckingham has utilised in coaching.
“If you’re in the sky and you start to panic you can’t just pull over to the side of the road like you can do in your car,” he says. “It’s the same on the sideline. I’m not the most animated and I don’t get too high or low around the group either. I try to remain consistent in my behaviour because if I do that I stay in control of my emotions which allows me to make better decisions.”
Fresh from honing his coaching and flying skills, Buckingham was headhunted by City Football Group (CFG). Buckingham began as an assistant manager at Melbourne City, where he won the A-League, before joining Mumbai City, another club in CFG’s stable, as the head coach where he lifted the Indian Super League (ISL) title last year.
Multi-club ownership has many critics and detractors, but working in CFG’s structure provided Buckingham invaluable experience “in one of the biggest, if not the biggest, footballing organisation in the world”.
“I didn’t quite know what to expect going in,” he says. “I was sent in to set Mumbai up as a CFG-run club with all the stuff on the field but also help the club set up its structure behind the scenes. I was able to do that over two-and-a-half years but also bring a different style of football and set the team up for success.”
Buckingham is hopeful that the infrastructure being put into place in the ISL will help India fulfil its potential as a footballing nation in time. It was a wrench to leave a club that had provided immense job satisfaction, but the allure of a head coaching role in England, 10 years after he had left to pursue such opportunities abroad, was too hard to ignore. That it was at Oxford was “a cherry on top”.
“Me being from Oxford played a part but it was nowhere near a major one in the decision for me to come back to this club,” Buckingham says. “Similarly to New Zealand what I was looking for and what the club was looking for was very closely aligned. That was the biggest thing.”
It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing. When Buckingham took charge from Liam Manning who was snapped up Bristol City, Oxford were 2nd in the table, one point behind the leaders Portsmouth; five positions and 20 points now separate the clubs. Oxford currently occupy the sixth and final play-off position and face three promotion rivals – Peterborough United (4th), Lincoln Town (7th) and Stevenage (9th).
Buckingham admits that finding the right balance between retaining what made the side successful under Manning and ushering in his own ideas took time, while a “substantial” injury list also limited progress.
But back-to-back 4-0 wins against Fleetwood Town and Burton Albion suggest that things are starting to move in the right direction.
“I think it seems to have clicked and the players seem to understand what we’re doing so I think we’ve put ourselves in the best position we can where it’s in our hands,” he says.
Buckingham was 14 the last time Oxford were in the second tier of English football and is aware of what promotion this season would mean to the city.
“I’ve supported the club since I was born,” he says. “I was born in Cowley just down the road from the training ground so I’ve been to those games in what was the old Division One.
“Look at the [National League] play-off game at Wembley in 2010, they sold out 35,000, so the fanbase is there. I know as well as anybody what the football club means to the people of Oxford. To be in a position to help try and take them up now would be very special.”
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