Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here
When Danny Cowley was sacked by Portsmouth in January 2023, it would be the longest break of his life.
He and his brother Nicky had both been teachers at the same school while taking Concord Rangers up through the divisions from 2008 to 2015, working 18-hour days to juggle their two professions.
Danny had gone from school to work to university to this relentless lifestyle and never really stopped.
Given the success at Concord, at Braintree Town and then at Lincoln City, where the pair truly propelled themselves into the national consciousness with EFL promotion and a run to the FA Cup quarter-finals, it wasn’t until Cowley was 42, 12 years and four clubs into management, that he lost his job for the first time. He considered himself indestructible and quickly realised that wasn’t the case.
But being sacked can have its advantages, eventually. After he left Huddersfield in 2020, Cowley and his brother continued to work every day, computerising their training programmes and reviewing their work until that date. It was clearly a valuable process, but this was still all-in, no rest.
In 2023, though, he did take some time. His son is in an elite gymnastics programme and his daughter is in Chelsea’s academy and England age-group setups. For the first time in too long, he got to spend time with them and watch them train and play.
As Cowley says with a smile: “There are times when you feel like an average football manager and a terrible parent.”
Two days after the first anniversary of leaving Portsmouth, Cowley and his brother were appointed by Colchester United. For the first time since leaving Braintree, they were back in Essex again. The job fitted for Danny and fitted for his family.
“We had been offered jobs while we were out, and for the first time in my life location did come into it,” he tells i.
“My eldest, Isabella, has already had six schools and she’s just gone into Year 11, and it’s the first time where we really felt that we couldn’t move them. As a consequence, that did come into my thinking. My wife was an international athlete, so she understands elite sport and its demands. But we made a family decision.
“My parents live 20 minutes from the training ground. I left home at 19 to go to university and I’ve gone back as a 45-year-old. My mum is absolutely delighted about it.
“She was the best mum to Nicky and me when we were growing up and she’s an even better mum now, if that’s possible. Our parents follow us wherever, come to all of our games, and it’s been lovely to be able to spend a little more time with them.”
The location might be ideal, but Colchester United’s situation hasn’t been. Having finished 10th in the Championship as recently as 2007, Colchester suffered two relegations and have finished in the top six of a division on only one occasion since.
There was no inglorious financial emergency, no huge scandal to rock the club, simply a series of unsuccessful managerial appointments at a club that had to sell their best players and rely upon the academy to produce.
Recently, treading water has been the height of Colchester’s progress. From a position of ambition to escape League Two, Colchester have come far closer to falling out of it.
They finished 88th in the Football League ladder in 2020-21 and 2022-23. Last season, no club below them survived. Third from bottom of the 92-club pyramid is an unpleasant place to be, where the flames lick at your feet.
That is the situation into which Cowley was thrust and one that he maintained, securing league survival on the final day. He inherited a team that had lost 10 of its previous 11 games and roughly converted defeats into draws.
Between his appointment on 4 January and the end of the season, Colchester only lost six league games and two of those were against Stockport and Wrexham, both promoted automatically.
As Cowley sees it, when taking on a project such as this there are two distinct areas in which you must seek improvements and influence. The first is confidence: if a manager is appointed mid-season, it’s usually because something has gone badly wrong.
That is complicated here because they have always attempted to develop young players. The average age of a Colchester United XI last season was just 24.2, the third youngest in the division. When young players make mistakes, it can cause a cycle of underperformance fuelled by a loss of belief.
“When you pick up a team that has lost 10 in 11, you expect there to be fractions, infighting and disillusionment, certainly lacking in confidence,” he says.
“That wasn’t the case here. They just needed a bit of help, support and direction. Confidence is a fragile commodity. It can be really tough to develop and can be lost in a heartbeat.
“We just try to equip them with the tools. The more competent you become, the more confident you become. They also need a mental framework to manage their emotions. Players have to live with a lot more criticism than they ever had to before.
“I remember at Portsmouth, and we might come in on a Monday after a poor performance. We’d come in to do our game review, and you looked at them and could almost see that they were full up with criticism.
“Football is a game riddled with mistakes. This is the game. You will make mistakes and your teammates will make mistakes. But it’s not that that defines us, only ever the reaction to mistakes, both our own and our opponents’. This is how we see the game.”
Colchester United 0-1 Brentford (Tuesday 27 August)
Game No: 11/92
Miles: 225
Cumulative miles: 1883
Total goals seen: 31
The one thing I’ll remember in May: The clash between modern football and lower-league realism. Consecutive adverts on the big screen pre-game were for Greene King – “our pouring rights sponsor” – and a Dolly Parton tribute act. Lovely stuff.
The aim, evidently, is for confidence to become a self-fulfilling prophecy propelled by many different actors. So often at struggling clubs, where people are down on their luck or have forgotten how wonderful intense pride can feel, the principal task is one of reconnection between component parts that have become disparate. Get that right and you create momentum. Nothing builds confidence like momentum.
Cowley has as good a shot at it as anyone could. On the evening I visit, the EFL Cup tie against Premier League Brentford during which Colchester are the better side for long periods, Danny’s name is sung frequently. Before the game I chat to pockets of home fans, eavesdropping on their corner of the football world for a few precious minutes.
Without exception, all are enthused by the future and proud to have the Cowleys in charge. They know that they will have had other offers and know too that swapping the top half of League One for the dusty floor of League Two’s lower reaches required a dose of familial loyalty in faith. They intend to repay them in kind.
“The supporters have been brilliant since the day we came in,” Cowley says. “I spoke about reconnecting them to the club. For whatever reason the team had suffered in recent times, and that can always cause a divide. I know that it is never an 11-man job – never has been and never will be. It always has to be a collective effort.
“There’s a huge difference between a spectator and a supporter. I see a lot of spectators in the Premier League now, going to games to be entertained. I don’t like that.
“A supporter comes to the game to influence the outcome and knows that they have that power. If they can stay with the players, and not get too frustrated, it can give a player so much energy and belief.
“We had three-and-a-half years of success at Lincoln and we had some brilliant players who will forever have a special place in my heart, but it was the supporters. That is what allowed us to have that success.
“We went from 1,300 season ticket holders to 7,000 in one season. It made us such a powerful force. I have the same feeling here: they really want to be with us. We just have to make sure that we can create something that they can be associated with.”
Make no mistake: this is one of the toughest assignments in the Football League. Colchester started to sink 17 years ago and haven’t really stopped since. Supporters have forgotten what momentum feels like.
Key players were sold again this summer and all moved up – Stockport County, Peterborough United, Port Vale. That means more change and risks the processes requiring another reset.
But Cowley is relentlessly positive. He came back here because it worked for him, worked for his brother, worked for his mum and dad and worked for his family. He came back here because he saw a project that provoked the same feelings of intense excitement that powered his greatest successes. If nothing else, this is the club that fits.
“I live my life with positives,” he says. “I want to see the best in people and the best in situations and I choose to live my life that way. I see a lot of people who see the worst in everyone. It seems such a miserable way to live.
“I see the best in this club too. I think everything here gives us a wonderful opportunity, but that’s all it is: opportunity. It’s on us all to make it more than that, everybody who has even a little piece of love within them for Colchester United. That’s the way you start to make meaningful things happen.”
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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