Sol Campbell the manager
“When you’re on the sidelines, it really tests your love of football”
Sol Campbell was a serial winner as a player, but successive jobs in the bleakest of circumstances at Macclesfield and Southend have only led him to closed doors. The former defender tells FFT of his struggle to shine in the dugout – and why he isn’t going to give up
Sol Campbell had been a manager for six months when the profession first reduced him to tears. The day before, he’d stood on the touchline as his Macclesfield Town side met Cambridge United on the final day of the League Two season at Moss Rose, attempting to avoid relegation from the Football League. The game nearly hadn’t happened at all. Players had threatened to walk out over unpaid wages, with off- field problems taking the club to the brink of implosion.
Ten minutes after half- time against the U’s, Macclesfield were bound for non- league. Trailing 1- 0, Campbell & Co looked like being consigned to the drop by relegation rivals Notts County – the club where he’d spent an ill- fated one- match spell a decade earlier.
But then everything turned. Just as Notts County were letting a lead slip at Swindon, Elliott Durrell levelled for Macclesfield. Having taken over a side that had been five points adrift at the foot of the table in November 2018, then faced a litany of problems in his bid to turn the tanker, Campbell had saved the Silkmen from relegation. He managed to hold it together at full- time, but the emotion came pouring out 24 hours later.
“The day afterwards, me and my missus both burst out crying with the emotions of it all,” he tells Fourfourtwo, remembering that unlikely afternoon in May 2019. “That job really stripped me down – I must have lost so much weight with the stress. There was so much going on behind the scenes that was out of my control, but I had to deal with and negotiate it. There were times when players were going on strike and we had a match in a couple of days. Emotionally, it took so much out of me, but the pure love of football just about kept me going.
“It was my first job in management and everybody was saying, ‘ They’re going down, they’re finished, they’re gone, they’re dead, they’re not going to recover, they’ve been
buried and concreted over, they won’t get out of it’. But I still had a little chisel and was chiselling my way out. I said, ‘ Come on lads, keep chiselling away and we’ll get out of it – we can see a bit of daylight, a bit more, a bit more... I can see the sun now, so let’s break through’. That’s what we did.”
MAN OF STEEL
After a glittering playing career that earned him 73 England caps and the captaincy on three occasions, some might have wondered what Campbell was doing in a League Two relegation battle in the first place. The former Arsenal stopper could have lived a stress- free retirement after bringing his playing days to an end in 2012, but he’d known for a while that he wanted to be a manager.
“It started creeping in when I was about 30,” he says. “When I was captain, I always liked all the responsibility. I love organising, preparing, the tactical side. You needed to be tactical on the pitch and think outside the box. The manager would give you a remit but sometimes you had to feel the game – if the opposition were doing something slightly different, you’d tweak things.”
Campbell learned from several successful managers during his playing career – among them Sven- Goran Eriksson, Harry Redknapp and most notably Arsene Wenger, for whom he won two Premier League titles. When he outlines his own philosophy, he’s describing the qualities of Wenger’s Invincibles team of 2003- 04, with himself at centre- back.
“I love watching the ball move quickly and decisively,” he explains. “A midfield that has energy and can play football: skilful guys but gritty, with character too. I like guys who can put in a tackle. A team where the goals can come from everywhere – midfielders, wingers, centre- halves chipping in. Then, of course, a really solid backline.
“PLAYERS WEREN’T BEING PAID – I HAD TO GET THEM TO BELIEVE THAT EVERYTHING WOULD BE OK”
“The top clubs can build that side in maybe two years – the lower you go, it might take longer, but it’s still possible. I always played in teams that played good football, even at Tottenham. I know that feeling when a team suddenly clicks together. It can’t be too slick, though – you need some ruggedness as well. A steely attitude.”
Campbell took his Pro Licence course with the Welsh FA and has travelled extensively to glean information and knowledge from coaches. “I went to Sampdoria two or three times, via a friend of mine at Gazzetta dello
Sport, and I went to Milan,” he says. “I studied at Ajax for my coaching course – Frank de Boer was the manager, and Dennis Bergkamp and Jaap Stam were there. I asked questions to everybody, from the physio to the kit man to the manager, and Marc Overmars, who’s the sporting director. I jotted down training methods, ideas, how they look at the game – I loved the way Ajax worked.
“I went to Feyenoord when Giovanni van Bronckhorst was there, and I watched Patrick Vieira in New York. Edu also helped me out and I went to see Germany vs Brazil in Berlin, watch Brazil’s training session and take notes. I enjoy doing that – speaking to people and getting a good picture.”
His initial moves into coaching were as an assistant – first with the Trinidad and Tobago national team, then when he was invited to help England’s under- 21 squad. “That was a 10- day tour, Denmark and Italy away, Aidy Boothroyd was manager and I learned a lot [ with England],” says Campbell. “[ Trinidad coach] Dennis Lawrence was on the course with me at the Welsh FA. He asked if I’d like to help him during qualifying for the 2018 World Cup and I said, ‘ I’d love to’.
“That was a fantastic experience. We took on Mexico, Panama and Costa Rica, and it was nice to see how Central America plays football. To top it all off, we played the USA and knocked them out of the World Cup. It’s amazing how people try to look down on you as a country – the USA has a population of over 300 million, Trinidad and Tobago a lot less [ circa 1.4m], and they disrespected our team. They only needed to draw the game. Christian Pulisic scored, but we came back to beat them 2- 1 and Panama qualified instead. They must have lost about a billion dollars that day by not qualifying for the World Cup!”
Getting a managerial job in his own right proved more challenging than Campbell had hoped – Oxford, Grimsby and Oldham were among the clubs who overlooked him before Macclesfield offered him a chance. He admits that he wasn’t aware of the club’s financial problems, but they quickly became apparent under owner Amar Alkadhi.
“I didn’t know anything about that side of things,” he says. “I knew they were bottom of the league, but I was looking for my first job. The main thing I said was that I wanted to watch training with the entire squad before I decided. When I watched them, I thought, ‘ They’ve got a bit about them’. I knew I could work with them – that session took me from a ‘ maybe’ to ‘ do you know what? I’m going to take this on’.”
The Silkmen had only been promoted out of the National League a few months earlier, but had won just two of their first 19 league matches and been pummelled 8- 0 by West Ham in the League Cup. Yet Campbell’s first nine matches brought four victories. “I had to turn around the mentality, to give them the belief they could win games,” he says.
But the off- field issues were starting to rear their head, with players going unpaid. “It was hard, extremely hard,” he concedes. “I had to work with passion, with heart, and be honest with the lads. Players weren’t being paid and I had to get them to believe that it would be OK, that we could override those difficulties, win some matches, eventually get paid and not go down. I said, ‘ We’ve got pride about us, come on guys’.”
Campbell was able to haul his team out of the relegation zone, then to safety after that dramatic final game of the campaign, when players eventually opted not to boycott for the sake of the club’s fans – even though they believed a strike might be their best chance of receiving their wages.
The former England international stayed on that summer, reluctant to give up his first job in management, but the troubles behind the scenes weren’t getting any better. After guiding Macclesfield to a 3- 0 victory against Leyton Orient and a League Cup triumph at Blackpool in early August 2019, he left the Silkmen by mutual consent.
“It was untenable – in the end my hands were tied, I couldn’t do anything and I hadn’t been paid for six months,” laments Campbell. “I was due a lot of bonuses, and so were the players, but they weren’t forthcoming. I was trying to build a team and do things in the proper way, but if someone at the top wants to do their own thing, it’s difficult.
“The sporting director did well, we got a lot of loans and frees in, and that helped us to stay up because it allowed me to change the team. But everything else was incredibly hard work. When I kept them up, I hoped it would be easier. I thought, ‘ Hey, back me, I want to do good things here’. But it never changed.”
Just a year later, Macclesfield were thrown out of the Football League and quickly went into liquidation. “It was so sad, and it didn’t have to be that way,” says Campbell. “It was a well- supported club – it didn’t need to drop out of the league. It didn’t have to fold.”
Given the context of everything he battled against, Campbell believes his achievement to keep Macclesfield up in 2018- 19 has been underestimated. “I don’t think people realise, that was a phenomenal job,” he says. “With shoestrings... with nothing.”
THE IMPOSSIBLE JOB, PT . II
Three months later, Campbell was back in management at League One side Southend United. Again, he was taking over a club that was deep in relegation trouble, hired after Henrik Larsson had opted against taking the job. The Shrimpers had won only five points from their opening 13 league matches, and when he watched from the stands after his appointment was announced, they lost 7- 1 at home to Doncaster. “I thought, ‘ I’ve got a big job on my hands’,” he remembers with a hint of understatement. “It was an even harder job than Macclesfield.”
Campbell had leapt straight out of a frying pan and into a fire. Again, financial problems soon began to blight his work. “Southend was a bigger club than Macclesfield and I thought I could get some loan players in, but when it came to January, I couldn’t do that because of an embargo,” he recalls.
“That wasn’t laid out to me when I agreed to take the job, and it meant I wasn’t able to change the dynamics of the team. I called in a few favours to send a couple of our loan players back, and thought I had five berths to fill – I’d organised a good wage structure for top players, but then I couldn’t bring them in. Then our best players started getting sold and it got really difficult.”
By early February, Campbell had presided over a run of only three defeats in 10 games, even if five of those matches ended in draws. He’d added old team- mates Andy Cole and Hermann Hreidarsson to his coaching staff, just like he’d done at Macclesfield. However, rocked by the disastrous mid- season transfer window, Southend lost six matches in a row. Campbell insists he hadn’t given up hope of avoiding relegation, but when the pandemic hit, his team were 16 points from safety with nine games to go.
Relegation was finally confirmed on points per game, and once again the former Three Lions defender departed unhappily by mutual consent. Without him, the Shrimpers’ slide continued, as last term they were relegated from the Football League for the first time in more than a century.
Does Campbell regret taking the Southend post, rather than waiting for a more stable club? “There were no offers,” the 47- year- old says of that three- month spell after leaving Macclesfield. “I didn’t know the full extent of what was happening at Southend and I took people at face value. I’m an honourable guy and maybe I was a little naive. I want to be the manager of your football club – there’s no need for you to hide things. Can we do this? Can we do that?
“Maybe next time, I’ll just have to say that and not feel embarrassed about asking those kinds of things, because now I know they’re important. They really impacted my ability to change the side and bring the level of quality up. It tied my hands. Now I know the direct link, that you need to be asking those crucial questions beforehand.”
Off- field problems brought a speedy end to Campbell’s time in the lower leagues during his playing career, too, at Notts County. The Magpies brought in Sven- Goran Eriksson and targeted the Premier League, only for things to soon fall apart. Convicted fraudster Russell King had been involved in a takeover of the
“THE SAD REALITY IS THAT I MAY NEVER GET A CLUB AGAIN – BUT I’LL KEEP PUSHING. I’M A TRIER”
fourth- tier club and was later the subject of a Panorama investigation. Campbell walked out of Meadow Lane after a month.
“Some important people who’d left the FA started contacting me,” he reflects. “They cottoned on quickly that the situation wasn’t good and were asking me, ‘ Are you absolutely sure about this?’ It changed my attitude and I started asking questions.”
After the immense stress of Macclesfield and Southend, Campbell could be forgiven for not wanting to go back into management, but that’s not the case at all. His frustration has been finding himself back at square one in recent months. Despite the circumstances of his Southend tenure, results at Roots Hall lowered his stock and he’s had a number of knock- backs from job applications.
“I’ve applied for England Under- 21s, Bristol Rovers, Bristol City, I had a chat with Swansea, MK Dons, Doncaster, Ipswich, Preston – the list just goes on over the course of a couple of years in recent times,” he says.
“Please God, I get an opportunity at a club that has a stable way of thinking, wants to win, does the things right and believes in me. They might have chosen all sorts of people and it’s not worked out, and think, ‘ Let’s see what this guy’s about’, or ‘ Let’s interview Sol and see if we’re missing something’. If you want to learn about a person, speak to them.
“I’m open to going abroad as well, and if a manager said, ‘ Sol, would you come in and work with me’, I’d look at that too – I nearly helped Thierry Henry with the defence when he was managing in Canada, but then there were the travel restrictions with quarantining and it didn’t work out. But ultimately I want to be a number one. Ideally I’d love a team here. I know football inside- out, I’ve played at the highest level – I know that doesn’t mean everything, but it means something. I can pass my knowledge on. I need a better environment, a foundation where I’m not constantly putting fires out every day, where I can concentrate on the team.
“I know how to build a team and manage players. You’ve got to manage egos, and I’m good at that. In football, 50 or 60 per cent is managing players to get the best out of them. I’m calm when I need to be calm, vocal when I need to be vocal – whatever the situation needs. The most important thing is to never lose your concentration.”
MEGAPHONE MAN
Despite the setbacks, Campbell has never lost sight of his dream to become a top manager. It’s a determination that stood him in good stead throughout his playing career. “It was about believing in yourself when everyone doubts you – every player goes through that,” he says. “I could go all the way back to when I was 11 or 12, thinking, ‘ Am I good enough?’ Then towards the end of my career, I moved to Portsmouth and people said, ‘ Has Sol still got it?’ But we won the FA Cup.”
His experiences toughened him up – not least the furore that surrounded his transfer from Tottenham to arch enemies Arsenal in 2001. “I was tough already by that point, but what it did do was make me razor sharp,” he explains. “I just concentrated on winning, on preparing myself each week. The Arsenal side I went to was full of unbelievable players and I wanted to win.”
Campbell went to six major competitions with the Three Lions, making the team of the tournament in 2002 and 2004. Asked what he regards as his highlight at international level, though, he points to without doubt his two most agonising moments. “It would have been scoring against Portugal or Argentina,” he sighs, recalling the controversial decisions that ruled out match- winning goals in the knockout stages at Euro 2004 and the 1998 World Cup. They’re decisions that irk him to this day. “Big time, they really do,” he says. “If we’d had VAR, that’s two goals.”
If just one of those goals had been allowed, would such a heroic moment have helped to change the perception of him with some in England? “I don’t think so – I think I did well for my country anyway,” insists Campbell.
“I represented my country at six tournaments – I’d like to see any player do that. I reckon that’s pretty good.”
There’s exasperation, then, that he’s found it so hard to convince chairmen to give him the role he craves at managerial level. Even attempts to get out and about again have proved challenging – he’s worked informally with QPR’S under- 23s, where Les Ferdinand is director of football, but some clubs have been reluctant to let him do something as basic as watch training.
“I’ve been knocking on doors to go to other clubs, but it’s difficult with the restrictions,” he says. “I could stay in the corner, watching with a megaphone saying, ‘ What about this? What about that?!” he jokes, briefly seeing the funny side of his predicament.
“It’s tough, though, when you’re not getting an opportunity and you’re getting overlooked. I love being around football and I don’t want to lose that. But when you’re on the sidelines, it does test that love and commitment – it’s not easy to carry on when you’re not getting interviews, and sometimes I don’t know why. Forget who I am and what I’ve done, just see if I can fit into your club.
“The sad reality is I might never get a club again. I really don’t know. Maybe I need some divine help from God, but I’ll keep pushing – I’m a trier, and I’ll keep trying. I’ll visit clubs and I’ll keep my knowledge up. If it happens, I’ll be prepared.”