Kirk’s big gamble pays off with Everton targeting the top four
Manager quit accountancy for full-time football career and tells Katie Whyatt how he came to realise that he had ‘to do something I love’
In the 5.30am twilight, while the majority of the nation sleeps, Everton manager Willie Kirk uses the 46-mile drive to Finch Farm to take an Italian lesson over his car’s speakers. Whatever floats your boat; some people go for a run. “Well, it’s before my run,” he says. “On a good day, the drive is 50 minutes. I’m not going to be able to phone anybody at five in the morning. I may as well do something. I’ve always wanted to learn Italian.”
Kirk arrives at work at 6.30am in a flurry of conversational phrases and leaves more than 12 hours later, such is the joie de vivre of a man whose career in football began when he quit his job as an accountant with no real plan. Via spells in Scotland and as Casey Stoney’s Manchester United assistant, he joined Everton last season, meeting a squad carrying “a little bit of guilt that somebody had lost their job” following the departure of Andy Spence.
Last season, Everton finished second from bottom – a nadir for a club once home to Lucy
Bronze, Toni Duggan and Nikita Parris. In that period, Kirk says, they and Arsenal were “caught cold” by the influx of new money at Chelsea and Manchester City. “It changed the whole face of it. We were behind, because I’m not sure Everton were fully integrated. It was appreciating and understanding that gap and how they could close it sustainably. We want to get back to days of senior England internationals. We want to be just as big as the perceived top four.”
Now they are fifth, and tomorrow will play a Liverpool side still searching for their first win of the season in the Merseyside derby at Anfield.
“It’s not another game and we need to admit this,” the 41-year-old Kirk says. “People always try and play down the occasion. What bigger buzz than to play in front of a massive crowd, against your city rivals, and beat them? I think we’ve got a better squad than them, better players, but we need to be careful. It’s another chance to grow the game and we need to play our part.”
Life at Finch Farm has changed since Kirk’s arrival. Players now have access to the recovery pool and for the first time do not launder their own kit. They receive breakfast and lunch – previously, lunch only – and have their own physiotherapy and boot rooms.
Kirk plastered “little messages that become subconscious – plays on the nil satis nisi optimum of the badge” – to the walls. “The lobbying part has to happen, but everything I’ve lobbied for, with good justification, the club have embraced. Everything will be challenged and rightly so. My budget is one of the lowest in the league, [but] I’m comfortable with it because I can see the club increasing it. Part of the reason I came here is that I could see that they wanted the women’s team to do well.”
Kirk knows money, given he was an accountant for 16 years. His then-girlfriend, Nikki, a dance teacher, “would jump out of bed in the morning because she was excited about going to work. I’d be trying to catch an extra half-hour because I wasn’t excited about going into an office to look at spreadsheets. That made me think, I’ve got to do something I love. There’s no reason not to.”
He took voluntary redundancy at the turn of the decade: it took seven months to turn football into a full-time career and five to rival his accountant salary. “People could not understand what I was doing. I split up with Nikki. One of the reasons was probably that I’d taken this big gamble without really consulting her. Other people were panicking more than me.”
Kirk’s personal ambition is to win the Women’s Champions League “multiple times, in different countries”, having previously battled with thoughts of returning to the men’s game, where he coached academies.
“If that happens, it happens, but if I’m in the women’s game for the rest of my career, I’m OK with it. Because the game’s growing, I’m absolutely comfortable with the career that lies ahead here.”
When Manchester United called, two summers ago, he went partly on the advice of Alan Irvine, David Moyes’s former assistant, to see what he could learn as an assistant. “He said it’s easier going from a No1 to a No2 than the other way, because the No1 sees everything,” Kirk says. “He said his hardest job was going from Moyes’s No2 to No1 at Preston: ‘There were things David had kept from me, and I’m not ready for this!’”
“He remembers United being introduced as “Casey Stoney’s side” on the Women’s Football Show and knowing he had to move, but it was an education, not least when one player requested time off for her sister’s Vegas wedding. “We had to try and weigh up what was right for the player. Very quickly, [Stoney] was, like, ‘You’ve got to go to the wedding. It’s a once in a lifetime that your sister gets married.’ That was a situation where the player was petrified to ask about it and Casey made it easy for her because she’s huge with her family. She manages to get the empathy part right, but nobody steps out of line.”
He will be at Finch Farm today, for one final training session ahead of the derby, having spent the later half of the week on a coaching course.
“Football can become allconsuming, definitely. There are periods in my life where I’ve definitely allowed my job to rule, but if I ever have a bad day, I think back to looking at spreadsheets. The day never seems as bad.”
‘If I ever have a bad day, I think back to looking at spreadsheets. The day never seems as bad’