In this guest post, Jack Stevenson of Football vs Oblivion, shares his interview with football coach, Tom Sermanni. Tom is the current manager of the New Zealand Women’s national team, and has previously coached the national women’s teams of the USA and Australia, as well as men’s clubs in Australia, Japan and Malaysia.
The year is 1983, and a 29-year-old Tom Sermanni has just signed for Dunfermline Athletic in Scotland. Never one of the game’s giants. Dunfermline had nonetheless had a fruitful recent history – they won the Scottish Cup in 1961 and 1968, and in 1969 journeyed all the way to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup-Winners Cup. Fourteen years on though and they were a club in steep decline, mired in an ultimately unsuccessful battle against relegation to the third tier of Scottish football.
Sermanni is someone whose enthusiasm for football is palpable, and throughout our conversation he frequently alludes to his gratitude at having made such a fulfilling living from the sport. Reminiscing about this time at Dunfermline is the only time he ever hints at disenchantment or ennui. He had spent the bulk of the previous decade playing at Blackpool and Torquay in England, and admits, “I didn’t really want to move back and live in Scotland again. I’d kind of left Scotland and moved on if you like.”
Football vs. Oblivion doesn’t believe in fate, but for the sake of a good story, there are a couple of things worth mentioning. The first is that Dunfermline Athletic has connections with some remarkable football coaches. That first Scottish Cup in 1961 was achieved under the stewardship of Jock Stein, in his first managerial role, years before he would become an immortal of Celtic and Scottish football more broadly. Three years later, a certain Alex Ferguson would begin a productive three years as a player at the club, racking up 66 goals in 87 appearances.
And, sixteen years after Ferguson left the club for Rangers, Tom Sermanni was about to receive a phone call that would change his life. It would also, strangely, end up changing the entire culture of football in a conspicuously massive country on the other side of the planet.
Australia calling
As a midfielder in the unglamorous environment of the 1970s English/Scottish lower leagues, Sermanni never considered the possibility that his career would take him overseas. “If I think back to those days at Albion Rovers, the only thing you wanted to be was a professional football player. Your general ambition then was to play up the grades in Scotland, or go to England, which I ended up doing, and trying to play down there. So that was as far as the ambition went in those days, and I would never have dreamed that my career and my life would have gone in that direction. I would never have dreamed in the 1970s that I’d be involved in women’s football, because women’s football essentially didn’t quite… well, it existed, but it was a completely unknown quantity.”
Some context. When Sermanni made his professional football debut for Albion Rovers in 1973, women’s football was still officially banned by the Scottish Football Association. He elaborates: “it basically didn’t exist, and if it did exist you didn’t get involved in it, and if you did get involved in it people would be looking at you a little bit strangely. It wasn’t thought about in those days. Even when I went into women’s football for the first time in the mid nineties, even then there was a kind of stigma about being attached to women’s football, and a lot of people – cos I skipped over from men’s football – a lot of people in Australia and back in Scotland at the time wondered what I was thinking.”
Nor was Albion Rovers the sort of place that would generally harbour future globetrotters, World Cup coaches, and Football Federation Australia Hall of Famers. “At Albion Rovers, I think we trained Tuesday night, Thursday night, then played on Saturday. There was no recovery stuff in between. So that’s what football was about then, you had usually a hard training session on the Tuesday night, a bit less on the Thursday night, then turned up and played on a Saturday. At times when you went to an away game, depending on where you were, you either met and went on the team bus and drove there yourself. It was a very different environment. It would almost be like what an amateur club does now.”
Sermanni carved out enough of a reputation for himself there, playing week in, week out in front of 500 or so fans – maybe ballooning to 2,000 for a glamorous cup tie, or a derby against Airdrie United. Eventually, he caught the attention of Blackpool, in the North of England. “It wasn’t too big a shift geographically, although in a sense it was because you didn’t do a lot of travelling at the time. I think I was maybe 23, and I still lived at home. Life was sort of like that.”
Sermanni roamed as far south as Torquay United, on the English Riviera, and then made his aforementioned move back to St. Johnstone. Then, a happy set of coincidences, and that fateful phone call. “When I was at Torquay United, the assistant coach was a guy called Mike Hickman. Mike Hickman emigrated to Australia. Then, two or three years later, I’m now playing at Dunfermline, and I get a phone call from a guy called Doug Collins who played at Burnley. Doug went out to Australia as well, and Doug and Mike Hickman ended up coaching together. Doug had come back to England to look for players. Now, unbeknownst to me, when I was Blackpool, Doug was the coach at Rochdale, and he tried to sign me from Blackpool, but Rochdale didn’t have the transfer fee. And he recommended me to Torquay. So, Doug actually knew who I was, but I never knew any of that whatsoever. So now he’s gone to Australia, Mike Hickman, the assistant coach at Torquay has gone to Australia, they’ve linked up, gone back to England, and gone ‘who can we think about coming out here? Oh, we remember Tom Sermanni.’ And that’s how that all happened. I was about 29 at the time, and the opportunity, it just appealed to me. I thought ‘it’s a chance to go out and play in Australia, do something different.’ So I went out there. But I didn’t go out with the intention of staying. I just went out with the intention of maybe playing one, two, three seasons or whatever. So Doug took me out to a club called Marconi, an Italian club, the following year he moved to a club in Canberra, so I moved with him to Canberra, and then went back and forward for two or three years, and ended up just falling into life in Australia.”
Marconi were a club that represented Italian immigrants and their descendents in Australia, and indeed at the time, Australian soccer was mostly sustained by the country’s immigrant communities. Teams would spring up to represent different ethnic groups – no prizes for guessing where Canberra Croatia derived most of its support from. When the A-League launched in 2005, it consciously attempted to distance itself from the supposed stigma of being an ‘ethnic game,’ and admitted new or rebranded teams to the league, with more generic, inclusive sounding names like ‘Brisbane Roar’ and ‘Newcastle Jets.’ Sermanni acknowledges the logic behind doing this, but points out “the ethnic clubs were the lifeblood of football, and the passion of football in Australia. And the ethnic diversity, I believe, helped contribute to that golden era of Australian footballers – Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, etc.”
As he alludes to, life in Australia suited Sermanni. “I suppose the lifestyle was better. Sunshine – sunshine! And I enjoyed the football. It was a blend, it wasn’t quite as physical as the Scottish and English game at that time, and that suited me. You were allowed to play a little bit more. And I sort of settled into the lifestyle, and ended up staying there.”
The Olympic Experience
With his playing career winding down, he made a smooth transition into coaching as player-manager of Canberra Croatia, and then in 1991 managed to land a job with the Australian Institute of Sport, a government funded body designed to develop elite Australian athletes across a variety of disciplines. He worked alongside the men’s U20 national team, and also took leave to help out Sydney Olympic (Greek) as their interim manager for six months.
In 1993, Sydney was awarded the 2000 Olympic Games. The upcoming 1996 games would be the first to feature a women’s football tournament. Australia realised it needed to try and get a decent team together ready for the edition on their home turf. Tom takes up the tale: “All of a sudden, women’s football, which was separate from men’s football in those days, got a million dollars in government funding, geared towards the Sydney Olympics. So, at that stage, women’s football in Australia, the players literally had to pay their own way. Any time they played a game you had to pay your way to wherever the game was. They played two internationals a year, perhaps, and so it was very much an amateur organisation run by really passionate, dedicated people, and players who played for the love of the game. Overnight, it became a sport that was getting about a million dollars a year. It was going to be funded by the Australian Institute of Sport. So, I was approached to basically a start a program… women’s football had no profile whatsoever at that stage. So it was, I mean, a lot of people questioned why I did it, and a lot of people shook their heads a little bit when I went into it, but I just felt there was real potential in the job. It really appealed to me. And by no plan or no thought, my career’s kind of gone in that direction. I’ve taken opportunities that have just appealed to me. And that was one of them.”
The sheer vastness of this remit – ‘hi, would you fancy building a team basically from scratch that can be competitive at the most prestigious sporting event in the history of the world in seven years time?’ – would have actively repelled a lot of people. Sermanni looked at it differently. “You rarely get a chance to be in with something at the start, and set it up and run with it and control it, and particularly when it’s being set up and funded by the government. You’re not getting emotional football decisions, you’re getting logical decisions based on what’s in the best interest of the sport itself and the program.”
As it happened, Sermanni left the Australian women’s team to coach at Japanese men’s club Sanfrecce Hiroshima in 1997 (“the quality of the Japanese organisation, the resources, the way they did things, it was phenomenal, a great set up”) and so didn’t get to see the Olympic project through to his conclusion.
He did, however, steer the Matildas to their first FIFA Women’s World Cup. Australia would beat both New Zealand and Papua New Guinea to qualify for only the second edition of the tournament in 1995, having lost out to the former in qualification for the inaugural World Cup in 1991. It was a chastening experience for Australia at the tournament itself, losing all three games, but it was an accomplishment to even be there. Sermanni doesn’t recall a tournament as shiny and slick as the modern World Cups are, however: “1995, we had 14 bits of equipment we used to take off the aeroplane, for the team. And in that equipment, there’d have been two ball bags, a couple of cardboard boxes, odds and sods of stuff. Then you fast forward to 2019, and some teams have got 60 pieces of team gear. Not New Zealand, we’ve probably got more like 30 to 35. The organisation is so much slicker, if you like. But also the differences in staffing. There was no video analysis in 1995, there was no psychologist in 1995. There was no sports science guy in 1995. There was a bare core of staff. I think we did take a nutritionist with us because the Australian Institute of Sport paid for that. So we had a nutritionist who looked after the meals. But nothing compared to how teams travel today. And the media scrutiny… I don’t even know if the games were televised in 1995. You played at smaller stadiums. I wouldn’t say ‘no crowds,’ but some of the games only had a few hundred people. Very different.”
Soccer Journeyman
After leaving Sanfrecce Hiroshima, Sermanni’s globe trotting really began to take off. He bounced between the hemispheres, coaching in the USA with women’s teams in San Jose and New York, and briefly accepting employment back in Australia with Westfields Sports High School, another government-funded body for developing teenagers who look like they might be able to play a bit one day. He had a cup of coffee in Malaysia, as director of coaching for Sarawak.
In 2005, he resumed coaching the Australian women’s football team. The cliché in football is that you should never go back, but in terms of results on the field, Sermanni’s second stint in charge was far more successful than his first. In 2007, he guided the Matildas to the knockout stages of the FIFA Women’s World Cup for the first time in the nation’s history, where they were beaten 3-2 by eventual runners up Brazil in a thrilling quarter-final. They again made the quarter finals in 2011. In 2010, they won their first AFC Asian Women’s Cup at the third attempt, beating North Korea on penalties in the final.
This success didn’t go unnoticed. In October 2012, Tom Sermanni was appointed manager of the US Women’s National Team. It goes without saying that this was quite a big deal. The United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) has been one of the top two women’s teams in the world from the first day that FIFA started keeping track of these things. There is no job in women’s football that comes with higher expectations. But if there’s one thing that comes across about Tom in our conversation, it’s that he’s a pretty chilled guy.
“There was considerably more media scrutiny because at that particular time, and probably now, the female team were better known than the men’s team in the US. So you had that, and you had the weight of expectations. But you also had the best team! People used to say to me ‘do you feel pressure in the dugout with the U.S. team?’ and I’d say ‘no, I used to feel considerably more pressure when I was on the opposition bench.'”
Sermanni oversaw 16 matches in his first full year with the USA, going unbeaten with 13 victories. They also won the prestigious Algarve Cup for the ninth time, beating defending champions Germany 2-0 in the final. 2014, however, was a year indicative of the exacting standards demanded by the best team in the world. The US returned to the Algarve Cup and crashed out winless at the group stages, finishing a meagre 7th after a 3-0 win in a play-off against their dear, dear pals North Korea. Sermanni stuck around for a friendly win over China in April 2014, but was then fired. He doesn’t express a hint of regret about the way things turned out for him, save for a brief allusion to not having quite the same level of autonomy as coach that he’d been used to back in Australia.
I was interested in Sermanni’s thoughts on the role the USWNT plays in women’s football, as someone who has coached them, and led teams against them. There is no easy comparison to their dominance in women’s football from the men’s game – maybe Spain from 2008-2012, except instead of lasting for five years, it just kept going, and also began at the dawn of men’s football itself. So how, for example, do you set a team up to play against opposition like that?
“That’s a really good question… Over the two and a half years I had in the job (his first stint with Australia), we probably played the US six times during that period, and we were very much the underdogs. I think the first two games were like 5-1, 4-0, and then we kind of clawed it back, and the last two games we played before the Olympics we only lost 2-1 and 2-1. But we literally set up in a system that Jose Mourinho would have been proud of. We basically parked the bus and said ‘come and break us down.’ And the thing with Aussies, and the Kiwis are a bit the same, is that players don’t back down. They give it a go. When I went back into the job in 2005, the Australian team had moved on a bit, so when we played them between 2005 and 2012, we actually more often than not went out to play how we wanted to play. The really interesting thing was, when I got the US job, the media guy was a guy called Aaron Heifetz, he’s been there like 30 years, a great guy. And one of the first things he said to me was ‘I used to hate when we played Australia. Because Australia were the only team who thought they could beat us!’ So my second spell when I had the Matildas, when we played the US, we actually just went out and played how we wanted to play. And we had a couple of draws against them, a couple of really narrow defeats. New Zealand, a different kettle of fish now, because the US have gone on to another level. So when we play them, we’ll go back to circa 1994 Australia, and basically set up our defensive structure and focus on that.”
Managing in New Zealand
As he alluded to there, Sermanni is now back in Oceania, as head coach of the New Zealand Women’s team. The New Zealand job is a fascinating and strange one, as Sermanni explains. “Firstly, you’ve got a country where there’s less than five million people, but still a very strong sporting country, so you’ve got multiple sports. In the women’s space you’ve got netball as a huge sport, you’ve now got rugby sevens and rugby union generally as a sport. You’ve got a host of individual sports. You’ve got a very small playing base, you’ve still got a reasonable sized country which that playing base is stretched out across, and you’ve got even greater geographical isolation than Australia. So there are some really significant challenges. And then you have a pro and a con with being the dominant team in Oceania. You then have the luxury or the advantage of qualifying for all the major tournaments, the Olympics, the World Cups, the U20s, U17s. The challenge within that is that the cost of putting all those teams into competition is really restrictive, because there’s no revenue from an U17s, U20s, there’s no revenue from the Olympics. There’s some revenue now from the World Cup, but not a significant amount. And then even though the qualification process is generally straight forward, the cost of qualification is still quite significant because you have to… you could be in New Zealand, you might be in Tahiti, New Caledonia, Samoa. So we qualified for the World Cup in New Caledonia. It’s not a cheap exercise. So the key challenge then becomes your preparation. You can qualify for tournaments, but to get preparation, particularly for your underage teams, is almost impossible. So that then impacts your development. You’re not really having a development program. What you’re having is a group of players who train together, qualifies, goes to tournaments, and then finishes. So, you have to do everything the best way you can, with the process you’ve got and the other challenges you’ve got. That’s what we’re trying to do now, we’re trying to put things in place for the best way to develop talent considering the challenges we have.”
Within those restrictions, Sermanni is trying to promote an ambitious, but pragmatic version for the development of New Zealand women’s football. “Because New Zealand qualifies for all these tournaments, sometimes people have certain expectations that are sometimes unrealistic. And these are some of the things that we’re actually discussing at the moment, to say ‘OK, what do we actually want to be about, how do we want to develop players, what do you think we should actually be able to achieve?’ I mean, the key thing I always come back to is we want to try and put out a team that’s competitive. With the resources that are being put in from Europe, with South America begin to come alive in the game, that in itself multiplies the challenges for a country like New Zealand. So what we have to do is put strategies in place for us to better develop players, and then look for pathways for those players, to go to then develop further. At the moment, some of the things we’re trying to do… the coaches that coach our U20s, our U17s, we’re trying to get our better younger players, where possible, into professional environments overseas. So what we want to try and do is really double down on our development at a younger age group, so we’re actually having quality development at younger ages to produce better players, and then when they get a little older, start to encourage most of them to play overseas. And the reality is, most if not all of our national players do play overseas. And that’s the pathway that we have to go down, and try our best to develop key players. But it depends on what you want to do… sorry, I’m rambling on a little bit! (I obviously encouraged him to continue to ramble). So the key thing for elite development is you have to look at individual players. Elite development’s not about teams. The key thing in elite development is how can we best identify and develop elite talent, and how can we, in amongst that, start to develop more special players. Players that are more talented. That’s the key challenges that we’ve got. In the modern day game, there’s an emphasis on structure and system that comes in at a younger age group, and that often takes away from the intuitive players that can make a difference in teams. So we’ve got to try and develop that kind of system, or start to look at being able to do that, and at the same time continue to develop and stress the key qualities that Kiwis and Australians have, which are the competitiveness, the roll up the sleeves kind of attitude. We need to get a bit of a balance. And therein lies some of the key challenges… some of this stuff just makes sense in my head!”
The part of this development plan that I thought was most surprising was his determination that players should leave New Zealand and pursue their careers overseas. How does that goal, understandable though it is, coexist with the desire his bosses at New Zealand Football must have to develop the domestic women’s scene?
“I had the same challenge in Australia. That’s what we have the challenge with, the relationship with the national team and the league, and club football. Because people who work in club football are putting their passion, their time, their energy and effort into the game, and then you see people like me coming along taking players and encouraging them to go play for West Ham or Tottenham or somebody else. Or, even more so domestically, we say ‘we need players to come into our program, because yours is not at a level to develop these players to the level we need, elite players. So that is always a challenge. I think there are a couple of things that need to be done in relation to that. First of all, the national federation need to say ‘this is what we want for our elite players, this is the path we’re going down.’ And then the other key thing is the communication, and how that message comes across, and also to, kind of, like, try and ensure that everyone feels part of the system. You can have the view that ‘they’re stealing our players!’ But we’re not actually. You’re giving your players so much, and we’re just taking them on to the next step. And you’re all part of that process. But that process is not going to be successful without the end bit that we’re trying to put on it. And we’re just really trying to get that message across. It’s funny enough because I’ve just got back from New Zealand, and we’ve just had meetings with several of the clubs from Auckland. A lot of it is about communication, keeping people in the loop, it’s about explaining what you’re trying to do, and it’s about trying to ensure that everyone feels part of the development of the game. And that’s one of the critical things you need to do.”
Sermanni on coaching
With everything that Sermanni has seen and done in his career, he’s in a position to offer insights that few other coaches are. One thing I was curious about, as someone who has held serious positions in both men’s and women’s football, was how much his coaching methods needed to be adapted between the two. The answer, it turned out, was ‘not a whole lot.’ “I don’t coach females any differently, today or back then, than I coach males. The only difference is, your communication, your management has to be slightly different. You have to be more aware of how you communicate. But your actual expectations, standards, your coaching, your tactics etc, none of that is really different. And I think it fits some personalities more than others. I think the biggest thing with females – you need to communicate more, and your communication needs to be more consistent. Females listen better, absorb information better than men, so they don’t deal as well with mixed messages, they don’t deal better with Jekyll and Hyde kind of characters. They don’t mind if you’re Jekyll, and they don’t mind if you’re Hyde! So there’s some slight, subtle differences there. And I put it down to just the basic communication, not only in football but in life, the basic differences when you communicate male-to-female and male-to-male. There’s just differences in how you communicate. So that’s a little bit different. Outside of that, it’s all the same.”
Sermanni has been involved in football, in some capacity, since the 1970s. He has been a coach since the tail end of the 1980s, and has consistently worked at a competitive level in the game, including a clutch of elite jobs in women’s football. The overwhelming majority of coaches at the cutting edge of their profession when he began his career in the field have since faded from relevance, either long retired, or without any kind of track record in the modern game. How has Sermanni defied the passing of time, and the possibility of a game that has changed exponentially in his lifetime from passing him by?
“It’s interesting. I think I’ve probably learned more about coaching and managing in the last ten years than I did in the fifteen, twenty years before that. I think it’s being able to adjust to what you need to adjust to. Saying that, I think some coaches get set in their ways, and have a method of doing things, and don’t change that method, and are still successful, with longevity, doing that. And they tend to have very similar kind of jobs, if you know what I mean. Say, a Tony Pulis, Neil Warnock. My path has been slightly different in that I’ve done a whole variety, men’s, women’s, youth, senior, international, clubs, etc. My experiences have been slightly different. I think it’s just… it’s a cliché, isn’t it, that you never stop learning, but you actually don’t want to stop learning, or challenging yourself, finding ways to do things. In some ways I don’t think your management style necessarily changes too much, because your personality is your personality. So, I couldn’t change into an Alex Ferguson. That’s a totally different personality. I couldn’t turn into a Warnock or a Tony Pulis, they’ve got so many other different qualities that I just simply don’t have. So you need to be able to adjust to the situation, while still being yourself, if that makes sense. But at the same time, you’ve still got to move on with things as they move on, and players are a bit different today. Your communication’s a bit different. You can’t talk to people the same way that managers could talk to people thirty years ago. You need to keep relevant, if that’s the right word. The thing I love about following the game, and being able to do it at my age, is just being in amongst young people. That kind of stimulates you. And I think you also want the challenge of trying to do different things, whether that’s tactical, or – I’ve got a different challenge at New Zealand than I had at the US team, and things like that. So you have to adjust what you do in relation to those differences.”
Another thing I am always curious to quiz coaches on is the tactical side of the game, on the basis that not a single brain cell of mine is ideally suited to doing in depth analysis of the mechanics of football matches. I was curious as to how a coach like Sermanni distills all the things that go on in a football game, and is able to adapt how he sets up his teams as a result, both in preparation for a match, and on the fly during it.
“There’s a couple of things. I think if you’re doing tactical stuff when you’re watching other teams, you’re not necessarily watching live. Eventually, what you tend to see is tendencies if that makes sense. Some teams are easier because they’ve got really specific ways of playing, other teams are a little bit more difficult because they’re a bit more fluid and, not disorganised, but they’re not as structured, so it’s a bit more difficult. So when you’ve got time to study, that’s when you tend to think. And then what I tend to do is look at areas where I think I can exploit the opposition, and you need to be really careful of how they can exploit you. And that’s probably simplistically how I work it out. When I’m watching it life it’s very different, and to be honest sometimes you don’t see the picture. You become the Monday morning quarterback where you think ‘I should have made that change instead of making this change.’ I think just the key thing in the game today is to not get too caught up in the emotion of it. So when you’re watching the game live and your team’s playing, it’s so easy to get caught up in the emotion of the game, based on your players doing dumb things at times, based on things not working out, but there are times I’ve watched games and I’ve found it really hard to see a specific way of making a change that’s going to make a difference. But trying to watch the game from a not too emotional perspective is one of the key things.”
And with that said, how much of a difference is a manager, or head coach, actually able to make to the minutiae of the game? A 2016 article in the Financial Times by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski asserted that there was a 90% correlation between a club’s wage bill and its league position, while in 2019 The Economist claimed to be able to predict league tables within an eight point margin of error based solely on player stats from the FIFA video games. Managers do make a difference, both publications agreed, but only minimally so. So what impact does Sermanni think he is having on his teams game to game, particularly since so much of his recent work is with international sides?
“That’s quite a complex question, that one. One of my mates says ‘if you want to be the best coach, sign the best players,’ and there’s an element of truth to that. I think the key thing that you can do as a coach is to get the best out of the players that you’ve got. That’s probably the thing you can do most of, and that comes down to football, but also management of the team. So it’s a combination. It’s not just about on the field, and the tactics, it’s about how you manage that group of players that you’ve got. So I think the most successful people in the game have got a skill of both management and soccer coaching. And I would say probably the management is more important than the soccer coaching bit, because most guys in the game have got the soccer coaching bit. So I think it’s that ability to get the best out of your team, and that is… the answer to that question could be endless, the combination of getting the players to believe in what you’re doing, getting the players to buy into the tactical system that you’re doing, getting the best out of individual players, getting the best out of the group… managing when things are going well is really quite easy; but managing when things aren’t going well, which is becoming much much more of a challenge today because people want instant success… so you might make a couple of changes in a game, you might make a change that looks logical and makes sense, but backfires. So I don’t know about the studies, they could well be accurate.”
Career reflections
In 2014, Tom Sermanni was inducted into the Football Federation Australia Hall of Fame, only the third non-native Australian to achieve this. Personal honours of this magnitude would of course be very gratifying for Sermanni, but it also gave him an opportunity to reflect on the unlikely path his career had taken him.
“I had no expectation of being inducted. It was a very very pleasant surprise. So I feel honoured, I suppose is the word – that’s maybe a bit strong, maybe sounds a bit naff. You kind of feel honoured because I certainly don’t feel that I’ve had all these achievements, I’ve just kind of been a coach. Do you know what I mean? And as a coach I’ve had a career probably like the majority of coaches, where I’ve had some highs and had some lows, had some successes and had some failures. Ups and downs. Unless you’re an Alex Ferguson or an Arsène Wenger, the few people that have had significant success, and even they’ve had some failures along the way. Everybody else is kind of this middle bracket where you go in and try and do the job the best you can, improve the players that you’re with at the time so when you leave you’ve left it in a better spot… probably the thing that I would say, if I was to sum up my coaching career and say what I think’s been successful, it’s that I’ve been fortunate enough to have longevity. I’ve been coaching since 31, 32 as a player coach, and I’m still employed at 66, and apart from maybe a year in that time, I’ve always been employed in some capacity. So I would say that would be a measure of success. And some of that’s perhaps been good fortune.”
There is no way around the fact that Sermanni is coming to the end of his remarkable journey in football. He will be 67 on the 1 July, 69 by the time the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup comes round, which New Zealand are co-hosting. But there are examples of managers raging against the dying of the light into their 70s – former Inter Milan and Shakhtar Donetsk manager Mircea Lucescu just led Dynamo Kiev to their first league title in five years at the age of 75. And Sermanni’s attitude towards football seems well geared towards him being perfectly happy participating in the sport in any suitable role, for as long as he possibly can.
“It’s interesting, I… I see people who are much more passionate about football than I think I am. Now, my wife will say ‘erm, no.’ Because I’m immersed in it 24/7, I’ve got my wee local club that I help out at, so I’ve come back tonight to do this interview from there. I coached my wife’s bosses over 35s team last night, went down and did a session with them. So I’m immersed in it. But what I’ve started to do as I’ve got older is actually enjoy the stuff around the football, because I’ve reached the age where I’m not chasing a career, if that makes sense. So, I actually enjoy my interactions around football now, and my involvement in football, more than I did when it was just my job, and was just on it 24/7. And the second thing that I feel, is that as a coach, you never know what your longevity in the game is going to be. You have absolutely no idea when you go into the job whether you’re going to be in it ten minutes, ten years, or until the end of your life, so I have a very firm view now that if coaching finishes for me tomorrow, I’ll have had the great pleasure of being involved in the game, and still being involved in the game for pure enjoyment. So that’s that thing. The other thing is that when I look back at the game, when you think about whether I’ve had a successful career, I don’t look back and think ‘oh I had that team and we won that, had that team and we won that,’ I look back at the game, and the experiences that it’s given me, and the people that I’ve met through the game. Like… I know people everywhere in the world, now. And just those connections that it’s given me, and that’s the great thing about the game. Now I think other sports have kind of got that, but football has got it on a global basis like no other sport has. Football’s got it on a tribal basis like no other sport has. And football’s got the connection into communities like no other sport has. I think that is the difference between football and other sport.”
Sermanni has been to five World Cups, won trophies at different ends of the earth, and been inducted into a Hall of Fame, so his belief that football can represent something more important than material success is heartening. If someone like him can last 40 years in football and come out with the understanding that it’s not about the games, but the friends you make along the way, that probably tells us something profound. With the world currently unavoidably closed and stratified, it was a particular pleasure to be able to speak to Tom. He’s walking proof of the inherent worthwhileness of adventure.
Read more of Jack Stevenson’s work over on Football vs Oblivion.