Loyalty: it is a concept so threadbare in football as to be virtually redundant. Leicester City have barely had a month to relish their restoration to the Premier League, with Enzo Maresca passing up the chance to reap the fruits of his labours and instead leaping aboard Todd Boehly’s clown car at Chelsea. How soul-stirring, then, to discover that Kieran McKenna, taking one glance at the Manchester United maelstrom and the Stamford Bridge brain trust who have given Mykhailo Mudryk a contract until 2031, decides that his interests are best served at Ipswich.
McKenna is only 38, and there are high-profile examples of managers for whom the jump to a Champions League-chasing club has come too soon. Frank Lampard has rendered himself all but unemployable at this level after trying and failing at Chelsea twice before turning 45. Steven Gerrard imagined he was making his dream move when he joined Aston Villa from Rangers at 41 but must now wonder, on his lavishly-rewarded desert sinecure in Dammam, whether he took a wrong turn.
Given Sir Alex Ferguson was 44 when appointed at United, McKenna understands that time is on his side. His stated rationale for staying at Portman Road is sound: he senses the stability of the set-up, and he craves the exhilaration of leading Ipswich out in August for their first top-flight game since 2002. It promises to bring an exhilaration that eclipses even his ties to United, where he seems fated to return eventually after his roles at the academy and as Jose Mourinho’s assistant.
McKenna’s choice to remain is straight out of the Xabi Alonso playbook. The architect of the Bayer Leverkusen miracle, who led the club to a first Bundesliga title in an unbeaten campaign, as well as a German cup triumph, sparked surprise when he opted to spurn Liverpool’s overtures in favour of another year in North Rhine-Westphalia. It turned the received wisdom – that Alonso would be weak-kneed with gratitude at his former club’s interest, booking a flight to Merseyside faster than he could say You’ll Never Walk Alone – on its head. Eschewing the predictable glamour switch, he wanted to hone his craft.
McKenna is plotting a wiser and more cautious path
It is a hearteningly old-school approach. What McKenna and Alonso share is a conviction that, for all their stunning achievements, they still have much to learn. McKenna has been lauded to the skies for engineering two successive promotions from the third tier, a feat only accomplished three times in the Premier League era. Alonso, likewise, has ascended to demigod status at Leverkusen, coming within one game of leading his team to invincibility on every front. But the two are resisting any temptation to be puffed up by the accolades. Both would rather consolidate than gamble their reputations at larger clubs with itchier trigger fingers.
For years, it felt as if this pragmatic thinking had gone out of fashion. For most thrusting young managers, only restless ambition would suffice. In 2011, Andre Villas-Boas looked unfeasibly young, at 33, to be handed a three-year contract at Chelsea. And so it proved: he was sacked within eight months. While he is today comfortably ensconced as president of Porto, it is doubtful as to whether his lustre as a manager has ever recovered. Once celebrated as the youngest manager to win a Uefa title, this mini-Mourinho’s time on the touchline dissolved after the Chelsea experiment with ill-fated spells at Zenit St Petersburg, Shanghai and Marseille.
McKenna is plotting a wiser and more cautious path. He has seen from Graham Potter that even a hugely popular manager, renowned for his innovative methods, can enter an institution as impatient as Chelsea and be spat out in less than a year. For Potter, it was a cruel, if immensely lucrative postscript to his tenure at Brighton. As such, McKenna calculates that there is no reason to risk his momentous deeds at Ipswich being forgotten by leaping into the fire at Old Trafford. It is testament to the shrewdness of his judgment, not to mention a nourishing example of how loyalty, even in this most short-termist of games, lives on.