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Sean Dyche: Football is glossy now, it’s like a sport-panto. We can’t lose sight of the game’s earthiness
Sean Dyche tells Oliver Kay that he worries the game is losing touch with its base but his Burnley side will always play for the badge...
Sometimes Sean Dyche forgets to turn off his mobile phone on match day. It happened the other week. When he looked at it afterwards, he saw he had missed a call from a friend. “A missed call at 3.34pm on a Saturday afternoon,” the Burnley manager says with an incredulous laugh. “I rang him back and said: ‘Just checking you do know I work on Saturday afternoons, don’t you? I’ve been doing it a fair few years now.’ ‘Oh, yeah . . . ’ ”
Dyche might be a hero in Burnley, with his club confounding all expectations by rising to sixth in the Premier League, between Liverpool and Arsenal, but his friends back home in Kettering would never let him get too big for his boots. “I grew up with a group of mates I’ve known since we were five,” he says, “and we all meet up regularly and go for an Indian night, go for a pint and sit around and tell all the old stories we’ve told at least 10,000 times, which have all been stretched a bit over the years so that we were all a bit naughtier than we really were. Utter nonsense, of course, but I love all that. It breaks up the emotion, the stress. It brings it back to reality.”
Dyche is big on reality — even if his mission at Burnley is to defy it. Asked this week about the possibility of a top-four finish, he said that “football is about reality but also about dreams”. That is not the contradiction it might sound like; it is by keeping their feet on the ground, by being the humblest and most hard-working of teams, that Burnley have managed to soar to heights that nobody at Turf Moor had ever imagined.
Midway through an hour in his invigorating company at the club’s training ground, Dyche is talking about the “values” that he feels have underpinned his team’s progress. “A strong work ethic, passion, pride, care, attention, honesty, respect,” he says. “They are the bedrock and then, on top of that, you apply all the modern thinking — the sports science, the analysis, the data, the GPS and so on. We try to do as many modern-thinking things as we can while not losing sight of the values — the old-fashioned values, as I call them, but nowadays, in a society where the fabric is sometimes at full stretch, on and off the pitch, those values are more important than ever.”
What does he mean by the fabric being at full stretch? “The morals of the game on the pitch, the morals of the game off the pitch,” he says. “The reality of the game is diminished, I think. Logically, you look at what is expected of every club — beautiful football, winning things, young players in the team, good buying and selling, low wage bill, a cheap season ticket, the best view, the best pies, a parking space right outside the ground — and it’s very hard to deliver all of that. It’s a stretch. Then when clubs aren’t able to deliver that, it goes into blame culture and it sets this big thing in motion and it’s about how you can retrieve it.
“Football is . . . in a strange position now. The only real bit is on the pitch or on the training ground. There’s so much around the game now. It’s like a strange kind of . . . sport-panto. I don’t know how to describe it.”
A bit like The Truman Show? “Not quite there, but that kind of thing,” he says. “I don’t know how to put it. ‘The show’ is what they call it in America, isn’t it? Well, there’s the ‘show’ aspect of football and then there’s the reality. Because it’s not a show — it’s a sport and a business — but what is around it is like a show. The bit on the pitch is the reality-bound part. It has all got a bit . . . glossy, a bit formatted, a bit smooth.
“It’s changing into something different. Of course it will do over time, because life goes forward, but it’s getting to the point where there is not the same drive to be the best you can be. It’s agents, boot deals and glossiness — and in some cases that’s players who haven’t kicked a ball in a match with any meaning. And we have to be careful with that. We can’t lose sight of the . . . earthiness.
“It’s a sport that is to be enjoyed not just for the glossiness, but for teamship, for people giving everything to the cause, for feeling part of something, for being part of a tribe of people who care about one situation. Do you know what I mean? The game has got to be careful that it doesn’t go so glossy and beautiful and manufactured that it loses that connection. I’m not saying it’s at that point, but it’s on the stretch a little bit. It feels like the demand for the glossiness is higher than the demand for the earthiness —– and the earthiness, if we all cast our minds back, is about going to see your local team, wishing you were out there, seeing those lads giving everything for the badge.”
That is precisely what Burnley’s players do. The big question is about what is driving them to perform in a way that other teams, with more talented players and certainly with bigger budgets, do not. What drives Ben Mee and James Tarkowski to defend with a resilience and a doggedness that seems so rare these days? What does Dyche regard as his or his staff’s greatest strength? “We’re good at the truth,” he says. “We’re good at being honest with players in the work we do. They get honesty about themselves, about the team, about the good and bad of what might be happening to them and about reinforcing that environment, building and maintaining a culture where people want to play, want to work and want to enjoy what goes on.
“These are words that people often throw around in football — ‘We need a better culture, a better environment’ — as if it’s easy. It’s not. We started this process five years ago. It takes time. Not many people in football get time. People talk about ‘teamship’ and ‘real-team thinking’. These things don’t happen overnight. They take a lot of time, a lot of work. We put the foundations down here five years ago and we’re still working on it.”
That “teamship” appears to be Burnley’s greatest strength. It is certainly not the offensive side of their game; one curiosity of their rise is that it has come despite them scoring 16 goals in 17 games. Their playing style is not to every taste — their pass completion rate, of 71.4 per cent, is the lowest in the Premier League — and most of the analytical models suggest they are riding their luck, but if the team is built on resilience, honesty and hard work, then it stands to reason that they will have more “luck” than those teams that are more glossy than earthy. It is not good fortune, after all, that has led them to win more headers and block more shots than any other top-flight team this season or last.
“If we’re playing direct football, by the way, how come my two centre halves have headed more balls than anyone else in the division?” Dyche asks. “The stats do throw up some twists in perception. But I’m not interested in perception.”
How does Dyche believe he is perceived? “I couldn’t care less,” he says. “I’m interested in winning, not branding. You could drive yourself mad in this business, worrying about what people think of you. If you’re not careful, you can get your opinion swerved by outside influences. That’s why I don’t bother with it — not because I’m trying to sound strong and say: ‘I don’t care.’ I just look at things factually. You can please some of the people some of the time. You can’t please all the people all the time. Not everyone can like you. That would be against the rules of nature.”
For all that, Dyche’s work is being praised like never before. There was no shortage of people proposing him as the ideal candidate to fill the recent vacancy at Everton before Sam Allardyce was appointed. Did Everton get in touch? “No.” Have any other clubs, such as Crystal Palace, been in touch? “No.” Has he had conversations with any other clubs? “No.” Is that disappointing? “No.”
Where does he see himself in five years? Managing another club? Or England, perhaps? “I’ve been linked with this job or that job for three of the five years I’ve been here and the truth is that I enjoy the challenge here,” he says. “I’m only 46. It’s a really good challenge here and there are more challenges for us to go towards. There’s always this thing in football where you hear: ‘Oh, he’s been there too long.’ Sorry, what? How does that work? I’m in a very healthy point of my career, where I haven’t got every answer — you never do in football and I certainly don’t — but I’m learning all the time, my staff are learning all the time, the players are learning all the time and it’s a really healthy environment to be in. And football is a very tough business. You can’t say: ‘I’m at A and I’m going to go to Z and I’m going to go straight through the alphabet to get there.’ Football just doesn’t work like that. Another thing you hear bandied around about myself and Eddie [Howe, the Bournemouth manager] and others is, ‘Well, he hasn’t really got the experience, has he?’ Oh really? I would like someone to explain that. I’ve been hired, fired, hired again, promoted, relegated, promoted again, stayed in the Premier League, working hard to continue to improve now, built a training ground, played a part in building up the club, involved in the club’s community work, know about the office work, know about training grounds. It’s not a gripe, but if that’s not experience, I don’t know how you’re meant to gain it. ‘Yeah, but apart from that . . . ’ ”
He is a funny guy. Burnley’s players talk of it being a serious workplace, but also a happy one. “You need that balance,” Dyche says. “That child-like thrill of playing football has to remain. It just has to be in a more focused, more professional manner. There is that professional demand, but, like any workplace, they have to enjoy what they’re doing. They have to enjoy coming in — literally, to the point of playing with a smile. They have to have an inner glow.”
Burnley’s players seem to radiate that at the moment. So too do their supporters. Dyche wants them all to enjoy the ride. Who knows where it ends?
