How Mumbai City's young coach is building a team of young stars'

“I’ve always kept myself as occupied here as I can,” Des Buckingham, pointing a finger to his head, says.

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It’s typical of a man on the move, like the Mumbai City FC head coach has always been. The Englishman has top-level managerial experience in three different countries after spending a decade in Oxford, is a UEFA/OFC coach educator, holds a Master’s degree in Advanced Performance Football Coaching and has a professional pilot’s license. All of that before celebrating his 37th birthday a few days ago.

At an age when most footballers tend to begin their coaching journey, Buckingham is into his 20th season as a full-time coach, leading Mumbai City’s Indian Super League title defence this term (they are currently fifth in the table).

“Although I’m still young, I have a lot of coaching experience that people generally wouldn’t have in our world at my age,” he says.

It’s got a lot to do with an unusually early start. A goalkeeper in the youth teams of Reading and Oxford United, Buckingham was 18 when he acquired a coaching license and dived into professional coaching at Oxford United. 

Buckingham spent the next decade in Oxford teaching during the day and coaching the academy kids in the evening, gradually progressing through the age-group ladder. 

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“In my final two years, I was brought into the first team under Chris Wilder (former Oxford United head coach). I shared a journey with a lot of players in the club, and was fortunate to watch from the bench three players with whom I’d started off my coaching journey make their first-team debut,” Buckingham says.

At 29, Buckingham decided to expand his horizons and joined Wellington Phoenix, a New Zealand club which competes in Australia's A-League, as an assistant coach in 2015. After a couple of highly productive years at the club (he also briefly went to Stoke City for a year), Buckingham was handed charge of the country’s national youth teams. It’s where his skills of nurturing and developing young talent came to the fore. 

New Zealand reached the Round of 16 of the 2019 FIFA U-20 World Cup—their best-ever showing at any men's FIFA event—beating sides like Norway that had a certain Erling Haaland in the ranks. The country's U-23 team also clinched the OFC U-23 Championship in 2019 to earn a berth at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. 

However, more than these impressive outcomes under him, Buckingham is proud of being the facilitator—as he calls it—of a cultural shift in the country’s footballing ecosystem. 

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“We changed the style of football and the perception of what New Zealand footballers were capable of doing; we had just three professional players in that World Cup team. The other side was we engaged in cultural practices throughout the Indigenous and Maori people in New Zealand, and brought that into a football context. That gave a real deeper sense and meaning at wearing the badge. It was a built from ground up,” he says.

Such was his impact in New Zealand that when his contract wasn’t extended before the delayed Tokyo Games, the youth players wrote to the federation requesting for Buckingham to stay. “I still struggle to put that into words,” he says. 

“You hear a lot about players trying to get rid of a coach, but you very rarely hear about players trying to keep a coach. The one thing that showed is that we created an environment where players could speak up.” 

That’s the crux of his coaching philosophy: “empowerment and collaboration, respect and enjoyment”. Buckingham has brought those buzzwords into the Mumbai City setup after being roped in by the City Football Group in 2020 as the assistant coach at Melbourne City.

In a Mumbai squad that has 10 players below age 22, the young coach, with his work with the young footballers in England and New Zealand, felt like the right fit.  

“You have to understand the environment, the culture, the players before you draw comparisons. I’m four months into this, and I’m very excited about the skillsets and potential of the young players we have here,” he says.

Every player in the squad—especially the young ones—has an individual developmental plan charted out by Buckingham and his team, not just till the completion of this ISL but also for the months after that which includes the upcoming AFC Champions League. “We’ve sat with the players several times throughout the season on what they want to do, medium and long term. What I will start to do over the next couple of months is give myself a better understanding of where do they sit within the greater context of their peers,” he says.

It’s perhaps why no panic buttons were pressed when the champions went through a seven-match winless run after a top-of-the-table start to the season. They snapped it with two back-to-back wins this month to return into top-four contention. “We just stuck true to who we were and what we believe in, and remained consistent of what we did on the field and off it,” Buckingham says. 

“It’s about not being too high when we win or too low when we don’t.”

Talk of being too high brings us to Buckingham’s tryst with planes. The curiosity took off in Wellington, where he resided five minutes away from the airport. “I was given a trial flight at a local flying school for 40 minutes. Two years, a hundred flying hours, six theory exams and a flying test later, I passed my pilot’s license,” he says with a smile.

Buckingham is a coach constantly on the lookout for development—of himself and his players. Stuck in the ISL bubble for months while experiencing India “from the car window”, he is now picking up a new language. “I’m trying to learn Spanish. When you look across the world, knowing other languages is important as a coach if you want to stay in front of things.”

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