Kieran McKenna will lead Ipswich Town on their return to the Premier League. Photo: PA/Zach Goodwin
Loyalty: This is a concept so worn out in football that it is practically unnecessary. Leicester City barely had a month to enjoy their return to the Premier League, with Enzo Maresca missing out on the chance to reap the rewards of his labors and instead jumping into Todd Boehly's clown car at Chelsea. How exciting it was to learn that Kieran McKenna, looking at the maelstrom of Manchester United and the brain trust at Stamford Bridge, who signed Mikhail Mudrik to a contract until 2031, decided that his interests would be best served at Ipswich.McKenna is only 38, and there are high-profile examples of managers for whom the move to a Champions League-chasing club came too soon. Frank Lampard made himself virtually unusable at this level after trying and failing twice at Chelsea before he turned 45. Steven Gerrard imagined he was making his dream move when he moved to Aston Villa from Rangers at 41, but must now wonder, on his richly rewarded desert sinecure in Dammam, whether he made a mistake.
Given that Sir Alex Ferguson was 44 when he was appointed to United, McKenna knows time is on his side. His stated rationale for staying at Portman Road is sound: he feels the stability of the environment and is hungry for the joy of leading Ipswich to their first top-flight game since 2002 in August. even his connection with United, where he seems destined to eventually return after his time in the academy and as Jose Mourinho's assistant.
McKenna's decision to stay is straight out of Xabi Alonso's playbook. The Bayer Leverkusen architect, who led the club to their first Bundesliga title in an unbeaten campaign as well as a German Cup triumph, raised eyebrows when he decided to reject offers from Liverpool in favor of another year in North Rhine-Westphalia. It turned the conventional wisdom that Alonso would be weak-willed with gratitude for his former club's interest, booking a flight to Merseyside faster than he could say “You'll never walk alone” on its head. Avoiding the predictable transition to glamor, he wanted to hone his craft.
McKenna chooses a wiser and more careful path
It’s a reassuringly old-school approach. McKenna and Alonso share a belief that, for all their amazing achievements, they still have much to learn. McKenna has been praised to the skies for winning promotion from the third tier twice in a row, a feat only achieved three times in the Premier League era. Alonso has also risen to demigod status at Leverkusen, leading his team to within a game of invincibility on all fronts. But the pair resist any temptation to be swaggering over the accolades. Both would rather enhance their reputations at bigger clubs than risk them.
For many years, it seemed that such pragmatic thinking had gone out of fashion. Most tenacious young managers only need restless ambition. In 2011, Andre Villas-Boas, at 33, looked incredibly young to secure a three-year contract with Chelsea. And so it turned out: eight months later he was fired. Although he is now comfortably settled as Porto's president, it is doubtful that his brilliance as a coach will ever be restored. Once celebrated as the youngest coach to win a UEFA title, this mini-Mourinho's time on the touchline fizzled out following Chelsea's experiment with ill-fated spells at Zenit St Petersburg, Shanghai and Marseille.
McKenna is plotting a wiser, more careful path. He had seen from Graham Potter that even a hugely popular manager known for his innovative methods could walk into an impatient club like Chelsea and be spit out in less than a year. For Potter it was a brutal, if hugely lucrative, postscript to his time in Brighton. So McKenna believes there is no reason to risk his important work at Ipswich being forgotten by jumping into the fire at Old Trafford. It's a testament to the astuteness of his judgment, not to mention a nourishing example of how loyalty, even in this most short-term game, lives on.
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