[LONG READ]: 🇬🇧⚽🏆 Johnny McKinstry: A coach who has experienced many firsts

Moira is a village and civil parish in Northern Ireland where Johnathan 'Johnny' McKinstry was born 34 years ago; he lived there till he was five years old and then his family made the move to the third-largest city in Northern Ireland, Lisburn. 

​"It was good you know, Lisburn is a reasonably well-developed place. It’s not a big city like London or New York if you were to compare it to the bigger countries, I think Lisburn has 150 000 people which on the grand scheme of things isn’t big at all. But when you consider Northern Ireland as a country 1500 000 people which is already 10% of the country, so for Northern Ireland Lisburn would be a bigger place. Yes, it was a good place to grow up in, you definitely were around a lot of people, a lot of things. I know other people I got to know over the years grew up in more rural parts of Northern Ireland, they might have gone to school and only have 5 to 6 classmates, whereas for my entire education I was always in a class with 25 or 30 people. Then there were 5 or 6 classes for every year group, and every year group had about 150 to 200, so I was always around a lot of people growing up."

McKinstry has achieved impressive success in his lifetime and speaking to him, one learns about a person who is strong-willed, hardworking and certainly a risk-taker. You have to admit, it has worked out for him and at such a young age in the game? You have to give credit where its due; and quite frankly one of the most fascinating things is that he did not end up being a prolific footballer and you will get to understand why as his story progresses on his way to being the first Northern Irishman to manage three national teams.

"I grew up playing lots of different sports. It’s funny when you sort of look back like things you’ve looked into like I remember my primary school didn’t have many sports that would compete against other schools, we would compete against other schools in academic things but sport wise it was very internal. I actually remember we must have been in like my final year of primary school. So he must have been like 10 years old, and I remember myself and probably 3 or 4 others of the boys at school were so eager to play and organise football within the school environment. We all played for local club teams but we wanted to play in the school environment and we approached the head of the house and had teams that were divided into 3 houses. 

"Almost like in Harry Potter, the different sort of houses and they compete in these games, that’s a very normal thing for Irish and British schools. So we had these inter-house competitions. Then we approached the headmaster and said we would really like to host a football tournament, we would have been in our final year of primary school and we were given permission to work with some of the teachers to organise a sort of interschool inter-house competition. There were two teams from each of the houses and planned the …. Of the tournament, and that was my memory from primary school because there has never been that before.

"So even at 10/11, we were looking at organising football competitions. Then I went on to high school, Wallace High School in Lisburn and the school didn't play football so they had rugby, hockey and cricket, and I played football for a couple of local clubs in the junior leagues, but I also played rugby for the school. My Saturday mornings were all a bit difficult, if the rugby was at home then I could play both rugby and football one after the other because all the football games were at my side and the rugby games were a distance away. So if I were at school and rugby was a distance away I would be able to go play rugby for the school at 8/9 am and then play football at like 11/11:30," he told The L.A Dosage

It's interesting why he would say 'its a very short story' when he was quizzed about his potential career as a footballer as it is well-known in the football fraternity that most who have gone on to become successful coaches/managers were professional footballers in their heydays, and quite frankly its become the norm to expect that of players when they hang up their boots. McKinstry goes into detail about Northern Ireland not particularly having a professional football league but describes it as more of a semi-professional league and mind you, the pay was not exactly glorious. Perhaps the passion behind it made most go into it and hey, what's better yet than to be proactive on the field and stay out of trouble.

"Yes, it’s a very short story because the professional career is a very short chapter. In Northern Ireland we did not have a professional league, now in the last one or two years, you see some of the clubs go full time. In Northern Ireland, its more of a semi-professional league, and the teams are training 2 times a week and maybe get paid a few $100 a week. If you want to be professional in Northern Ireland you got to be good enough to make the jump, usually its 16/17/18 years of age to make the jump over to either England or Scotland in one of the academy teams or pro teams. There are boys from my hometown who signed for Manchester United, West Brom, and so forth. You know a lot of teams do scout in Northern Ireland but when you look at the numbers of professional footballers, even today its still only around 30 or 40 professional footballers, the rest of them are all semi-professionals.

"So at the age of 16 you know, to be told that I wasn’t good enough, you know I was more than confident that I had a good level of football. But to make that jump still at 16/17 you need to have something special and I wasn’t at that level, and you know I understood the game but it was never one of those things that I could picture. As disappointing as that was I was aware of that, but as I said you know there was always something in me for organising, even looking back I actually even remembered. When I was in primary school for many years, but you know there was always something for organising. I was a captain for high school I was always one of our organisers, you know even some of my coaches over the years hears of my interventions because at the time I was sort of 14/15 and coaches were giving tactical instruction and sometime I would pose questions on “why we doing that”, “would it not be best to play there?”, and that was not just in football it was in rugby as well. I always had that tactical element and so I thought let me give coaching a go, and so I actually started doing coaching with an under 10 football team, and that started that element of me and started at 16 while still playing football, and I enjoyed it. 

"There was an opportunity to do your coaching badges. In Ireland when you 16 you can do your level 1, which is now called your mini soccer leaders award back when I did it, was like your mini-coaching certificate. It was only a one day course, but I went along and did it when I was 16 and I enjoyed it and I got a part-time job for golf coaching, you know a couple of days a week after school sort of 1 hour and 30 minutes, but you get a little bit of money for it, whereas most of my friends were starting their part-time jobs, you know working in a supermarket or cleaning bars. You know my part-time job was coaching young players and earning a little bit of money from that, and it just took off from there, you know I enjoyed it. Clearly, I showed a good capacity for it and people kept encouraging me and kept sort of pushing me forward to do more each time."

We fast track and goes straight to the big questions if you like and for someone who has extensive coaching experience, McKinstry took me through the development and went into detail about the age groups and when coaches can establish what type of player the youngster could end being. To be fair, not everyone can end up being a pro footballer no matter how much they love the game; and so often there are many qualities that are looked for in a player besides their talents and this is what McKinstry had to say and in particular why he changed his opinion over the years.

"That’s a funny question! I probably changed my opinion of that over the years. I think that you know in their late teenage years, that they going to get the opportunity to be professional so I think when a by is 15/16, at that age you can find that they are going to get a pro contract most likely. I think before when they 10/11/12 you can see huge potential, but then so much can happen, so many thing surrounding a player like the family structure, you know the ones that are really supported by their families. You know it's not something that kids can do one their own, it doesn’t matter how talented you are, you have to have someone behind you supporting you, not pushing you all of the time because sometimes you see people have a nagging support structure where they put too much pressure on the child. But I think that really supportive network around the child as a player has a huge influence on whether they can take those steps and like I said when you in an academy structure when you’re 15/16 I think coaches really get to say okay he’ll get the opportunity to be a professional. 

"Why I say the opportunity to be a pro is then a big challenge for a lot of young players when they sign that professional contract. Because a lot of players get to 17/18 and get offered this contract and it doesn’t matter getting big money or small money, but they get offered a contract for 3 or 4 years and they’ve signed up, then they think they’ve made it and their jobs are done because I’m a professional now and I’ll always be a professional. But you can’t imagine getting older, you can’t imagine it ending, and you feel as though you’ve climbed Mount Everest but what don’t realise it, it’s only a base count, and that period between 17 and 21 is such a huge period for footballers that you know, they need to be playing they need to be competing. 

"They kind of have to grow up quickly because all of a sudden when they were 17 they were playing against other 27-year-olds, but now all of a sudden you 20 and you playing against 28-year-olds, and those guys are playing with about 5-10 years of experience of being a pro. So those first 3 years of signing that professional contract is huge for young players so even when at 16 you look at someone and think okay he has got a great opportunity for a good professional career. What happens in the period after immediately signing your contract has a significant bearing because there is a lot of players really in the world who signs their first pro contract, but when you look at their career their after they have a steady decline, and there’s a lot of players who are amazing. I know England there’s a lot of players who sign when they 18 but by the time they are 21 they are done playing semi-professional football because they’ve sort of dropped off the radar," as told to The L.A Dosage

As we were on the topic of development, McKinstry has some experience coaching in Africa namely in Sierra Leone, Rwanda to name a few and I wanted to hear his opinion on our development; where we are lacking, our potential and where we need to change in order for African players to be more successful not only in their countries but also abroad. There is still plenty of talent waiting to be discovered but there is still a limit in resources and education. What needs to be done to improve our talent, nutrition, fitness, skills, you name it.

"Mmm...Even when I worked in Asia as well and in the developing world is generally organised sort of opportunities for young players, not just in football, but in all sports, it's very limited. Not very common for a young footballer in Africa for the first time for them to have had organised quality football coaching when they 16/17/18 years of age. You know a lot of young players at 10/11/12 are not being given the basics of the game, and look there’s a lot to be said, you know there’s a lot of kids who play street games, that we’ve maybe lost in the European context, you know players who have that creativity because they just play, and so its important to find balance. But you know whenI’m sort of working with senior players, and this has been in all the countries I’ve been in and you working with 20/12 and you still talking to them about what foot they should receive the ball on or where their first touch should take them, you know the very building blocks of the game, and I mean these are good players. But they are missing some of the fundamentals of the game.

"They almost succeeding almost in spite of those foundations and you look at them and think “wow if we could put them into the foundations of the game since you were 10 years old," "how good wouldn’t the player could you be”, and that’s a big difference. I always say it’s a lack of proper football education in a lot of developing countries and that understandable because sport in comparison to mainstream education are still having to push very hard to make sure that everyone has access to good quality mainstream education, let alone affording education but I definitely think that’s a big difference. If you look at a player who’s come up through a European academy, his first touch and what he does with that first touch.

"I mean does it take him somewhere, is his first touch beating the opponent, does he know when to receive on his left foot, on his right foot depending on where the defender is. I think for guys who have come through those football academies in Europe they definitely have a higher level. So we start to see some stuff like that happen in our African developing world, but definitely, there needs to be more for where players are exposed to, organised football and quality coaching from a young age and then after that, you can start talking about nutrition and all these other things, but when you start talking about all those other things, they the small margins. Small bargains don’t matter when you haven’t looked after the big bulk of football education."

Remember the headline, mentioning [A coach of many firsts], well this is one of them and it's a big one for McKinstry. Imagine this, he has done his coaching badges and worked with several youth clubs and then in 2013 at the age of 27, he is handed the position of head coach for the Sierra Leone national team. It's impressive what he achieved with this team and the significance of this job putting him on the map for his next jobs to come (later in the story). You will also get to imagine the self-confidence he has when he mentioned that he was not surprised when he got the job after being interviewed for it; he was simply thrilled and ready to hit the ground running.

"It was an important point, and you sort of look back on it, at the time I knew I was something significant. But I don’t think you realise how significant it is, and I’ve said to people in the past, you know people ask me was I surprised to get this job and after having interviewed for it. I wasn’t surprised; I was very pleased, very thrilled. Glad to be given the opportunity, because Sierra Leone, has got significant players, you know you look at the team we had in 2013, we had guys playing in the English premier league, Italian Serie A, major leagues, in the US, we had the Swedish league top goal scorer. So we had a team filled with top professionals, it wasn’t like you were given some small island in the pacific; you were coaching a team that has real talent and had good direction recent years.

"But when I went and sort of interviewed for that, I really did feel that I was well-positioned to have a really positive impact on the team and I felt that I got that across in our meetings when I met with the people from the federation and yes when they rang me an offer you know I was thrilled, but it was something I was ready for. I already had a plan on how we could build that team and you got to remember I’ve been in the country for 3 years coaching and as I watched the players. So I wasn’t coming in blind like some coaches may be applied for the job, and yes it was a significant moment if I’m honest. I always had it in my head that one day I’ll have the opportunity to coach the national team when I was running my academy there, and I didn’t think it would happen quite so early, but you don’t get to pick and choose when things come up we just had to make arrangements to allow me to take that on board."

The fascinating bit about this is that at his age he managed to get through his role like water off a ducks back but hearing how dealt with the day to day pressures, critics along the way and potential self-doubt is rather motivating.

"I think you definitely feel pressure in the sense that you think if you get this wrong you might not get another chance, because in football there’s a remarkable statistics, like 70% of coaches, managers if you will only get one job, and 65% after they lose that first job, they never get a chance to do a second one. So when you go into that environment, and I don’t think this would have mattered if I was 20 or 37, 47, you get handed that first coaching job, knowing the statistics, knowing that if you do bad no one will trust you again, and that came with its pressure that you need to get this right. That pressure can maybe manifest in different ways, I think for some people that might make them cautious, you know don’t make mistakes, play safe. Whereas for me that is just, my personality, but for me, that has another impact, that pressure makes me bold. So I say okay, let’s not play itself, let’s be bold if we think something is a good idea let's go for it. I knew our first game against Tanzania; we gave a 16-year-old his international debut, and everyone thought we were crazy because we were dropping a 30-year-old and replaced him with a 16-year-old. 

"He’s never played for the national team or for a junior national team. But we looked out and we said this is an electric young player, and I played him and he was excellent. So the pressure and being bold enough to say look we need to do things right and the same as everybody else isn’t going to help us move forward, we got to try and be different in a positive way. So yeah there was pressure but I felt he was ready, you know football and footballers are about playing the game. I and the staff just went down to the pitch and do what we do; we know we’ve got good training sessions. We know what we want to do with this team, so let’s go a coach them, let’s go and work with the players and if its good enough quality, the players will respond positively. 

"If it’s not good enough quality, then it is not good enough but I think history now shows that what we did was of good enough quality and the players did respond well. It wasn’t as though you were 27 coaching a team, you know I never had that feeling, maybe in the first 1 or 2 days some players question why they are doing certain things, but they got a very direct and logical answer, the reason we doing ‘aa’ is because of these things, and when it made sense they fell in line and said okay let’s do that. This is because we were confident in what we wanted to do it never became an issue."

McKinstry achieves something remarkable and he takes Sierra Leone to their highest FIFA World Ranking at the time and it seemed like he was on the right track, quite frankly doing something with the team. But what did he do that was so different you might ask?

"It is hard to say what was different from the previous coach, you know you not there with previous people, you only know what you do. I think for us we always just try to make things simple, you know it was very clear, you know I’m a very big student to the game and for coaches, I believe football shouldn’t be a complicated sport, we should have all of the fine details, we should have a look at everything. We should have journals of notes on what we want to do and how we want to do it, and why we want to do it. But then the key to coaching is about bite-size chunks to give the players, so players and getting a very distinct and clear message, and I think that’s what it’s about, the players need to be very very clear on what it is they need to do. So they don’t need to know how the car engine works, they just need to know how to put it in gear."

With every good thing comes a slightly bad thing but in this case, we would call it challenges and this was his first rodeo at an international gig and McKinstry states that the major problem in Sierra Leone was mainly logistics; something coaches don't necessarily have control over and have to go with the flow. 

"I think the biggest challenge in Sierra Leone was logistics, was the planning and organisation which was something that we have done as coaches don’t necessarily have huge control over. Though we can advise and we can direct people, federation and the government on what we want to do. But also we, not the people paying for them, booking airline tickets, booking hotels and things like that, organising those kinds is not part of the coaches range, but those are things that have a significant impact on players. Not just the physical state, but even just their mental state getting given good quality equipment then their mental state is better. So it’s something you try to influence but don’t necessarily have control over, but then it’s equally working when you know that it might not be at the standard you would want it to be.

"It’s also about working with the players to get them psychologically prepared to say in the big picture do these things really matter, more important for your career is that being in a bad mood over poor training kit, or is it going out and performing which helps your career to maybe help you to move to a bigger club. So it’s about directing energy sometimes there’s an old saying ‘don’t argue about a bad rule, what’s the point of arguing about it’. So for us as the players we’ve always had this of let's invest our energy into things we can change and things we can have an impact on, and if there are things we can have an impact on, then let’s just understand them and alliances for them, but let’s not waste energy on them, let's focus our energy on the things we control and that’s really what we try to give across to the players as well."

Eventually, it was time for McKinstry to bid farewell to Sierra Leone and Rwanda was next in the pipeline and it's not surprising that they had deemed fit for the job because he had previously proved himself - a man who gets the job done and produces results.

He said: I applied for it, I saw that it was available and I actually knew my predecessor a little bit, and we met at a FIFA conference, so I was aware that he had taken a different job, and that it was India, and I saw it’s available and thought it was something of interest. I heard good things of the country, in terms of what it was like, and I looked at that and thought okay when you hosting a tournament, chances are that government and sponsors will be quite supportive in terms of the training camps and all the various logistical things that in Sierra Leone had been so difficult. So I thought that the team in Rwanda, don’t have the high profile players of Sierra Leone, but on a logistical level, I think the support structures might be better to push the teams forward, so yeah. I applied for it, we got in touch, we spoke, I interviewed for the position and I was invited out there in 2015."

Rwanda was another great success and McKinstry talks about the vast differences between his time in Sierra Leone and how that inspired him going forward. It feels like he was going from one successful gig to another and more was yet to come by the looks of it. 

"I think in Rwanda, we obviously had a lot more time with the players, we had …when I joined Rwanda, sort of 99% of them were playing in the Rwanda premiere league, hardly any players playing outside, we had 1 in Europe, maybe 2 in Tanzania and 1 in Kenya. So it meant you had more time with them and get that tactical development considerable more. I think, and not just Rwanda but East Africa in general, there is more of young players and people have more experience in formal education, whereas in Sierra Leone not a lot of kids have a formal education and that’s not about being intelligent or not intelligent, but being comfortable with the learning process. So when I can to Rwanda, players were able to take onboard ideas in a much more straightforward way. They could prove more complex ideas, whereas in Sierra Leone we didn’t have the players that long because they were all playing in Europe and also because their formal education wasn’t so extensive, it meant that just their ability as adults to learn was there but it was never as developed as some of the players in. I definitely think the teaching side of coaching was a bit easier in Rwanda, but that was definitely counted by the fact that the players in Sierra Leone had a higher level. So they were very different environments, and different jobs, you know the time we had was different but also the performance level was significantly different as well."

The interview eventually takes a different turn and we look into McKinstry as a coach, basically, we spoke about tactics and how he goes about developing a game plan that will get him the desired results. Well, we all know that's what every coach wants at the end of it all. 

He said: 

"It depends who you coaching, it depends how good you think you are as a team, if you think that you are a weaker team then your game plan is going to be much more heavily based off your opponents. If you have good believe that you are a strong team then your game plan is less based on your opponent. I think with Uganda now, we always talk about how it’s almost like an 80/20 split, its 80% about us and 20% about them. You know we believe we good enough to dictate games, we believe that we the team who should be forcing the issue, we play it at our tempo and so we have a way that we want to play and we work on that. We will have small twigs, we’ll say “okay we’ll play, but this week we’ll play against player A, and instead of going outside, he likes to come inside”.

"So we just got be aware of that, we may be going to ask our midfielder to mend his position ever so slightly. Leave one or 2 metres off to the side instead of being so central, but you know, and it might seem odd, but we might talk about what is 1 or 2 metres in football, but it can be massively important, but its small adjustments. It’s almost like in Formula 1 you, you twigging the engine or the tires, you know this strategy is our A strategy, but if it starts to to become tedious we need to change the tires. So yeah, I think for us now Uganda it’s sort of 80/20, but look is it still 80/20 if we playing away in Cairo against Egypt, is it still 80/20 if we playing in Lagos against Nigeria, it might be 70/30 but then it might be 60/40. But we believe that we are a good team, we focus on us more than what we focus on the opposition, it was different in Rwanda. There we focused a little bit more on the opposition, but now definitely here in Kampala we very much about ourselves."

Then there is always conflict in every setup if you like and we tend to wonder how coaches deal with players especially those who are deemed to be 'primadonnas' of sorts; basically feeling that rules don't apply to them. How did McKinstry deal with that? Reason being that he comes across as rather cool, calm and collected.

"When I was with Sierra Leone, we had a young player who was of Sierra Leonean heritage; they would come up through an English football academy and we had a couple of boys we called in and he came in and it taught me a big lesson. I didn’t think that when he arrived he felt Sierra Leonean, he was clearly brought up English rather than Sierra Leonean, and that was a problem because when he came in it was a professional opportunity rather than a personal opportunity, and that has an impact on how you train and how you play, and ultimately our solution was that we stopped calling him up. So I solution was… at this point in your young career you not the right person for this squad mentally, you know good footballer but we felt that the squad dynamic was lessened because he was part of it.

"So at that point in time, we were like look, you going to have to want to play football for your country, it’s got to be, and that is something that I carried with me through to Rwanda. In Rwanda, we had one or two guys who we transferred across, who were European born but Rwandan heritage. Literally, as we speak today I’ve got two meetings with English born players who have Ugandan heritage, but one of the first questions to both of them will be Ugandan because that’s important. When you put on your national team shirt it shouldn’t be the same as playing club football, it should be a little bit more than that, mean something to you personally, so that was a big thing, but we had that issue quite early in my time with Seat Leon, and that player I didn’t think he was giving Sierra Leon enough respect and so we just stopped that experiment. We said we going in a different direction because this should be the most important thing to you in your career for the week that you here anyway, and if it’s not or if there is somewhere else you’d rather be then by all means go and be in that place."

What happens then when he is preparing for a tournament, how does a typical day look for coach McKinstry?

He said: 

"Well it's interesting at an international level, you’ve done so much for your work beforehand that once you’re in camp it allows you to do the more personal things with people when you in camp, because got to remember you’re at an international level. You’ve got so little time face to face with players but it’s difficult so sometimes build those really strong relationships. Modern technology makes things like that easy, like WhatsApp you know all of these things. You know we got like team groups for the Uganda team, you know I’ll try to be in touch with everybody, whether that’s on a phone call or a few text messages, it just how it happens to be, so I keep in touch with what they doing.

"Other clubs were obviously watching the game. But it’s about building that personal relationship. But with a national team game, it might have been 3-4 weeks, but we’ll already have all the video’s we want to show the players, the tactical metres plan, we with already have all of the training sessions planned. You know everything will be done, so when we get into the training camp we not losing any of the admin work, all the logistics, admin and planning had already been completed so the only thing you’ll need to touch with that is if there are any small amendments, so to say individual issues with players.

"Then once you in camp it allows you to sit around for a bit longer for lunch having a chat with someone, and maybe grab a couple of balls and it allows you to do a little of extra free practice. So that once you in that training week you not pushed for time, everything is done, so now I can give me and my assistants fully to the players, so like what can we as coaches do in the next 5 days that will help you perform at your maximum, because we’ve almost cleared the schedule for all of the other work that we have done the weeks before camp. So the player's sort of getting personalised service, and from the coaching staff, we work together."

As a coach, there is some importance in the rotation to keep them fresh and fit, how does he go about that especially with some players who are first-choice in all if not most games:

"You know I’m a big believer that you keep your best 11 on the field as often as long as given possible, your best 11 is just that for a reason, you know I always say that every game you play you being asked a question, it’s like doing an exam, and I were to go in and write the same answer to every question in the exam, I would fail the exam. Every question is different so it requires a different answer. So that is the same as when we play matches, the matches are no different to being asked a question, it’s quite a layered question and we got to come up with an answer for that.

"The answer might be we want fast wingers who might want to attack them on the outside or attack them on the inside more, and so the answer that you deliver is formulated through your team structure or tactics. We will alternate players in order to answer the question appropriately, but at the same time in terms of freshness of players. Its a lot about your training program, so when players come in do we know what they’ve been doing at their clubs? You know nowadays in the era of big data, we build good relationships with clubs, you told to get players most recent GPS data, and what they’ve been doing for the last 10 day or 2 weeks in training, so that when they arrive in on Monday.

"If you saw Uganda’s training session on the first day on a Monday, it’s not a single session for players, it’s like many sessions going on because if a player has played 90 minutes he needs something different than someone who was a substitute on a Saturday. You know so they need different things, we have two objectives when they come into training camp, 1 is to get them tacitly ready for the game you know mentally ready do they know what they’ve got to do, in order to be successful. Then we need to get them physically ready, you know we need to get that field time, you know a 100% fit as possible, and that is different for everybody, and these are the things you got to deal with," he concluded.

McKinstry is currently the head coach of the Uganda national team and in a short space of time, he has already shown that he is here to win. He got the first title on the job as Uganda went on to be crowned the 2019 CECAFA Senior Challenge Cup champions.

Uganda were also on par for the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations having garnered four out of the possible six points from the open two games before international matches were called off due to the coronavirus pandemic. There is no doubt that he will be back to winning ways and making an impact in the Uganda Cranes squad when it is safe to return to action.

McKinstry has previously worked in the USA, Lithuania and Bangladesh before making his way to the big jobs.