They didn’t sing the words, but after a humiliating 5-0 defeat by Bolton Wanderers in March, most Oxford United fans expected Des Buckingham to be sacked in the morning. Oxford had been third in League One when Buckingham took charge four months earlier; now they were eighth and plummeting out of the promotion picture.
“We went to Bolton and, probably naively on my part, we chose to change our shape and press and be aggressive away from home, and it didn’t work,” Buckingham says. “That was on me.”
The reaction on social media was damning and, as a lifelong Oxford fan who was born in the city, it stung.
“By all means say what you want about me as a head coach, but I think when people step over the line personally, especially when it’s your own people, that’s tough,” he says. “I know my family struggled seeing that as well. I probably needed a better way to deal with that [than to] go home and overthink it and over-worry and think up scenarios that are just not there … you can dig yourself a lot deeper than ever needs be. Mentally, it’s probably the biggest challenge I’ve had to deal with in my life.”
In the days that followed, Buckingham shut out the noise and stripped his team back to basics, leaning on the principles he’d learnt on an extraordinary coaching journey via Wellington, Melbourne, Mumbai and, erm, Stoke. Oxford lost only once more all season and met Bolton again in the play-off final at Wembley. A tactical masterclass delivered a 2-0 victory and restored Oxford to the second tier for the first time in 25 years.
Five months on, Buckingham is speaking to The Independent in his office at the training ground. In the Championship, Leeds and Burnley have triple the wage budget of Oxford, whose summer spend of £1.5m was the lowest of any team in the league. A long list of names on a whiteboard reveals the players out injured. And yet there is momentum: new stadium plans are in the pipeline and they are punching above their weight, in mid-table after 14 games with a goal difference of zero.
Buckingham has just waved goodbye to a primary school class who visited for the morning. Oxford is a local club with a wide reach, a club unusually connected to its county more so than its city, and few people know it better than the manager. He began his footballing life here as a youth goalkeeper before becoming an academy coach aged 18 and one of Oxford’s current players, Sam Long, was trained by Buckingham in the Under-9s.
The 39-year-old is an outlier among English managers in that he never played the game professionally. After 10 years working his way up the coaching ranks at Oxford, nurtured by club great Mickey Lewis, he took a punt on a job as a football development manager for New Zealand Football to broaden his experience.
There he transformed New Zealand’s lump-it youth teams into slick attacking sides, first taking the Under-20s further than they’d ever been at a World Cup and then qualifying the Under-23s to the Olympic Games. Buckingham won New Zealand’s coach of the year award in 2020 but his contract was ripped up during Covid, despite players writing a letter to the governing body pleading to keep him.
His impact was immense, and the experience opened Buckingham’s mind.
“I grew up in a very traditional football environment which was, ‘This is how we coach and this is how football is played’. In New Zealand and Australia, they are very open to people coming together across different sports to share ideas.” He spent time with cricket coach Mike Hesson and All Blacks coach Steve Hansen, taking with him their famous “no dickheads” policy, and he incorporated elements of Maori culture into his young Kiwi sides to help build a team ethos.
City Football Group, the global network of clubs with Manchester City as its flagship, had been following Buckingham’s work. CFG recruited him first as an assistant coach at Melbourne, where they won a league and play-offs double, and then offered him the manager’s job at Mumbai City, where Buckingham discovered a different challenge.
When you lift up a trophy at Wembley for your hometown club, there’s not many better moments
“The first two weeks, I sat in the restaurant and the players would have their food and leave and they wouldn’t even look at me. I said to the Indian assistant coach, ‘Have I upset them?’ He said, ‘No, they would never think of coming anywhere near your table because you’re their head coach’. It was a respect thing.
“You can’t change Indian culture but you can certainly create a footballing environment that I felt could really benefit what we do on the pitch. We started off doing sit-down, one-on-one meetings. They were probably the most awkward conversations I’ve ever had, but what it did was start a communication between coach and player. Twelve months later, you saw the impact of that – players came up and said hello, introduced their families. They talked to me not just about football but about their lives.”
Mumbai won the title in Buckingham’s second season with a record-breaking 18-match unbeaten streak. On the football side, he had never felt so supported.
“All of our training sessions in Melbourne and Mumbai were uploaded to a central server in Manchester. I had a guy called Ceri Bowley [then CFG’s head of coaching support] and Brian Eastick [coach developer], and I would speak at least once a week with them. They watched the game and then we’d have a chat around what we were doing, how we were doing it, what the training sessions that week looked like. We were never told what to do, but you could ask without the worry of sounding like you didn’t know what you were doing.”
So when Oxford approached last season, asking Buckingham to come home, it was not so straightforward. “It was the biggest risk I’ve taken in my coaching career,” he says, and yet he knew he had to leave the safety of CFG’s network for a rare opportunity.
Oxford spent significant money prising him away so it was a gamble for both parties. He arrived on his own last November, without any coaching staff and in the strange position of picking up a working, functioning team from predecessor Liam Manning, who had left, not been sacked. It wasn’t broke, so at first he didn’t fix it.
“Tactically, there was a period of time where I tried to continue on some of the work that had gone before me with Liam, but I probably carried that on a little bit too long,” Buckingham admits.
The thrashing by Bolton became a line in the sand. “At 5-0 you can actually say, ‘Right, this is what we’re doing’. You can be real clear cut with it. I flipped it straight after that game to the same way I set up at Mumbai and at Melbourne, and we went from there.”
New staff arrived who had worked with Buckingham before and he quickly imprinted his learnings from a decade-long coaching odyssey. By May, there was a section on the supporters’ forum called “The Des Buckingham Apology Thread” where fans gathered to admit they had got it wrong two months earlier.
“It wasn’t about proving people wrong,” he says. “It was just about showing that giving people time to get their ideas across, it does come good. When you lift up a trophy at Wembley for your hometown club, there’s not many better moments.”
The step up from League One to the Championship has been an eye-opening experience. “The biggest noticeable thing in this league is the teams’ and the coaches’ ability to change. In at least eight of the games we’ve played so far there are sometimes small, sometimes big tweaks to what they do. Once they realise that you’ve set up to stop them, they’re able to flip something very quickly.”
A goalkeeper going down injured is, he says, a telltale sign a message is being rushed on to the field.
Even after 22 years on the training pitch – longer than Pep Guardiola or Sean Dyche – Buckingham is still learning his trade. Amid debate about the talent pool in the wake of Thomas Tuchel’s England appointment, he is proof that there is a route to success for determined British coaches, and believes there is a path to the very top.
“I’d like to think so. I can’t speak for other coaches, but I’m 39, I’ve had some wonderful successes. I’ve still got lots more I need to learn and I’m in no rush, but I do enjoy a challenge and I want to coach at the highest level I can. Right now, that’s here at Oxford in the Championship.”
