A Conversation With Guy Branston, a Proper English Football Journeyman | OneFootball

With over 400 appearances over 17 seasons for a myriad of teams across England, there isn’t much Guy Branston hasn’t seen. We sit down with him to discuss his rich playing and coaching career.

There are players that’ve had well-traveled careers, and then there’s Guy Branston. The Leicester-born center back featured for 19 different clubs across England’s lower divisions, and made 40 different transactions via loan or transfer in his 17-year career.

Now 47, Branston is making his mark as an agent as well as a sports AI consultant.

Branston fell in love with the game in his childhood while working as a food vendor in Leicester Market. He started following Leicester City, eventually joining their academy, although he’d never feature for the first team. In his two years with Leicester, he saw seven different loan spells with clubs including Rushden & Diamonds, Colchester United, Plymouth Argyle, and Rotherham United.

Leicester cut ties with Branston in 1999 after an incident that saw him overreact to a player who stamped on him, getting himself sent off and heading down the tunnel before punching his arm through the referee’s door and almost puncturing an artery in the process. It could have been a death sentence for his career; instead, it was a turning point.

Branston would join Rotherham on a permanent deal for £50,000, where he proceeded to lead them to back-to-back promotions, guiding them back to the second tier after a 19-season drought.

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Loan spells at Wycombe Wanderers and Peterborough United would follow before Branston departed for Sheffield Wednesday in June 2004, where he helped them secure victory in the Third Division promotion playoffs. Shortly after, the Third Division was rebranded to League Two, the Second Division to League One, and the First Division to the Championship. After a loan move at Peterborough, Branston headed to Oldham Athletic, where he emerged as a vital cog in central defense, before returning to Peterborough on a permanent deal in order to be closer to home.

Across his 17-year playing career, Branston played 170 times in League Two, 65 in the the Championship, and 63 in League One, while also making 17 appearances in the FA Cup, 14 in the EFL Cup, and 13 in the EFL Trophy. But there was at least one blemish on his résumé: he never got to play in the English top flight.

“I came into a physically imposing age of football where being big, strong and aggressive mattered, and every year, it got harder and harder to implement my game,” Branston said in an exclusive interview with Urban Pitch. “I had to change, or the game would change me, or I wouldn’t play the game.

“I had to understand that, and it took me a few years, a few sending-offs, but I look back through some of my red cards, and I look back through some of my bookings, and I’ve gone to win tackles, I’ve gone to do the right things. I’ve gone to make decisions, and sometimes the decisions weren’t good enough to then put me in the position where I needed to be. These are the things where, in terms of being good enough for the so-called Premier League, somebody’s got to trust you to play that level.”

There were times where Branston was close to signing with a Premier League team, but it never ended up happening. He partially puts the blame on his fiery temperament.

“I was in a predicament with sitting around the Championship, waiting for another chance, and I think, because I was quite aggressive within training and on the pitch as well, Ronnie Moore, the manager at the time, chose to play [Martin McIntosh] who’s safe and a lot older, a sure head,” Branston said. “And it was a good decision at the time, because he was a better player than me for that position.”

Though he never competed in the Premier League, Branston lived large as an English footballer — at least temporarily. By age 26, he owned three mansions and a BMW, and was earning around £5,500 a month. He even wore the captain’s armband at Peterborough before dropping out of the XI and then heading to Rochdale, Northampton Town, and Notts County. However, he was forced to drop out of the English Football League after a new rule that prohibited players from playing for more than two clubs in one season.

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Suddenly, Branston was making just £30,000 a year at sixth-tier Kettering Town, but he would make lemonade with lemons and spearhead The Poppies to promotion before heading to League Two side Burton Albion. He lasted just a few months before heading out to Torquay United, where he emerged as an indispensable figure at the back and making it to the 2010-11 PFA Team of the Year as well as winning the 2010-11 Torquay United Player of the Year award.

This would earn him a move to Bradford City, where he initially thrived only to be relegated to the bench under new manager Phil Parkinson (now Wrexham’s coach). Branston then bounced around from Rotherham to Aldershot Town to Bristol Rovers on loan, scoring on his debut against Bradford City, before heading to Plymouth Argyle. After a swan song in Devon, Branston hung up his boots in 2014, working as a chief scout with Notts County and then operations manager at Nuneaton Town, before serving as Chesterfield’s director of recruitment and development and then caretaker manager.

After watching in awe as his boyhood club won the Premier League title, he joined Leicester City as as an academy coach before switching to the club’s PDP loans manager. Branston departed Leicester in April 2022 to become a football agent, launching Game Changer Football Agency alongside fellow ex-footballer Lee Philpott. Today, he spends his time overseeing Game Changer, raising his two kids with his wife in Leicester, and working at Sport AI Consultants, offering cutting-edge AI solutions tailored to the sports and leisure industry.

We caught up with Branston for a Q&A discussion.

Urban Pitch: When you were growing up, Leicester were battling it out in the lower leagues. Shortly after you retired, they won the Premier League. What was it like witnessing their evolution?

Guy Branston: I noticed it quite early on. I was lucky enough to not stand too far away from the Gary Lineker store and work with people in Leicester Market and see that transformation of the man that he was, the normality of the family, and obviously the popularity of when he went to Barcelona.

I probably still have a signed autograph of him when he was at Barcelona in my attic, because he, like me, worked at Leicester Market selling fruit and vegetables at his parents’ stall, and was good friends with the owners of the store. I saw that, if you’re successful at football, you can be really popular, but also a really sought-after individual, and that attracted me to the game. Then the game developed again in 1992-93 when the Premier League came, just as I was starting to really get into football and understand it more.

That was probably the first time I ever got a Skybox within the house. We could afford it back then, and I just remember them ripping up the floorboards and setting up the wires and doing all sorts of things. I was so excited about having this box, because I’d only ever watched Channel 4, and the players started going to Italy and places like that.

You could see that the best teams were starting to go after English footballers, who were going from World Cup appearances to making multi-million pound moves. It was only if you played well in the World Cup that you got teams tracking you and signing you, players like Des Walker and Paul Gascoigne who went to Sampdoria and Lazio. Back then, Leicester wasn’t a Premier League club, but I was able to go through the chances and transitions and watching Leicester evolve into what it is now: a big football club in the Midlands.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Was that the case for you when you scored against Bradford on your Bristol Rovers debut?

I signed for an ex-manager of mine, Mark McGee, who was at Leicester when I was a kid. Sean North, who was Torquay’s assistant manager when I was successful with them, he was the assistant manager at Bristol Rovers, and they brought me in to be that leader. They had a lot of good, talented young players around the place, a lot of lads who went on and had good careers from there…it was a fantastic, amazing club.

We were playing against Bradford, who had released me because of Phil Parkinson after I helped to keep them up the previous season. We ended up playing against some fantastic legends like Nahki Wells and James Hanson who’ve tacked on into different leagues like the Premier League and Championship and done really well. I went in and scored pretty much instantly against the center back [Carl McHugh] who was supposed to replace me. I wanted to stay at Bradford, because I’d had a great time there as captain, so it ended up being one of those “F**k you” moments.

I probably could’ve done a bit better in the game, credit to the lads I was playing against, but the game was what it was. It was 3-3, and it was an amazing game to be involved with.

You had the chance to mentor quite a few future Premier League stars at Leicester, including Newcastle winger Harvey Barnes. How highly do you rate him?

I used to coach him as a 12-year-old alongside the likes of Hamza Choudhury, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, and Josh Knight. I was actually texting him the other day after the goal he scored, just having that conversation with him about the situation that he’s in, and where he’s going to go, and how far he can go. I think he can comfortably play for England in the future if he just keeps developing under Eddie Howe. I believe he can play at the top clubs, and I think he’s a fantastic kid as well. His dad’s a wonderful person too, and I’ve known them for many years, so I can’t help but speak highly of him.

Photo by Pete Norton/Getty Images

Lastly, you’ve been involved in five different promotions. Which one tasted the sweetest?

It would have to be when I finished second in League One with Rotherham in 2001. We beat Brentford 2-1 in the penultimate game of the season to secure promotion, while Millwall won the league and Reading got promoted via the playoffs. That was the standout moment for me. I just cared about playing and getting 40-minute games under my belt again…we just kept trying to play as best we could, and we kept winning football matches.

We concentrated on ourselves, we concentrated on the unit, and that was something that we had within that group that taught me very early on that the team is a good group of people…there’s no d***heads, as the All Blacks would say.

I think there’s an element where you can go on and be successful if the team are in it together. I believe football’s played by lots and lots and lots of individuals within a team environment, and it’s about managing the individuals. When I look back, we managed ourselves a lot within the dressing room units to get to where we arrived. Sometimes the staff forgot that if you’ve got good lads and they manage themselves very, very well, you don’t need to overly micromanage them. That was the standout performance for me through the season, and it was just an amazing time to be a part of and then play against teams like Leicester in the Championship the following season.