Jon Brady explains the addiction of football management that coaches just can’t kick | OneFootball

Former Northampton Town manager Jon Brady is talking about his friendship with compatriot Ange Postecoglou, and the discussion suddenly raises a question. Postecoglou himself has laughed about how you can tell a manager is out of work if he looks relaxed, which the Australian certainly hasn’t at Nottingham Forest. So, given how pressured management is, given how thankless it can be, given how fleeting both jobs and even the feeling of victory can be… why keep going back?

Brady is better placed than most to answer. His work with the League Managers’ Association has ensured it’s one of his responsibilities to think about all of this, and that comes after what might have been considered a difficult job at Northampton.

In the summer of 2021, they had a budget that aligned with a club from the lower half of League Two, and looked set to drift. Brady instead guided them back to League One within two years and then to 14th spot in the third tier – the club’s best performance in more than 15 years. The 50-year-old can’t help but smile now.

“That’s the draw for me,” Brady says. “The absolute addiction is having a group where you can help them perform way beyond where they think. And when you can connect that to fans as well… reignite a club, reconnect the fanbase, and build a culture people can believe in again. There’s no better feeling.”

And now, a man who has had that taste of success wants it again. Brady, originally from New South Wales, is one of the EFL’s most distinctive coaches. There aren’t too many who had also been running successful sports businesses in their playing career, and have taken time out to specifically study how to improve.

By the time the former winger was at then-Conference side Stevenage in the mid-2000s, he was running a company with 40 staff. It provided equipment and elite coaching to schools, as well as other pathways. Not bad for someone who took a chance on travelling for a trial at Brentford when he was 17.

Brady has sold off most of the business now as he focuses on management, but the way he got into it came from the sort of insight that now aids his coaching.

“The biggest thing I felt as a player in the Conference and League Two was that you’re not really in control of your career, because it’s mostly short-term contracts,” he reflects.

Brady’s time is a testament to that, given he played for 14 different clubs.

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Jon Brady got Northampton promoted from League Two (Getty Images)

“The only thing you can control is your performances, so the only job I knew was football, and I knew it inside out,” he explains. “I loved getting into the detail of movement, agility, balance and co-ordination, so I started to see how I could make a living from sport in that way.

“And doing that business gave me a real financial foundation.”

Brady feels his coaching was also honed by something that held back his playing career.

“I didn’t feel I made it to the level I should have, and I understand why I didn’t,” he says. “I was an over-thinker. I’d dwell on everything and just destroy myself… instead of playing with a little bit more freedom.”

Thinking about the game so much meant Brady has been able to explain how it works. This insight was ided by early managerial experience at non-league Brackley Town, before overhauling Northampton’s underage set-up.

“Not fulfilling my own potential still drives me,” Brady maintains. “I believe having my experiences allows me to connect to a player much more deeply, first by finding out their background and what they need. Some of them are blocked off from improving. You need to find what unblocks them.

“That’s how you improve players: you build a culture that allows for empowerment and growth. My passion is for improving individuals… to helping others play beyond what they think is possible.”

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Brady then led the Cobblers to mid-table safety in the third tier (Getty Images)

There are obvious examples from Brady’s coaching, like Marc Leonard at Birmingham City, and Kieron Bowie, now at Hibernian. It’s why, as he puts it, rising to the first-team job at Northampton “just felt like home”.

“The first thing I said was ‘I don’t want to know what you can’t do, I want to work on what you can do,’” he explains. “Then it’s about empowering players to make key decisions in the moment… we had an unbelievable group over that period.”

This links to Brady’s “addiction” to getting back into management. You can sense the relish as Brady talks about how the team evolved, and the way the community got behind Northampton as they first missed out on automatic promotion on goals scored and suffered subsequent play-off heartbreak before finally getting back into League One for the 2023-24 campaign.

“Transitionally, we’d rip teams apart. By the time I got into League One, we dominated possession,” he notes.

“I played for a lot of clubs in the area, I ran a business in the town, coached a lot of kids who were now going to games. So the connection was so much deeper. Any time I brought a player in, I told them about this.”

It’s now a story he enjoys relaying. Brady ultimately left Northampton because, after allowing the town to dream, financial realities hit. He lost too many players to better-paying clubs and resigned in December 2024.

It was then Brady ensured to take time to hone himself. That involved a lot of work with the LMA, including their diploma in Football Management and a leaders’ course. Brady has frequently debated coaching with not only giant footballing figures like Mikel Arteta and Gareth Southgate but rugby union’s Stuart Lancaster and coach of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, Steve Kerr. The period has also seen him run the London Marathon for the British Forces Foundation, and spend six weeks with Villarreal.

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Brady is friends with fellow Australian Ange Postecoglou (Getty)

Such work has seen Brady ruminate a lot on football’s evolution, and particularly the “post-Pep era”: the decline of the positional game.

“I was asked to deliver a session on a relevant topic in the LMA Technical Masterclass, all the peers up at St George’s Park,” Brady remembers. “So I said ‘rest defences’ – something you now hear quite a lot. So I did how you set your rest defence up against a Bournemouth, who sit in that 4-4-2 and break with high pace; a Nottingham Forest who sit in a 4-5-1 bloc with [Chris] Wood high and then one with Mo Salah in a 4-3-3, where he’s staying high and wide and you lock him off.

“But modern trends… some of it is the language changing.

“The game has become faster and more aggressive, but if you look at the EFL trends, a common denominator is that leading teams have lower possession. Arsenal are the anomaly, but then you look at their set-pieces, as well as Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, even Man City going to that 4-5-1 bloc.”

As he speaks, Brady laughs about how his own playing career was “4-4-2 against 4-4-2 and who could fight the hardest”.

He adds: “And if anyone played 3-5-2, it was a bit, ‘wow, they’re the new guru’.”

The EFL is now so sophisticated that Brady feels a key is to simplify messages.

“From early on, I felt football was about control, and that was possession. Now, it’s more of an invasion game,” he claims. “That’s how I simplified it in my head.

“When you’re delivering it on grass, it’s got to be in a way that shows you totally believe in what you do. It’s got to come across like that to players. ‘If we do this, we will win today.’ You have to instil that in the players, then they go out and deliver.”

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Brady has worked a lot with the League Managers’ Association (LMA) since leaving Northampton (Getty Images)

Brady has long realised this is what helps eliminate doubt and over-thinking: absolute conviction from the top.

That’s how he got Northampton to overcome the heartache of missing out on final-day promotion to Bristol Rovers in 2021-22 and then losing to Mansfield in the play-off semi-finals.

Brady now fully believes in himself.

“I’ve never taken shortcuts,” he says defiantly. “I’ve taken the long road to sharpen every tool: leadership, psychology, tactical and technical detail and soft skills.

“It took real courage to resign when I did, and I stand by that decision. I believed I’d earned the right to go after something bigger.

“The next club that hires me isn’t just getting a manager. They’re getting someone who can transform a culture, unite fans, and is proven to win games of football. A game-changer.”