Nicky Hayen interview: ‘Never in my life did I think I would manage Club Brugge or a top team’

It is a long way from The Rock in north Wales to the knockout stage of the Champions League, and Nicky Hayen never imagined for one moment he would end up making that unlikely journey.

Three years ago, the Club Brugge head coach was taking in the scenery — literally — at the home of Cefn Druids as the manager of Haverfordwest County in the Cymru Premier, the top flight of Welsh football. It was Hayen’s first game in charge and there were 102 people in attendance at a stadium that is next to a disused quarry.

Asked what was going through his mind on the touchline, Hayen smiles. “What I was thinking at that moment was, ‘What a nice view’,” he says.

“The Rock stadium is really… you don’t have to see it through the stands because there are almost no stands, but it’s like a rock next to the pitch and I admired the view.”

Hayen’s time with Haverfordwest was short but sweet. He enjoyed it so much that he was in tears when he left, and it says everything about his affection for the club and the people involved that he gets emotional during this interview when talking about the respect that Haverfordwest’s chairman Rob Edwards showed him after a job opportunity came up back home in Belgium.

What happened next was not in anyone’s script.

Having returned to Brugge to coach the reserves in the summer of 2022, Hayen took over as caretaker manager of the first team when Ronny Deila was sacked last March, with the club in fifth place at the end of the regular season.

Two months later, in the six-team play-off mini-league, Hayen led Brugge to the title. In June, he got the job permanently. In December, he was named Belgian coach of the year. Last month, his Brugge side beat Atalanta, the 2024 Europa League winners, 5-2 on aggregate in the play-off round to set up a last-16 Champions League tie against Aston Villa.

It has been a whirlwind and Hayen sounds as surprised as anyone. “Never in my 44-year life would I have thought I would manage the first team of Brugge or a top team,” he says.

As well as defeating Atalanta home and away, Hayen has led Brugge to Champions League victories over Sporting Lisbon, Sturm Graz and Villa. It has been quite a ride, taking in trips along the way to Milan, Celtic and Manchester City, where footage of Pep Guardiola accidentally throwing a ball at Hayen on the touchline went viral. Guardiola was mortified but Hayen’s relaxed reaction diffused the situation immediately anyway.

“It wasn’t on purpose and he came to apologise,” Hayen says. “I’m not a coach who is moaning or arguing a lot. I always try to stay calm, and he showed a respectful reaction by coming to me. And he’s one of the greatest coaches in the history of football.”

A measured and humble man, it is hard to imagine anything rattling Hayen, who revealed in a press conference after the Atalanta second leg that he always speaks to his late mother before matches. The story behind that story feels like a life lesson for many of us.

Hayen had never set foot in Wales before he took the Haverfordwest County job. “I had never heard about the league either,” he says. “It was just an opportunity that came. I have an app where some jobs come in, and this was one of the job descriptions there. I showed my interest and 30 minutes later I already had an answer.”

A former professional footballer in Belgium, where he played more than 250 games in the top flight, Hayen had coached for the best part of a decade across a range of levels — youth and senior, lower league and top flight — prior to joining Haverfordwest.

His previous job ended in relegation from the Jupiler Pro League with Waasland-Beveren in 2021, and the Haverfordwest experience could easily have gone the same way — they were second from bottom when he was appointed.

Did people in Belgium not think it was a strange job to take? “Yeah, really strange,” Hayen replies. “I think if I wasn’t successful over there, maybe my coaching career was finished. Or you had to start in a lower division again, at amateur level. So, yes, it was a risk.”

Hayen did his homework. He read up on the league, looked up the stadiums — “football is football, if you play before 30,000 people or 100 people, you still want to win that game” — and also watched half a dozen Haverfordwest matches on video. “I think three games were really useful. Three games were really like… I don’t say rubbish, but scaring me is not the right word either. More like difficult.”

After a slight delay with his work permit, he was up and running, introducing a more expansive style of play and taking away “the fear of defeat”. Haverfordwest won their first four games under him, scoring 15 goals, and climbed to safety.

Settled at the club and chasing a target of European qualification within three years, Hayen had no plans to leave until he received a phone call at the end of his first season that would, ultimately, transform his managerial career. Brugge wanted Hayen to run their under-23 team, who play in the Belgian second tier, and he had 24 hours to make a decision.

“I had an open conversation the evening before with Rob. He said, ‘OK, I understand. But I want to keep you. I want to give you everything you want. Except I’m not going to sell the club to you! That’s the only thing I can’t do’. He said, ‘Look, think in an easy way in the car’ — I had four or five hours to drive — ‘and just give me the answer before noon’.

“I phoned him exactly one minute before noon. And it was with tears in my eyes that I told him, ‘I’m going to tell you something that I never, ever want to say to you…’. He didn’t let me finish. He said, ‘Are you sure?’. And I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ And then he said, ‘Then I’m really glad that I can say how stupid you would be not to take that offer’.”

Hayen shakes his head and smiles. “It’s the first time a chairman ever said something like this to me.

“I had the vice-chairman on the phone after and he asked, ‘If Rob had mentioned what he wanted to do for you’. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Rob called the board together at six in the morning, saw that I was struggling making the decision and said maybe we should end the contract, so that he doesn’t have to take this difficult decision, so it’s just a no-brainer that he can go’.”

Hayen puffs out his cheeks and looks at his arms. “This makes me emotional and gives me goosebumps at the same time. How warm, how respectful. He’s a friend for life.”

Hayen was busy with working and coaching. Too busy.

“Sometimes your life is so hectic that you don’t stop to think about normal things, like visiting your parents,” he says.

“My mother passed away four years ago. Before she passed away, I was working part-time in the morning and the evening, so I didn’t have much time.

“At a certain moment, my hairdresser said that my mother asked her, ‘How is my son?’. And my hairdresser — because she lives near me — said, ‘He’s doing fine’. My mum said, ‘I don’t see my son a lot. I think you see him more’. And then she (the hairdresser) said to me, ‘Sometimes you have to visit your mother’. This was an eye-opener for me and from that moment I went once a week to have a coffee over there, for two or three years, until she was sick and then she passed away.”

It’s a story that provides some context to the comments Hayen made after the away victory over Atalanta, when he mentioned how he speaks to his late mother prior to games.

“I have the letter (order of service) of her funeral — it’s downstairs now — always with me,” he explains. “And every time when I go to the cemetery, I take a coffee along and I drink it at her grave and I just talk with her.

“And the moment that I was hired as the first-team manager here, last season, I just said to her, ‘Let’s do something crazy that no one expects’. Then we won the title and no one expected it.

“I don’t say that I’m a big believer but at that moment, if you achieve something like this, of course you think that she helped. And this is something that I keep on doing.

“It’s not always that I have a conversation of five minutes. Sometimes I close my eyes and I’m thinking about her. That’s it. Sometimes I say, ‘It’s a difficult game today. Help us, we need this win.’”

When Hayen addressed the Brugge players for the first time as caretaker manager, he chose his words carefully.

“I said to them that I’m not going to teach them how they have to play football because they have more experience than me — they played in higher leagues, they played with national teams. I was telling them that I wanted to guide them in the right direction and I gave them some tools so that we could do things better than before, like a collaboration.”

Hayen quickly won matches but, perhaps more importantly, won credibility with his methods. “One thing is crucial, that everyone in my team knows exactly what he has to do in an offensive way and in a defensive way. I want to have the ball as much as possible. But, of course, if you play against a team that is much stronger with the ball, then you have to change your playing style a little bit. But with 30 per cent of the ball you can also do good things, which we already showed.”

The away leg against Atalanta was a case in point and highlighted the team’s tactical flexibility under Hayen. Brugge, who are dominant in possession in domestic matches, had only 35 per cent of the ball in Bergamo but were lethal on the counter-attack. Their third goal, wonderfully dispatched on the half-volley by Ferran Jutgla, after Christos Tzolis had scampered clear on the left, was a thing of beauty. “A magnificent feeling,” Hayen says.

At the other end of the pitch, an experienced and familiar face more than did his job too. The former Sunderland and Liverpool goalkeeper Simon Mignolet, who turns 37 on Thursday, prevented Atalanta from scoring what could have been a crucial second goal when he kept out Ademola Lookman’s penalty in the 61st minute.

“Simon is one of the leading players on the pitch and also in the dressing room,” Hayen says. “He’s a real professional. You saw that when he doesn’t know something, like, for example, we weren’t expecting Lookman to take that penalty, he sprints immediately to our goalkeeper coach who has all the information.”

Villa are up next and it is one of the strange quirks of the competition’s new format that the two clubs have already met in the league phase. Brugge won that game 1-0, when Hans Vanaken converted from the spot after Tyrone Mings handled the ball in bizarre circumstances. Hayen notes how Villa have strengthened since then, signing Marco Asensio and Marcus Rashford.

Brugge are potentially dangerous underdogs, though. “We’re now at a stage — and it was the same before the Atalanta game — where we don’t have much to lose,” Hayen adds.

As for Hayen himself, his feet are as firmly on the ground now as they were at Cefn Druids three years ago.

“I’m living the dream and I try to enjoy it as much as possible,” he says. “But I won’t be the guy who’s going to be partying on the table when you win, and I’m not going to sit in a corner when you lose. I just try to stay normal.”

(Top photo: Tullio Puglia – UEFA via Getty Images)