The former Man City coach aspiring to be the next Graham Potter via ‘difficult circumstances’ in Turkey

Kieron Lovelady had a pretty good gig.

At the start of this year, he was coaching in the Manchester City youth system — an impressive career step considering he’s only 27. He was working under this generation’s best manager, at England’s dominant club of the past decade, within a multi-club group known for giving chances to coaches already in their network, preparing some of the best young talent in the country for senior football.

Then, in January, he was offered a first-team coaching job at Adana Demirspor who, to say the least, were in a sticky spot. They were bottom of the Turkish Super Lig, but that was just the start of their problems.

Thanks to an array of financial and administrative problems, they had already been given two separate points deductions, which put them on -1 for the season. They were also under a transfer ban and their most experienced players had left in the previous couple of transfer windows, so their squad had an average age of just over 21 with no player older than 28. Relegation more than loomed.

For Lovelady though, there was only one answer.

“I felt it would be the opposite, really,” he said when asked by a slightly incredulous Athletic whether he thought diving into such an impossibly difficult situation would be detrimental to his fledgling coaching career.

“The circumstances are extremely difficult, but we’re all thriving in it because it’s an amazing challenge to be a part of.”

You certainly can’t accuse him of taking the easy route.

Moving to Adana, a city in the south of Turkey, about 575 miles from Istanbul and not far from the Syrian border, wasn’t an entirely random move. In January, Mustafa Alper Avci became the club’s fourth manager of the season (appointed by their second president of the campaign, after the first resigned), moving from his post in the City academy, where he had worked with Lovelady for a couple of years.

The pair had developed a good relationship in that time, so when Alper Avci got the call from his homeland, he brought Lovelady with him as a first-team coach, along with Dean Holden — formerly Charlton manager and Steven Gerrard’s assistant at Al Ettifaq — as his assistant manager.

“He’d watched a lot of my sessions at City and was very impressed by my delivery, my ideas and the way that I see the game. He always said if an opportunity arose for him to go back to Turkey in the Super Lig, he’d love me to go with him. And here we are.”

Things haven’t become any easier since they arrived. Their second game in charge was at Galatasaray, which you may have heard about: the Adana Demirspor team was withdrawn from the pitch by their president, Bedirhan Durak, in protest against what a statement claimed were “systematic, deliberate referee errors and injustice”.

A bemused Lovelady watched as a farce played out where club officials tried and, for 20 minutes at least, failed to get the message across that they were withdrawing from the game. Even by the chaotic standards of Turkish football, it was an extraordinary scene, and for those involved, you can certainly file the episode under ‘not ideal’.

Not least because Galatasaray weren’t just awarded a 3-0 walkover, but Adana Demirspor were given another points deduction, bringing the grand total deducted for the season up to 12, meaning that at the time of writing, they are on -2.

There’s no point pretending the season will end in anything other than relegation – they are 21 points behind second-bottom Hatayspor – but from Lovelady’s perspective, it is all a learning experience. “I thought it would be an amazing opportunity to learn and progress. Obviously at my age, and given my coaching experience in academies, it’ll be something that I’ll always be able to refer back to.

“A job in a top-10 European domestic league was just an opportunity that I had to take. I feel that a long way down the line all these challenges will benefit me, to be able to say that I’ve worked in these conditions. Hopefully, it will stand me in really good stead for my future career as a first-team coach and maybe one day as a manager.”

Lovelady on the touchline (Photo courtesy of Adana Demirspor)

Lovelady’s career path hasn’t been conventional. He was a decent amateur midfielder as a teenager, good in the local leagues and captain of Southport Trinity, a club in the Mid-Lancashire League (effectively the 15th tier of English football), but it was fairly clear quite early on that he wasn’t going to make it as a professional player. So he turned his attention to coaching.

“Even at a young age, I was always involved in the conversations around what team we were playing,” he says. “I always felt one day that it’d be me picking the team. The first thing I’d be doing is looking at what formation both teams were playing. I don’t know why that is, but that’s just the way I’ve always been.

“I started to take that side of the game a lot more seriously and started to think about what my next steps will be after school, eventually to pursue a full-time career in coaching, which is what I’m doing now.”

He started out as a coach at Southport, winning a league title with their under-18s side, while at the same time studying at the Robbie Fowler Academy, where he later worked full-time, absorbing information from the other coaches around him and from the Liverpool legend himself, who Lovelady still speaks to.

“He’s always there if I need to speak to him,” he says. “He’d put on the occasional finishing session for the forwards and it was great to be able to pick his brains. Anything you can take from him is worth it and you can pass the pieces of information on to forwards that I work with today.”

From there, Lovelady moved to academy coaching jobs at Rochdale, Preston North End and eventually Manchester City, starting work there as a part-time coach in their select programme, which is essentially the feeder system into their academy, before moving into a full-time job when one became available in the academy itself, when he was just 25, working with school-age kids.

It’s remarkable that he has gone from working with 11- or 12-year-olds to coaching a professional men’s side. Lovelady looks like he can’t believe it himself. He is, as far as we can tell, the youngest English first-team coach currently working in one of Europe’s top-10 leagues. He’s young but not necessarily inexperienced as a coach: as he points out, he’s been doing this for over a decade now.

His youth might be seen as a weakness to some, but while he was working in those various academies and indeed with a squad as young as Adana Demirspor have now, it’s actually an advantage to be of a similar age to the players he coaches. “I’ve always been able to build fantastic relationships with players,” he says. “I can relate to them.”

Given his unconventional coaching route so far, the name that immediately comes up when asked about his coaching influences is perhaps unsurprising. “The one that I always go to is Graham Potter,” he says. “I just love the story of how he started in the Swedish fourth division and he took Ostersund all the way up to the top division, got them into Europe and played against Arsenal.

“I love how he was prepared to go over to Scandinavia and start right at the bottom and build his way up.”

The ultimate goal is to be a manager. Where? Who knows. Lovelady has already demonstrated that he’d be prepared to go to places and into situations where others wouldn’t. When? Again, who knows. For now, he’s got plenty to keep him occupied.

GO DEEPER

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(Top photo courtesy of Adana Demirspor)