Abingdon Red

Nigel Pearson: The message read: your brother was killed. I don’t recall much after that.

The Bristol City manager, who was 16 when his brother was killed in a car crash, talks about how that experience made him an angry young man.

Jonathan Northcroft, Football Correspondent

Saturday August 19 2023, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

Day is gently giving way to evening and golden light blankets the riverbank where otters play. Nige likes to stroll here through fields, or park on the way from work, so he can watch them. “In that sluice,” he says, pointing to a river bend, “are freshwater oysters, would you believe.”

We’re halfway between his home and Bristol City’s training ground. His love of this spot encapsulates a man only half-immersed in the world of football, who determinedly keeps the other half of himself rooted in what he considers the real world: the world of family, of genuine experiences and relationships, of nature, of reflection and thought.

He is turning 60 tomorrow and the idea is an interview about how to age gracefully in a young man’s game. But being Nige — Nigel Pearson — he takes the conversation in unexpected directions. Like when he says that, despite enjoying being a manager as much as ever, he worries about carrying on too long to get through his bucket list, which includes competing in the Mongol Rally, a 10,000-mile motor odyssey in old bangers.

As he speaks, in his bungalow backing on to a farmyard in the Somerset countryside, wind chimes chime and his campervan sits in the drive.

A theme is loss. It’s been a strange summer. In quick succession four people he worked with, and felt close to, died: Trevor Francis, Gordon McQueen, Chris Bart-Williams and Dave Wilkes, his No 2 in his first management job, at Carlisle United.

Losing Bart-Williams, ten years his junior, whom he captained in the Premier League with Sheffield Wednesday, was the biggest shock.

“Watching old interviews he did reminded me what a fabulous lad he was,” Nige says. “Before away games he’d go to a West Indian fast food place in Wicker Arches and bring back chicken, rice and peas for me.

Pearson, 60 on Monday, fears staying in management for too long would stop him completing his bucket list.

“When people die who are about your age or younger, it’s very sobering and reminds me I need to invest time in myself as well. Because who knows how long we’ve got.”

Many of us only begin experiencing loss profoundly in middle age but, sadly, not Nige. He tells me about Marc, his brother, who died in an accident when Nige was 16. He hasn’t spoken about this to many people and certainly never publicly. A long-time friend who joined us for dinner in Clevedon was unaware.

Nige is the youngest of three brothers. The eldest is Simon, and Marc was the middle one, a year older than Nige, and looked very like their grandfather, Percy Mills, a legendary player for Notts County: tall, strapping, ginger-haired. “Marc was a good footballer,” Nige says. “He turned down an apprenticeship with Mansfield to work at Rolls-Royce in Derby. I used to enjoy beating him at tennis because he had a ruthless streak in him, in sport, so when I won it would irritate him. You don’t always get on with your siblings.”

Nige was in the sixth form in Nottingham and touring the United States with his college team when Marc died. “He was killed in a car crash,” he says. “Somebody he went to school with picked him up. Unfortunately they weren’t wearing seatbelts.

“We were travelling around. We started in California, played games in Arizona, went down to New Mexico. The girls’ tennis team was on the tour as well. All good fun. We’d been out — to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A group of teenagers on the lash and the problem was nobody [back home] knew where we were staying.

“You’ve got to remember back then there were no mobile phones and my parents had to track me down. It must have been terrible for them.”

Eventually he was passed a stark message: your brother has been killed. “I said, ‘Which one?’ I got a flight home the next day or two days later. I don’t remember too much after that. The whole experience was very damaging in some ways. I was just coming up to 17. Yeah, tough. Really tough.

“It’s difficult to know what was in my head, and I probably wasn’t aware of a lot of stuff I was going through just because, like a lot of people do, you internalise it, and who knows how long that stuff stays with you?

“There’s a lot in your life where it is difficult to quantify what it does to you. We’re all good at giving advice to other people: ‘Oh yeah, you have to talk about things.’ But most of us are guilty of not doing that thing we tell other people they should do.”

His parents, especially his mother, never truly recovered and he remembers the jolting experience of seeing the driver of the car — who was unscathed, but whom he doesn’t blame — around town shortly after Marc’s funeral.

A year later Nige entered professional football, joining Shrewsbury Town from non-League Heanor Town, and describes himself as “probably quite difficult” back then. “I remember having a real go at [the first-team goalkeeper] Bob Wardle. I was in the reserves. I think the senior players thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ but I found the professional world difficult to start with. Dressing rooms were not easy environments, especially when you go in as a college boy. And there was a lot of anger in me about my brother.”

However, things would settle inside him and Shrewsbury became a golden place. He wouldn’t swap his grounding. Pre-seasons when the squad ran up the Shropshire hills then went to the Crown pub opposite Gay Meadow for pints with the manager and directors, before trying to run it all off again the following day. Pay of 80 quid a week and holidays where he youth- hostelled in the Lake District. Being taught tricks of the centre-half trade by the gnarly Colin Griffin. Like what? “Well . . . he was very good at elbowing people in the face for a start.”

After scaling higher playing heights with Wednesday and Middlesbrough — both of whom he captained to promotions and cup finals — he started in management back in humble surrounds, at Carlisle. There Wilkes and his other assistant, John Halpin, were always having to ring round to find a practice field because the River Petteril had flooded the grass behind the stadium where they were expected to train. “We’d arrive at some pitches and go round picking the dog shit up with our little training cones. That was every day.”

Michael Knighton was chairman and sold Carlisle’s only fit goalkeeper on deadline day. Nige signed an out-of-favour Swindon goalkeeper, Jimmy Glass, who kept Carlisle in the league by scoring at a corner in stoppage time of their final game. “I think, ‘If we’d gone down . . .’ The effect it would have had on my career.

“And you have to remind yourself you are not always in control. The line between success and failure is so fragile and you can’t control everything. The managers who want total control damage themselves and damage people around them. One thing I’ve learnt is sometimes you’ve got to run with things and let them go their own way and have a subtle touch. It’s like steering a big bloody boat.”

You accrue such management insights over time. His others involve the importance of authenticity, of having “diversity of characters” in a coaching staff, and that culture and craft knowledge are passed on almost better by good senior players than coaches.

“My view of management is it’s an overview of the whole operation, whereas I think a lot of modern managers are specifically just football, which is OK, but what I’m saying is you’ve got to understand what you are yourself — and it’s important clubs understand what they’re looking for.”

He chuckles about the self-styled “super-coaches” who “like to talk about themselves a lot, and tactics”. Agents? “Never get involved with them. Because it’s really crucial my relationship with players is based on football and not finance or the bullshit that goes with the modern game, if you like.”

Some of this is old school, yet, for a man on the cusp of his seventh decade, he seems in appearance and outlook remarkably youthful. He loves “childish” humour and being around young people and his 2½ years at Bristol City have involved radically lowering the age profile of the squad while slashing the wage bill to keep the club FFP compliant.

Suffusing the team with academy products such as Tommy Conway, Sam Bell, Ephraim Yeboah and Alex Scott (sold to Bournemouth this summer for £25 million), he has made about £30 million on transfers, improved league finishes year on year and introduced a playing style that combines possession, pressing and athleticism. This season’s aim? The play-off places, minimum. “I think it’s really important we have a successful season. I’m in the last year of my contract, so I need that myself.”

The birthday will be a quiet celebration with his wife, Nicky, their children, James and Hannah, their partners and his grandchildren. He won’t be thinking much about football. One foot in, one foot out — out in the real world. That’s the way.

When I ask for the best and worst football experiences of his 60 years they both involve Leicester City, where his knack for bringing people together, doing things differently, creating culture and promoting talent laid the groundwork for a miracle but the bitter personal disappointment of leaving the club just before the 2015-16 title season.

“My favourite moment in management was winning League One with Leicester. Getting to the Premier League was all right but League One was brilliant. We had so much fun. For our last game, Crewe away, the fans came in fancy dress and we [the Leicester staff] ended up in a bar with some Norwegians — one had a guitar — singing Bohemian Rhapsody.

“So it’s not necessarily the football, it’s the camaraderie and building something. That’s where people sometimes miss what it is about. People like to be part of something.”

And by “it” he could mean football or could mean life, but is probably speaking about both.