When Accrington Stanley travelled to Scotland for a series of pre-season friendlies in the summer of 2005, the first game was against the wonderfully named Dundonald Bluebell, a club from Fife, then competing in the country’s eastern junior league.
Accrington would finish that 2005-06 campaign as champions of the National League, English football’s fifth tier, an achievement nobody foresaw given the limited finances available, but they were expected to easily win that friendly against a team made up of amateur players.
Their manager John Coleman had tried to make it a relaxed trip. He did not want to overburden his squad with training and instead tried to build fitness and tactics through games. It was as much a social getaway, where newcomers bonded with their team-mates over drinks, but on reflection, Coleman thinks the start of the camp was too laid-back. “It showed in the performance,” he admits.
While Accrington would win that game, it was only narrowly, and having been behind at half-time. When Coleman launched into the players in the dressing room, the response from one of them took him by surprise. The latest arrival at Accrington was Anthony Barry, a 19-year-old midfielder whose experience amounted to a childhood in Everton’s youth system and, following release, a short period with Coventry City’s reserves.
“He wasn’t slow in coming forward with his opinion,” recalls Coleman, who took turns with his assistant Jimmy Bell and first-team coach Paul Cook to remind the lad who was in charge. “We all jumped down his throat,” Coleman laughs. “But it showed to the staff and the rest of the squad that he had the guts to stand up for himself in a new environment. He had something about him.”
Nearly 20 years later, Barry is assistant manager of the English national team under Thomas Tuchel, who he has previously worked with at Chelsea and Bayern Munich.
Barry has had an extraordinary coaching journey, considering his playing experiences took him no higher than League One, the English game’s third division. There have also been spells with the national teams of the Republic of Ireland, Belgium and Portugal. Last summer, it was reported in the UK’s Times newspaper that he was being considered for the manager’s job at leading Portuguese side Porto.
Barry with Tuchel at the German’s unveiling as England manager in October last year (Eddie Keogh/The FA/Getty Images)
Coleman remains one of his closest friends in football and is able to provide insight into the formative parts of his playing and coaching careers. The pair have much in common, starting with the fact they both come from the same city and support Liverpool, the club members of Barry’s family follow all over Europe and beyond.
He recalls meeting Barry for the first time, just a few weeks before that trip to Scotland. He convinced him to sign for Accrington over glasses of coke in a pub in Allerton, to the south of Liverpool’s city centre.
“I’ve said to nearly every player I’ve signed, ‘If the sum of your ambition is to play for Accrington, you’re the wrong person for me. I want players who are able to see past us. We’ll use each other.’ They’ll use me as a stepping stone and I’ll use them for their natural ability and enthusiasm. I saw that in Anthony straight away.”
Coleman, whose association with Accrington stretches across 23 seasons over two spells as their manager, would haul the club from the third tier of non-League football to League One. Now in charge of League Two side Gillingham, he says that during his first term at Lancashire side Accrington, he prided himself on picking up the untapped talent from the neighbouring Merseyside area, and Barry fell into that category.
“I used to see it like (former Arsenal manager) Arsene Wenger’s relationship with (his native) France. If I don’t get the best players coming out of Liverpool and Everton, then I’m not doing my job properly,” continues Coleman, who thinks Barry was let go by the latter because of his size and ultimately, “there were too many players in his way.”
A few years earlier, Coleman had taken on a teenage Peter Cavanagh following his release by Liverpool and he’d later emerged as Accrington club captain.
Coleman thinks the majority of youngsters see the lower divisions of the EFL and non-League as a step down if they have to leave Premier League sides, but he believes the opposite is true: “Most of these lads have only played under-21 football where nobody is watching and the points don’t really matter. Anthony understood what he was joining and embraced it. He saw it as a chance to trampoline back towards where he wanted to be.”
Accrington could not offer him much money. In the same period, Coleman would also convince fellow Liverpudlians Gary Roberts and Andy Mangan to join, players who have subsequently launched their own coaching careers. Each one was initially on £150 a week with the promise that if they did well, the money would go up. Coleman says those figures soon doubled.
Barry, right, playing for Accrington in 2006 (Barrington Coombs/PA Images/Getty Images)
“We wanted someone who could win balls and keep it moving; Anthony ticked both boxes and he became the enforcer in midfield,” Coleman says. “If we’re talking numbers, as they do now, he was a six. Good footballer. He kept us playing. Tenacious in the tackle. Very, very fit. Covered a lot of ground. We used to do a lot of 12-minute runs in training and he’d always be in the top three.”
Though Accrington were one of the favourites for relegation in that 2005-06 season, they ended up easily winning the title, returning to the Football League after a 44-year absence. Halfway through the campaign, however, Barry was on the move again, this time jumping up two divisions to League One. His last game was away against Exeter City, and he starred in a 3-1 win that was shown live on Sky Sports.
Coleman had promised Barry that if a club from a higher league came in for him, he could leave. As a non-contract player, Yeovil Town were not obliged to pay anything for him but did offer a small fee.
At the end of his first full season in Somerset, Barry almost helped Yeovil into the Championship, only for Blackpool to progress at their expense with a 2-0 win in the play-off final at Wembley. He left Yeovil at the end of the following season and for the next six years bounced around mainly non-League clubs, from Chester City to Wrexham to Fleetwood Town to Forest Green Rovers, before rejoining Coleman at Accrington in October 2014 on an initial loan at age 29.
Coleman could see he wasn’t as mobile as he used to be but he wanted him for his “enthusiasm and experience”. Gradually, Barry started to speak to Coleman more about football and they would go for coffee a couple of times a week at a cafe in the Wavertree district of Liverpool. Coleman’s daughter lived near Barry, so he would sometimes pop around to his house with his grandson: “None of these meetings were formal. It was just a series of conversations with a mate.”
It was clear to Coleman that Barry wanted to become a coach, so he arranged for him to work with the club’s under-16 players with Ged Brannan, formerly a player with Tranmere Rovers and Manchester City. Coleman let him get on with it and never saw one of his sessions but the reports back about Barry were positive.
Accrington were not and are not a wealthy club, and Barry paid out of his own pocket to go on a series of courses, including one about the benefits of meditation. “Anthony was single-minded in that respect because no one was telling him to do it. He took learning very seriously,” Coleman says.
Since starting on his own coaching journey with Coleman at Accrington, Cook’s career had taken him to Wigan Athletic, where he was manager. In 2017, Cook asked Barry to join his coaching staff there. He worked closely with the Wigan players, specialising in one-on-one sessions.
“Anthony is very dedicated but he is also smart,” Coleman says. “He understood that players tend to love talking about themselves and the best ones like to work individually on their game.”
Barry working with Tuchel at Bayern Munich last year (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
Barry, for example, would trawl through a player’s history and compile a body of information about their on-pitch decisions. He would talk to them about why they made those choices and try to understand their thought processes. While it helped him learn more about the characters he was dealing with, it also made the players feel valued, allowing him to get on-side with them.
Famously, Barry focused on throw-ins when studying for his UEFA Pro Licence and Cook believes this helped Wigan retain possession a lot more. On one of these courses, Barry became friendly with former Chelsea and England midfielder Frank Lampard, then another student. When Lampard became Chelsea’s manager in July 2019, he hired Barry. When Lampard was sacked 18 months later, replacement Tuchel insisted that Barry be retained after hearing about his work. The pair have been a partnership ever since.
Coleman concludes that if footballers like their coach, they work harder, and he describes Barry as fundamentally being “a really nice lad”. Yet he stresses coaching isn’t a popularity contest: “Players will see straight through you if you’ve got no substance. So as well as liking you, they’ve got to trust you and they’ve got to believe in you. I think Anthony ticks all of those boxes.”
For a Scouser without a background in Premier League football, it might have been hard for Barry to earn respect at Chelsea but Coleman thinks he was comfortable enough in his own skin to impose himself. Under Tuchel, Chelsea won the 2020-21 Champions League and Coleman is convinced Barry will end up managing at that level in his own right at some point.
Importantly for Coleman, Barry has never forgotten who has done well by him. When he and Bell lost their jobs at Accrington last March, Barry responded by inviting the pair to Munich to attend a key Bundesliga game against Borussia Dortmund a few weeks later.
It had already been announced by then that Tuchel would be leaving the club at the end of the season, and Bayern were trailing eventual champions Bayer Leverkusen at the top of the table, but Barry took the time to arrange it for Coleman and Bell to sit in a hospitality box at the Allianz Arena. Later, even after a 2-0 home defeat for Bayern, he made a fuss of them.
“That’s the thing,” says Coleman. “Anthony hasn’t changed one bit.”
(Top photo: Barry at an England training session this week; Eddie Keogh/The FA via Getty Images)
