Here We Are Now… Entertain Us (Marc Skinner interview)

A substantial four-page interview with Manchester United’s head coach, in his first season after succeeding Casey Stoney. Marc Skinner is unusually forthcoming about the gap between the touchline persona and the man – an introvert who avoids social media and whose energy goes home to partner Laura Bassett and their daughter – and about deliberately not rewriting a club he found unbroken. His coaching philosophy is freedom within a framework: decision-making rather than patterning, spaces rather than obstacles, a lesson he traces to a physio telling him at 16 what the Spanish see when they look at a back four. He is candid about arriving in Orlando with an ego and having to shed it, about the humidity, trades and draft, and about learning from Bassett that coaches stop coaching senior players.