Chris Hughton pauses mid-answer and excuses himself from the interview. The patter of tiny feet outside his living room has distracted him and Hughton wants to check in on the youngest of his 10 grandchildren. A moment later, he is cradling in his arms two-year-old Amara, the toddler having just arrived with mum Aisha for a morning visit.
With his fit, youthful appearance, it is easy to forget that Hughton now ranks among the senior statesmen of English football, a 63-year-old veteran of three decades coaching in the top two leagues and 14 years of them as a highly-respected manager or head coach.
His latest role will shortly take him to the World Cup as technical advisor for the Ghana national team, assisting head coach Otto Addo in the task of trying to restore some success to a Black Stars side who upset the odds to defeat Nigeria in a qualifying play-off.
Chris Hughton has served as Ghana’s technical advisor since February and will travel to Qatar
In an interview lasting more than an hour and a half — his only one with a national newspaper ahead of travelling to Qatar — Hughton will discuss the challenge of managing expectations of a football-mad nation, admit his desire to return to the impossibly unstable world of club management and lament the continued failure to tackle properly the lack of management opportunities for black and ethnic minority candidates. He begins, though, by recounting the unlikely circumstances in which Ghana offered him the job.
At the start of the year, he was on a family trip to the country when the press began to link him to the head coach’s role that had been vacated with the sacking of Milovan Rajevac, the Serbian who was discarded for failing to lead the national team out of the group stage of the African Cup of Nations. Though the speculation was overstated, the idea of recruiting Hughton quickly gathered momentum and he was soon offered a position assisting Addo, a former Ghana international who is also a coach at Borussia Dortmund.
As well as presenting Hughton with a new professional opportunity, the role offered him the chance to connect with the country his father, Willie, left behind in the 1950s for a life in east London.
‘There’s no doubt that played a part,’ says Hughton, sipping coffee in his handsome Hertfordshire home. ‘I do feel a strong connection to the country. So, when they asked if I was prepared to help, using my experience and knowledge, the answer was always going to be yes.’
Otto Addo will manage Ghana in World Cup next month and will be supported by Hughton
While Oddo picks the team and decides on tactics, Hughton attends training, contributes to discussions with the coaching staff — which includes former Middlesbrough defender George Boateng — and alleviates the pressure on Oddo by assuming some of the administrative responsibilities involved in preparing for the tournament.
They have taken charge of a national team emerging from an uneven period in its history, their fortunes having declined since the high point of the 2010 World Cup, when they lost a quarter-final only after Luis Suarez had famously denied them an extra-time winner with a deliberate, goal-line handball.
The management team had already changed twice in 18 months before Rajevac was appointed in September. His team finished bottom of their AFCON group before Otto and Hughton masterminded the two-legged Nigeria win at short notice.
Their place in the fourth pot for the World Cup draw always meant they would be given a difficult group and so it turned out, with Portugal, Uruguay and South Korea their opponents in Qatar.
As the conduit between the coaching staff and the federation, then, Hughton has a tricky task to manage expectations without damaging the mood. ‘It is difficult in a way,’ he says. ‘I’m confident in the squad and the coaching staff, but part of my role should be to be realistic. Not to dampen expectations, but to speak honestly.
Ghana secured a place in the World Cup earlier this year after beating Nigeria in the play-offs
‘We are where we are, the lowest-seeded team in a group of four — and it’s a tough group. In my conversations with people, I encourage them not to get too carried away, but this is the World Cup. They [the federation] will be expecting us to do well. So will the country. It’s a cup competition and we have to be confident.’
Hughton’s one experience of a World Cup, as a player with Republic of Ireland in 1990, points to the success that an unfancied but well-drilled international side can enjoy in tournament football. With Hughton drawing towards the end of his career and given a place on the bench, Jack Charlton’s team drew with both Holland and Bobby Robson’s England before eliminating Romania to reach the last eight.
By then, Hughton had broken down several significant racial barriers in a career dating back to the late 1970s. For a period, he was the only black player in Tottenham’s first team and became the first to represent his country, for whom he qualified via his mother. He went on to become one of only nine black managers to hold a full-time position in the Premier League and is comfortably the most experienced.
As a result, you are inclined to sit up and listen when Hughton insists clubs and authorities are still not doing enough to address the scarcity of black and ethnic-minority managers and head coaches, despite the increased awareness of the issue since the Black Lives Matter movement impacted on the game.
‘Superficially, yes, there have been some changes,’ he says. ‘There are more black and ethnic coaches now involved at grass roots, academy level, Under 21s. But what hasn’t changed is the level of black and ethnic managers and coaches at the top level. And that will always be the barometer.’
Hughton played 53 times for the Republic of Ireland and was part of the squad that reached the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup
Currently, though 34 per cent of players in the Football League are black, there are only five such managers in full-time positions through the pyramid, Patrick Vieira at Crystal Palace, Paul Ince with Reading, Burnley’s Vincent Kompany, Sheffield Wednesday’s Darren Moore and Keith Curle at Hartlepool United.
More disturbingly, there are only two in Europe’s big five leagues, Vieira and Antoine Kombouare, of Nantes. ‘For sure, there is still a huge lack of diversity in certain aspects of our game. And it’s not because the talent pool isn’t there. I will never accept that.’ Hughton is careful to commend efforts among stakeholders thus far to address the problem but is adamant some of them could go further. In doing so, he echoes the thoughts of Les Ferdinand, the QPR director of football who last week said the Football Association’s leadership diversity code had made ‘no difference whatsoever’ since it was introduced in November.
Like Ferdinand, Hughton wants the voluntary code to become mandatory in an effort to broaden the ethnic make-up within every department at a club. He is also frustrated that sides are failing to implement the Rooney Rule that requires them to interview a black or ethnic-minority candidate for all managerial and head-coach vacancies, despite it being mandatory within the Football League.
‘I believe in the Rooney Rule, but does it work? And do our organisations and clubs implement it? Probably no. What happens is what has always happened. The club will sack a manager and already have someone in place for the job.
Crystal Palace boss Patrick Vieira is just one of five black managers in English football
‘We have to think why the Rooney Rule was put in place in the first place. It was to try and redress the imbalances. And you have to think, well, why are there these imbalances?’ The suggestion is that the mindset of those in power has not changed sufficiently.
‘A lot of what organisations are trying to implement — are they really trying to implement them in the best way they can, to ensure as much diversity as possible?’
As a player, Hughton was quite frequently the target of racist abuse from the terraces. For years, the behaviour went unchecked by the authorities, leaving the few black players in the game to deal with it in silence, often without the support of team-mates. ‘I never looked for support from them. You experienced it, you got on with it. The support mechanisms were your home life, family and friends. That was the comfort zone. You’d go back to them and try to process it.’
As a player, Hughton was quite frequently the target of racist abuse from the terraces
Presumably with this experience in mind, he is frustrated that UEFA continue to issue relatively inconsequential fines to clubs whose supporters continue to exhibit such behaviour.
Only last month Juventus and Eintracht Frankfurt had to pay €15,000 (£13,050) for the racist conduct of their fans, as well as being subjected to partial stadium closures in the Champions League. Juve’s amounted only to a minimum of 1,000 seats and Frankfurt’s was suspended.
‘If that’s what the sentence is, you can generally read something into that,’ Hughton says, with an air almost of resignation. ‘If the punishments for racism are some so minimal, why is that?
‘The policy is a reflection of the people governing these punishments. They’re saying that’s the value we put on the racism. And as somebody that’s been on the end of it, that is frustrating. It makes you think, well, if that’s the value they put on it, then it’s not going to change.’
The son of a postman and a mum who worked in a local school, Hughton says he only became aware of his racial identity once his world expanded beyond Upton Park, the fairly diverse neighbourhood of his youth. Initially, he was alerted to it through the occasional snide comment from an outsider to his social network, but then he turned…
