Leicester have given Steve Cooper the Premier League opportunity he has craved since leaving Forest

He has been running a lot. It helps him clear his mind and focus his thinking. As head coach of Nottingham Forest, he would often go jogging on the morning of a match to help him decide on the words for his team speech and the most inspiring way to deliver it.

But now Steve Cooper had to think about the next phase of his professional life.

Losing his job at Forest last December had been an emotional and draining experience. But once he got his head clear, he was always convinced that if he remained patient – ​​and made sure he didn’t undersell himself – he would get the kind of opportunity that Leicester City presented six months later.

Vacancies abounded from Championship clubs hoping for the touch of magic that saw Cooper lift Forest from the bottom of English football’s second tier when he was promoted to the Premier League in less than a year.

Sunderland wanted him. Birmingham City wanted him. Burnley too. Stoke City, Norwich City and Hull City all put out feelers. And so did several others. Of course they did: At that level, hiring Cooper is almost a guarantee of making the playoffs and maybe doing something spectacular.

But the danger for Cooper was that he was being typecast as an elite Championship manager. He wanted another crack at the Premier League. And in the end, he was right to wait. If Leicester need a feat of escapology to ensure their impending return to the English top division lasts longer than one season – it seems almost certain they will be awarded points for breaching the Profitability and Sustainability (PSR) rules – Forest’s recent history suggests they have chosen wisely.

Do you want the hard evidence? An analytical study regarding Forest’s first season in the Premier League in 2022-23 found that 68 percent of players were likely to be relegated. Their recruitment was extensive and erratic. Everything felt chaotic. The experts wrote them off. The bookmakers too. And yet Cooper kept them busy with a game to spare.

Cooper will be tasked with keeping Leicester in promotion following their immediate return to the Premier League (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

He considers it as great an achievement as winning promotion through the play-offs a year earlier with a team that had taken one point from their first seven league games under Chris Hughton. It was an almost improbable turnaround and Cooper was long loved and praised at the City Ground like no manager since Brian Clough.

Against that backdrop, it was extremely painful for him when it became clear again and again that the Forest hierarchy were dissatisfied with his work and sounding out other managers. Cooper was sacked on 19 December after a poor run (one win in 13, with seven defeats) that left them 17th in the 20-team division, five points above the relegation places. The only small consolation was that he had known it was coming for a while. It had almost happened several times.

Since then, he has focused on making sure he would be ready if he were given another chance in the Premier League.

There was a holiday to Barbados, family time and the opportunity to do some things that might have been difficult to arrange when he was working. If you were at Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds performance at the Royal Albert Hall you may have seen him.

But above all, he wanted to use the time to improve himself. He has worked with specialist analysts to scrutinize every aspect of his management. He has examined all the data. He has been busy watching all kinds of matches at home and abroad. And when he wasn’t away somewhere, he was often at the Racecourse Ground watching Wrexham, his local club. In short, he tried to absorb as much new information as possible. He is determined to improve and ensure, as all good managers do, that he is always developing. He was open to management abroad, possibly in the Bundesliga.

What Leicester fans will find is a manager with an incredibly deft talent for inspiring players and fostering a spirit of togetherness. It is his greatest strength. Even as Forest broke all kinds of records by signing 29 players in the 2022-23 season, Cooper had the force of personality to bring everyone together and create what sometimes felt like a siege mentality.

Consider how he transformed Djed Spence from an outcast at Middlesbrough to a £20 million signing for Tottenham Hotspur and how, without Cooper’s guidance, the same player was never able to reproduce the electrifying form that prompted Arsenal’s Gabriel Martinelli to hail him as the strongest to describe. opponent he encountered. It all comes back to Cooper’s human touch.

Cooper got the best out of Spence – Spurs paid £20m for him (Jon Hobley/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

At 44, he is still relatively young for a manager, with a portfolio of successes including winning the Under-17 World Cup with England and taking Swansea City to back-to-back play-off finishes in the Championship. Cooper is a student of the game and one of the youngest people – perhaps even the youngest – to gain his UEFA Pro License coaching qualification, at the age of 27. And like many modern managers, he has come to realize that it is better to adapt. instead of being completely tied to one playstyle.

On Forest’s return to the Premier League, Cooper wanted to play an extended style with an attacking full-back system, similar to the approach that had helped Forest win the Championship. However, it soon became clear that a rethink was needed as the low point was a 4-0 defeat at Leicester that almost cost him his job.

From then on, Forest played with a stiffer structure, denying their opponents space and breaking out with quick, sharp counter-attacks. It wasn’t always pleasing to the eye, but it worked. Liverpool and Arsenal were among the teams Forest defeated to stay alive. Leicester too.

Things eventually turned sour for him at Forest, where the owner, Evangelos Marinakis, did not believe Cooper deserved all the praise from fans and favorable publicity.

Everything got broken behind the scenes and when the farewell came, there were those with knowledge of the situation who were surprised that he lasted so long. It’s not easy being a manager at Forest, especially one who started last season with four right backs and eight central defenders. Cooper had no idea of ​​some of the players who had been signed until they arrived at the training ground. And yet overall he loved it at Forest, absolutely loved it.

Against that backdrop, Cooper’s return to management, 30 miles away on the A46, will inevitably add an extra spark to the Leicester-Forest rivalry.

Cooper will learn that, for the most part, Leicester fans are more committed to that rivalry than their counterparts in Nottingham. But it’s not entirely one-sided and it will be intriguing to see how it plays out.

Many Leicester fans initially found it difficult to accept Martin O’Neill – two-time European Cup winner with Forest – when he became their manager in 1995. O’Neill faced all kinds of protests during a difficult start. to the track. He still remembers the graffiti for “O’Neill Out” plastered on the walls of an old factory near their old Filbert Street ground and the near-mutiny he encountered during a 2-0 home defeat to Sheffield United. It was, in O’Neill’s words, “volcanic rage.”

The relevant chapter in Alex Montgomery’s 2003 biography of O’Neill was called “Winning the War.” And boy, the subject of the book did just that. O’Neill established himself as a hero at Leicester, leading the club to promotion, top ten finishes, two League Cups and countless other highlights. Until Claudio Ranieri won the title with Leicester in 2016, O’Neill had realistic credentials to be considered the most popular manager in the club’s history.

However, it can be complicated. At Forest, many fans will remember how the popularity of Nigel Clough – the club’s post-war record scorer and son of Brian – declined dramatically after he took over as manager of their main rivals, Derby County, in 2009.

It is usually no longer held against Clough, but the football rivalry can cut deep and he made a number of provocative comments that ended badly in Nottingham. As a former manager of Burton Albion, he was mocked with chants of “non-League Nigel” on his return to the City Ground. Hostilities increased and resentment festered. In an East Midlands derby, Billy Davies accused Clough of putting him on his knees during a touchline brawl involving the two managers.

With Cooper, however, it is difficult to imagine that he will deliberately stoke the rivalry. He has a new group of supporters to please and win over, but it doesn’t have to be at Forest’s expense. He’s too sensible for that. He is acutely aware that the adulation he received at Nottingham was rare and that he may never encounter anything of that level again in his life.

Cooper led Forest to promotion from the Championship (Christopher Lee/Getty Images)

They were happy times. Each victory was celebrated with a series of fist pumps. Cooper wore clothes from Paul Smith, a fashion label that started in Nottingham. He loved the history of the club and speaking to the European Cup winners. He talked about the ‘football soul’ of City Ground. To use the popular expression, he gets it. Is it possible he can ‘get it’ for Leicester too, without damaging his legacy at Nottingham? He will do his best.

It says a lot about him that he never made public the more unpleasant aspects of his last fourteen months at Forest. He still has many friends and admirers at the club and on the day of his dismissal it was important that he left in the most dignified manner.

Even when Nuno Esperito Santos took over his job at Nottingham, Cooper went to the boardroom to shake hands with Marinakis and wish him well.

Over the coming days and weeks, he would lose count of the number of sympathetic messages and phone calls he received from other people within the industry.

But Cooper wasn’t just thinking about himself. Before setting off on the long drive back to North Wales, he visited a terminally ill Forest fan, with motor neurone disease, who he had befriended during his two years in Nottingham. Cooper wanted to give him his Forest top and tell him personally how much he would miss managing Forest.

That, in short, is ‘Coops’ – a man considered one of the good guys throughout the industry.

He still has a site south of Nottingham, convenient to Leicester’s training ground. His appointment comes just six months after the loss of his last job and regardless of the rivalry between the two clubs, he will quickly win over any doubters if he can have the same impact for his new employers as he did with the previous ones.

(Top photo: Marc Atkins/Getty Images)