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Eckstein Talks About Life, Old Places, New Opportunities..April 15, 2019
Genoa manager Ian Eckstein conducted a recent phone interview with the Regina Leader-Post. In this Leader-Post exclusive, the former Canadian National Team manager discusses his own personal history, and where he hopes the future may lead.
Fourteen and a half years ago, Ian Eckstein, a product of Regina, was sitting in a dead-end customer service job, when he received the call of his life. He was asked to manage The Hereford United Bulls, then of the English Nationwide Conference. Almost fifteen years, four teams, and one lengthy stint with Team Canada later, he finds himself in Italy. It's a new place, with a new opportunity and he has a renewed sense of enthusiasm.
LP: Ian, thank you so much for taking time out to talk today. I don't know why it's taken this long for us to get an interview with you...
IE: *laughing*...I've been a little busy and quite frankly, media attention doesn't do a whole bunch for me. But I'm proud to speak to you and to the people of Regina.
LP: You spent nearly ten years as the manager of Team Canada. What do you feel your legacy was, and is, from your time there?
IE: Good question. I'm not a fan of the word "legacy". You talk about someone's legacy after they've retired or are dead, and I'm certainly neither of those *laughs*. In all seriousness, I think, or, at least I hope what we did is to increase the exposure of soccer on a nationwide scale. Clearly, it won't overtake hockey or (north american style) football, but certainly we made some strides, I think the evidence of that is the success we had at bringing new kids on board into the under-20 system, and then having those kids come up to the senior team and start within only a year or two. In some cases, Jason Kindel comes to mind specifically, we had kids starting on the senior team at sixteen and seventeen years old. Those experiences are absolutely invaluable for a youngster. Some argued with me that I was throwing these guys to the wolves too quickly, but I don't agree with that. I think the quicker you can get someone exposed to a higher level of competition and get them used to it, the better off they'll be in the long run. Fortunately, we did enough to bring talent in that those who did start that young were able to compete without risking hurting their own confidence, which is a bonus.
[LP] You used the phrase "thrown to the wolves" just now...[/i]
IE: (interrupting)..I think I see where this is going, but go ahead....*chuckles*
LP: You may have had the shortest head coach/manager tenure in the history of sport with Wolverhampton, where you managed for thirteen days. Talk about the reasons for wanting to take on that job, and then the reasons for why you left after less than two weeks.
IE: Well, at that point, I had just finished either my first or second year with Team Canada, at this point I don't remember which, and I was jonesing for club football, even back then. At heart, I find club management so much easier than national management, although I was and am obviously very proud of the time I spent managing our national team.
That said, I wanted to see if I could take on the challenge, during a little bit of downtime with Team Canada, of managing a high-level club. They were in the English Championship at that point, and, I won't lie to you, the money they offered was fantastic. However, I got there, and much like with Luton, which I left a while ago, we had some early success, but things just didn't feel right almost from the minute I arrived. So, I did what I needed to do to preserve my sanity and I resigned.
Thankfully the contract was backdated to the beginning of the year and they bought me out of it.
LP: You've alwas spoken glowingly of your time at Hereford United, even in the years since you left. You've got a special connection to that place and the people involved, even to the point where you've attempted to bring certain guys in to other teams you've managed. For those who may not know all of your history, talk about Hereford a bit and why it's so close to you, even still to this day..
IE: Yeah, I do feel a connection to Hereford, even now. They gave me my start, I earned my first league title (Conference National 2005/06), my first cup win, and achieved my 100th win there. Graham Turner, who's the chairman of the board there is someone who I have alot of respect for and who I have all the time in the world for. John Trewick, who was my assistant manager and who has gone on to manage various clubs at various levels all around England is still a friend of mine. Ollie Nyberg, my central defender at Hereford was someone who I managed to convince (though it didn't take much) to join me at Luton. I appreciated that from him. Yeah, it's a special place.
LP: And you moved from Hereford, of course, to spend many many years as manager of Team Canada. Talk about that experience..
IE: Anytime someone has a chance to manage the national side of their home country, it's absolutely an honour beyond all words, and that's what my nine years in Edmonton were, plain and simple. I strongly regret that we weren't able to bring Canada either a Gold Cup or a World Cup championship. Not winning a Gold Cup ranks still as one of the bigger disappointments of my career.
That being said, I can point to player and coach development as the things I'm proudest of, not to mention the fact that we guided the team to three consecutive World Cup appearances, and we very nearly got out of the group stage in 2014. When I arrived, in 2009, Canada had only ever been to one World Cup ever, in 1986, and lost badly in the group stage.
Ante Razov, who I brought on as my assistant manager and manager of our youth program will be one of the great managers of our time, if he's given the opportunity. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I didn't bring him with me here to Genoa. I don't want him to be constantly under my wing. I brought him with me to Luton for the experience, and to reward him for his loyalty to me. I thought that he would do well at a mid-to-high level English club, and he's proven me right. He can handle himself, and I hope that when his Luton contract runs out in a year or so that he'll have an opportunity to show what he can do on his own. He deserves it and he's totally capable.
LP: I read a comment from you recently where you said that you felt that joining Luton was the worst decision you've made in your career. Talk about that, and what made you decide to join Luton in the first place, straight from a long, no-doubt taxing stint with Team Canada...
IE: Hindsight being what it is, I joined Luton for the money, first and foremost, which is the wrong reason. Secondly, I joined because I wanted to get back to England and try my hand at club management again and they were the first ones who really showed interest. Look, I knew going in it was a bad choice. I knew I needed time off, and towards the end of my time there, I knew it wasn't going to last. Then certain things started coming out in the press about a job in Parma, which I said that I might be interested in EVENTUALLY, because I love Italy (which is the reason why I'm back here now). It's a beautiful country. Unfortuately, those comments were taken the wrong way by the press and by my boss at the time at Luton, and it was decided that the best thing I could do was to leave, but not before he made some comments of his own in the media, which stung me.
LP: Have you spoken to Bill Tomlinson since?
IE: No. After I left, I had fully intended to get the heck out of England, and come back to Canada, which is what I did. I even stopped in Regina for a few days to visit family around the beginning of December last year. And then this job with Genoa came up. But no, to answer the question properly, we haven't spoken and I don't think we will. If he calls to talk to me about a staff member for a reference or something, I'll take his call. That's a professional courtesy, but it won't extend beyond that.
LP: And now, you find yourself back in Italy after you said you wouldn't take a job there...
IE: Life's crazy isn't it? Yeah, I'll tell you, I must either be a glutton for punnishment or a workaholic because I was going nuts at home after about two weeks. I was dying for the phone to ring. Fortunately, it did, and I'm here now and loving every second of it. This is as good a team, and as good a group of people as I've been associated with in my career. It's also as big a challenge, from a personal social standpoint. I didn't know the language very well when I arrived, I didn't really know the culture very well. But I've been accepted and welcomed and I've been given the resources to build this into the best team that I've ever been a part of, and that's what we're in the midst of doing right now. This is a team that's destined for greatness and I want to be a part of it.
I told the press when I was introduced that I wanted to win my 300th game here. That holds true. I've never said that in any other situation. I've always said, even just in private "Well, we'll finish this three year contract and see what happens". With this group, I'm already looking six or eight or ten years down the road, in the back of my mind. I'm focusing on day to day, don't get me wrong, but I love the idea of being here ten years. I'd love to be on the level of José Mourinho, who manages Chelsea to this day. He's been there an eternity and shows no signs of slowing down and his success speaks for itself.
On a side note, and I can't remember where I read this exactly, but I read somewhere fairly recently, it may have been in a soccer magazine, that, under his guidance at Chelsea, he's approaching €1,000,000,000 in terms of players bought. ONE BILLION EUROS! That's nearly a billion and a half Canadian dollars just in players he's purchased from other clubs in his career. And that's just with a single club. I'd love to be at that point. Although, having said that, he's also sold over $750,000,000.00 Canadian worth of his players.
And that's been a hallmark of my career. I sell more than I buy, by about two to one from a financial standpoint, because I tend to look for players who are out of contract who you don't have to pay the transfer fees for. Free agency is the name of the game in North America, when it comes to building a successful sports franchise, and I'm using that principle to the best of my ability in Europe.
LP: So where do you go from here? Do you think Italy will be the last stop on your career before you call it quits? You're still young.
IE: In all honesty, I'd love to make this the last stop of my career. Realistically, I can see myself here for ten years. At that point, I'll be in my early 50's ..still very young. So, yeah, if I could be here for the duration, if I'm allowed to be, I'd love it, but one never knows. All I know is that we'll do our best to bring success to the club and let things fall where they will.
Strange Days Indeed... Personal Thoughts - July 16, 2022
Where do I begin when describing what has gone on in the last three years?
I'm still with Genoa (which, to some, may be surprising, considering my history of leaving clubs for other opportunities after only a few years. More on that later...). We won the Italian Serie B in 2018/2019 with a record of 20 wins 9 losses and 13 draws. I signed Marc Bucic (yeah, that Marc Bucic) on July 4th, 2019, and, as I expected, he's been every bit the scoring machine I thought he'd be. He's been the fan's player of the year in each of the last two years.
My first year in the Italian Serie A (which is the highest competitive level I've ever managed at, at the club level) was really not too shabby, when you consider that we were something like 500-1 underdogs to win the division. We finished in 15th place (out of 20 teams) with a record of 10 wins, 17 losses and 11 draws. The next season was one of absolute improvement. We finished in tenth, which is good because the fans expected a mid-table finish. We had a record of 12 wins, 15 losses and 11 draws.
Alesio Grassi, a 17 year old who came up through our youth academy, was my starting keeper for about a fourth of my matches that year, and he did enough by the end of that year (including three or four clean sheets) to earn a new four year contract at €925,000 p/a. This meant that my previous keeper (Giuseppe Ferarri) was relatively expendable, and I chose not to re-sign him after that year, as his contract expired and I thought we'd have good coverage for the youngster.
Perhaps the most personally and professionally gratifying experience that came out of that year was that Genoa had seen enough in me, apparently, to agree to terms on a FIVE year deal (the longest single deal I'd ever signed with any club ever) at €1.5 million p/a. During those negotiations, which lasted all of about one day, I had presented a list of all the teams in the Serie A to the board, ranked in terms of stadium size. We've got a capacity of 38,879, which, at the time, was about the sixth-smallest stadium in the league. I had asked if they might consider expanding our stadium because I thought the extra ticket revenue would be valuable, especially considering I thought we had a VERY legitimate chance to be playing in one of the major European competitions in the very near future. I figured we'd sell out the vast majority of our games with the improvements I planned to make to the on-field product (we've averaged right around 37,500 fans so far). Unfortunately, I was told that the board doesn't own the facility and therefore couldn't do any renovations to it. Okay, so that was shot down, but I had a huge long term deal, with the full financial support of the board. I was sitting in a very good place. My only job now was to not let anyone down.
I knew our biggest weak spot coming into the 2021/2022 year was defense, especially right down the middle, so I splashed out on Vice Cohen, who I purhchased for €19.5 million from Lyon in the French first league. I never expected any level of board interference, but apparently they also recognized the need for us to improve the defense so they told me they'd be the ones to handle the contract negotiations. I was a little surprised and kind of offended in a sense. I did the transfer deal, I put the package together, I should have been able to negotiate his new player contract. No matter, they got the deal done at a relatively cheap price (a million euro p/a).
Clearly this was the one big move we needed to make. We finished SECOND in the league, having spent alot of time in first place and only faltering over the last half dozen or so games of the year to drop to second. This is the first time this team has qualified for Europe since 1924 (the same year they last won the division) and it was the team's first second place finish since 1906. We've qualified for the Euro Cup, although it hasn't been scheduled as yet, so I'm not aware of who we're playing at this point.
The other bonus is that we don't have to go through the qualifying for the Coppa Italia this year. We've not done well in this area, I have to say. We've been eliminated in the third round of qualifying in each of my years at Genoa, so it'll be nice to avoid all that mess for a change.
Having said that....
With all due respect to John Lennon, nobody told me there'd be days like this. Or...weeks.
2022 is a World Cup year. It was completed in early July. Portugal won the whole deal. But, my biggest shock, and, quite frankly, sense of pride, came as I watched Canada finish FOURTH in the whole event. Do I take some credit for it? Candidly, I do in a sense. I think the work that we had done in my last few months as manager of the national program prior to my leaving for Luton set us up really nicely for future success. Granted, Mike Hughes, the guy who succeeded me, deserves most of the credit for giving everyone the tactical and motivational tools that were required to achieve what that program has, but, I have to take some pride in the amount of work that myself and my team (and most everyone is still in their previous positions within the program) did during my time there.
Apparently, a very severe rift developed between Mike Hughes and the Canadian FA immediately following the World Cup, because just eight days ago, on July 10th I received a call from a beat writer from the Edmonton Journal stating that Hughes was on the verge of being fired and that my name was once again at the top of the FA's list to replace him.
My reputation had grown. I was a virtually unknown manager, even during my time with Team Canada, and I really felt like I had grown into my place with Genoa. I am now continentally known, I have guided the team into European play (which is astounding considering that just four years previous the team was merely expected to finish mid-table in the series B). I honestly hadn't heard anything though, so I offered no comment other than to say that I certainly didn't think my name was on any list of candidates, the FA certainly hadn't contacted me, and I wasn't expecting it. Why would they bring in a previous manager who hadn't guided them out of the group stage of the World Cup, let alone to a fourth place finish, as Mike Hughes had just done?
Sure enough, the Canadian FA called me in the early evening (Genoa time) on the fifteenth. They were very gracious about understanding if I didn't want the job, but that I was on their list of candidates and that they'd spent the week talking to a few other candidates and people who I knew both inside and outside of Canada who had all said that if anyone should do it, they should bring me back. I was floored. I actually asked if I was first on their short list and they were honest in saying not initially, because they didn't think I'd accept the job due to my current circumstances. I told them I was very happy here, and that if something DID happen in the near term with Team Canada they would need to understand that I would under no circumstances move myself back to Canada. I told them that Genoa came first, that I was under a five year contract with them that I fully intended to honour to the fullest of my ability. They told me they wanted to meet face to face. Now, this all has happened in the last couple of days. As I sit here now, I'm seriously considering packing a bag for Edmonton. I could use a week or so of downtime, and it'll be good to see everyone again. I honestly don't know if I'll take the job. They have some convincing to do, I'll say that much. We're virtually done our friendly schedule, we have a couple of matches against Serie B teams coming up, and I told my assitants they'd be able to handle those easily.
So..we'll see what happens in the next short while. I've got to pack. I think it's fair to at least meet with team canada face to face, and I can fly back to Genoa with Marc (Bucic). I hear he wants a new contract. Grrrrr. I won't do that every time the guy has a great year, I'll say that much. But he may deserve to have his current deal re-opened. Decisions decisions.
Edmonton (CP) - Ian Eckstein, highly reputed manager of FC Genoa in the Italian Serie A, as well as a former Team Canada manager, has turned down the opportunity to return to international management. What follows is the text of the announcement made jointly through the Canadian FA as well as Ian Eckstein himself:
"Following several days of rumours about my future with FA Canada, I wish to announce today that I have decided to not accept the position of Manager of the Canadian Men's National football team. This decision certainly wasn't easy. I had a long previous history with Team Canada, during which we reached heights which previously had not been attained. However, it was my belief, after extensive discussions with the FA, that it would serve neither myself nor the program in general to bring me back on board at this time. It was felt by myself, personally that I didn't think we would be able to progress any further with myself as manager than we would with anyone else as manager. I want to thank the FA for the consideration, as well as all the players for welcoming me back so warmly. At this time, my sole priority is my work with Genoa. I feel as though it is best that my energy be directed towards that venture at this time. Thank you."
Personal Thoughts - July 20th, 2022
So, that's that. I really came close to accepting their offer, in fact we did have an agreement in place which would have seen me become manager for one World Cup cycle and then resign to let new blood take over. I asked for one night to sleep on it, which I did, and I woke up the next day realizing that what I have with Genoa is far more interesting and challenging than what I would have with Team Canada. I did do some roster and tactical consulting with the FA before I left, as a courtesy to them. I also realize that all of my suggestions could very well be tossed out the window the minute a new manager comes in, but that's up to whomever the FA selects and that's not for me to worry about.
I spoke to Ante Razov while I was there, and apparently I've been REALLY out of the loop and buried in work with Genoa because I didn't realize that he had been named manager of Luton. They fired Marty Foyle and named him as caretaker and I guess he impressed enough to get the job full time. I think they're around 7th in the league two. I knew that he'd have a chance to manage on his own at some point and I'm pleased that they seem to be responding to him.
Well, I guess it's back to work at Genoa. Actually, it's to bed, because as I write this I've been awake for the last 20 hours. I'm done.
Eckstein Set To Part Ways With Genoa - Will Helm Real Madrid. May 14, 2024
Madrid, Spain - In what many may see as a surprise move by both parties, long-standing Genoa boss Ian Eckstein will take over the helm of Real Madrid, a source close to the deal said, on condition of anonymity. If rumours are true, the deal will make Eckstein the highest paid manager in football. The deal is rumoured to be a five year deal on €4.1 million p/a, and would make Eckstein football's first ever €4 million manager.
Real Madrid finished fifteenth in La Liga last term, after winning it the year before. Previous boss Adolfo Baines had been employed less than one year, and the exceptionally disappointing league performance is believed to be the reason for the manager's sacking.
A press conference has been scheduled for noon at Santiago Bernabeu on May 16th. It is expected this will make the announcement official.
Personal Thoughts - May 14, 2024
As I sit here and write this, I'm still attempting to digest the history that's being made here, not to mention the immense pressure I find myself under at the moment.
The deal was tentatively agreed to nearly two weeks ago, on the 11th. Yes, it's €4.1 million a year over five years. Incredible. When I tossed my name in for consideration (just because I didn't think they'd be crazy enough to even look at me as a candidate), they came back with "Yes, we'll hire you". I then thought "okay, I honestly don't WANT to leave Genoa, so I'll come back at them with terms that I'm certain they won't agree to." I asked for €4.1 million a year (more than a million euros more than the next-highest paid manager in the world, and more than twice what Jose Mourinho makes), and I also needed them to wait until the end of the year to hire me. The second part was more important than the first. The money was just something I thought was an insane figure that theyd'd laugh at. And I was certain that they wouldn't want to wait to hire someone. Turns out I was wrong on both fronts.
They came back and said "yes" to both conditions, and, with an admittedly slightly heavy heart, I went ahead and signed the deal. I had fully intended to finish out this five year deal with Genoa, and then sign a second consecutive five year deal, and then take my whistle and clipboard and walk into the sunset of retirement. What can I say? Yes, it's the money. I'd be a fool and a liar if I said that I didn't like the idea of being the highest paid manager in football history. But it's also the challenge. This is the first time I've ever gone into a job with a literal sense of fear about what I'm getting myself into. For all I know, this whole thing could be gone in six months if we get off to a bad start. Real Madrid isn't particularly patient with their managers. It helps that the contract is five years, I'll say that. I appreciate their commitment. I also appreciate their commitment financially, not just to me, but to the building of our program. They've given me in excess of €400 million (yes, four hundred million euros) to work with in terms of transfer funds. Again, I'd be crazy if I didn't take advantage of that to bring some of the guys from Genoa over with me. We'll see how that all goes though.
One final word on my previous employers. Yes, we parted amicably. Yes, I'd go back there if conditions were right, and I told everyone so. I'm incredibly proud of our success there, probably more than in any other situation that I've ever been involved in. When I was hired there, they were a mid-level Serie B team. As of today, we had qualified for Europe in three consecutive seasons. Because of the folks that I was associated with at Genoa, and their willingness to let me make some mistakes and grow as a manager, I'm a guy from Canada who has been given an opportunity to manage one of the top three or four most storied football teams in the world. It's Genoa's commitment that allowed me to progress to this point.
Okay - it's late and I should wrap this up. We're going to make the announcement in two days and I need to get myself ready.
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