It’s been a wonderful journey – Des Buckingham on his coaching career

Mumbai City FC head coach Des Buckingham shed light on his coaching career. The Englishman is only 37 years old but he has had an experience of 20 years as a coach. Buckingham feels it has been a wonderful journey as he has been surrounded by the right people.

Buckingham started his coaching journey with Oxford. He started as a youth coach at Oxford United FC. Subsequently, he rose through the ranks and joined the A-league club Wellington Phoenix as an assistant coach and then went on to take the baton as first-team head coach.

“I was surrounded by so many good people, coaches, I didn’t expect it to turn into a career as such, it was something that just snowballed and progressed as I did my badges. Opportunities came up and hopefully I did a good enough job that people wanted me to come into that environment as well,” Des Buckingham said while talking to Scroll.

“That’s continued all the way till now. I’ve been swallowed up by City Football Group. I moved to Melbourne and then got the opportunity to be here. It’s been a wonderful journey, but because I was surrounded by wonderful people to get to where I am,” he averred.

Buckingham is one of the youngest coaches in the Hero Indian Super League and he shared his experience of what is it to be like being the youngest manager.

“If you’d say I have 20 years coaching experience over being 37-years-old, you’d say I’m a very experienced coach. It’s something that I’ve had all the way through up to this point. Generally, I’ve always found myself being younger than a majority of the people I coach. I’m now starting to tip the other side of that when I’m older than most of the people,” Buckingham added.

The 37-year-old has all the experience under his belt. Buckingham added that he tries to maintain the right balance between work and personal life.

“For me, it was always trying to get some kind of work-life balance. Even though I was young, I was 26 and working full-time at a club with four different roles, I was always trying to have something going on that was different to football,” he said.

Buckingham revealed that he would have become a pilot if he wouldn’t have become a coach.

“In Wellington (New Zealand), I lived five minutes away from the airport. For my 30th birthday, people I worked with booked me a practice flight. They had once asked me what I would have been if I wasn’t a coach and I think I said I’d have probably gone down into some kind of aviation stream – maybe a pilot since it always fascinated me,” the Englishman revealed.

Mumbai City FC has won one and lost one so far in ISL 2022-23.