If you put the photographs side by side, the resemblance is there.
Sir Bobby Robson talking to Jose Mourinho while the pair worked together at Barcelona, and then Mourinho coaching alongside Kieran McKenna 21 years later at Manchester United.
Robson, who passed away in 2009, is all around at Portman Road — there is a statue of him, a stand, and a bridge leading to Ipswich Town’s stadium named in his honour — as is only right for a manager who led their team from 1969 to 1982, winning one UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League) and one FA Cup.
That the thread is there from one legendary Ipswich manager to another, now surely among the greats to have occupied the home dugout, makes this all the sweeter.
As fans stormed the pitch at full time on Saturday, lifting players onto their shoulders, McKenna clutched other members of the playing and coaching staff in a series of emotional embraces.
After 22 years away, Ipswich are a Premier League club once more.
When Gamechanger 20 bought Ipswich in April 2021, the ambition was always for their progress to be quick. The American consortium had big ambitions. New owners usually do.
A club boasting a history as former champions of England and European trophy winners, with a 29,000-capacity stadium and founded in 1878 will never feel at home in the third tier. But getting out of League One and then breezing straight through the Championship a year later, while making it look this easy, is something that even the most optimistic Ipswich supporters would have laughed off.
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Pulling off back-to-back promotions to reach the top flight is a freak of nature which strikes so infrequently Southampton were the last team to do it 12 years ago. Only three more (Norwich City in 2011, Manchester City in 2000 and Watford in 1999) had previously done it since the formation of the Premier League in 1992. This Ipswich team are a rare thing.
After relegation from the Premier League in 2002, Ipswich drifted through 17 years in the second tier with a steady decline in the latter years under then owner Marcus Evans leaving them as seeming has-beens in League One by 2019. They’d had brushes with returns to the big time, with three Championship play-off semi-finals defeats, in 2004, 2005 and 2015, but as time went by and the financial power in that division became increasingly stretched, Ipswich fell away.
Relegation to the third tier, for the first time in 62 years, finally came at the end of the 2018-19 season.
Now Ipswich can look back on that time and smile, reflecting on what it offered them in terms of a reset, but at the time it was the worst possible scenario.
“Evans wasn’t a bad-spirited owner,” says Joe Fairs, an Ipswich fan who is part of the Blue Monday podcast about them. “When he bought the club, we were eighth in the Championship and he gave us a £12million transfer kitty. At the time that felt like a lot, we were the big spenders with Roy Keane as manager, but within three to four years the parachute payments (for clubs relegated from the Premier League) had gone so mad that the game got too rich for him quite quickly and we just slid back.
“The only thing that stopped it really was Mick McCarthy coming in (as manager) and doing a fantastic job with the resources he had. But the resources were less and less as time went on. By the time he left (late in the 2017-18 season), there was no figurehead off the pitch.
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“It was a business that was failing, it was drifting. Everything was tired around the club, there was no drive off the pitch, which showed on the pitch. We were just being dragged down, and we were miles off clubs that had traditionally been seen as much smaller than us. We acted like a small club and we were becoming a small club. Nobody wanted to come to games, because it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t entertaining.
“It’s incredible how much has changed in such a short period.”
There were a few false starts: Paul Cook was not able to take Ipswich out of League One and there were two 11th-place finishes either side of one in ninth over three seasons.
McKenna arrived as Cook’s successor halfway through 2021-22; a young and ambitious coach who had been forced to retire aged 22 due to a hip injury, he had worked on the staffs at Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United before Ipswich gave him his first crack at management at 35 — coincidentally the same age Robson and fellow Ipswich and England legend Sir Alf Ramsey were when they got appointed at Portman Road.
“He’s done his due diligence on the place and he’s done his hard yards as a coach,” says former Ipswich captain Luke Chambers, who left the club in summer 2021 after nine years and almost 400 appearances. “It’s no coincidence with the teams he was working for previously; working with Mourinho at Manchester United, he’s used to working with top players. I know he’s consistent with his messages and how he sets the team up, they don’t come too far away from what they want to do. He’s level-headed and a good person to work with, there’s no confusion in anything he’s trying to do. He’s honest with his players and they know where they stand which counts for a lot in modern football.”
The stars aligned.
Things started to click as the off-field structure of chief executive Mark Ashton and director of football operations Gary Probert plus the investment of the new ownership group matched McKenna’s tactical nous and coaching ability on it. With the foundations laid in that first half-season, 2022-23 was when it finally came together — but even then it was not easy.
Plymouth Argyle and Sheffield Wednesday, big clubs with significant histories in their own right, were not going to let Ipswich have it all their way. Being locked in a multi-team race for one of two automatic promotion spots has been Ipswich’s default setting for the past two years, and each time they have been successful. Last season, they secured second place with 98 points from 46 games, scoring 101 league goals along the way. This season? Second place with 96 points, scoring 92 goals along the way.
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“Tactically, he (McKenna) is just a genius,” says Omari Hutchinson, a 20-year-old midfielder on loan from the Premier League’s Chelsea. “I have improved a lot since I came here. Him, his coaching staff and the other players have all improved me. In the attacking third, he has just told me to be free, to do what I am best at — ‘Go at players, that is why we signed you’. He has told me that I am now one of the best pressers he has seen, so that has become one of my attributes. I am making it a strength now.
“The manager is always bringing on substitutes for a purpose, it is not making a change just for the sake of it. You need players off the bench to come on, be focused, make a difference, not sulking (because they are subs). All the players are ready to go.”
Among the most impressive features of Ipswich’s back-to-back promotion teams is that they are a squad stronger than the sum of its parts under McKenna’s leadership.
Choosing a standout star is a struggle — you can make a case for it being assist-king Leif Davis just as easily as you can for goal-scoring midfielder Conor Chaplin, their everywhere man Massimo Luongo or combative captain Sam Morsy — before even considering the effective use of the squad that has kept Ipswich in the fight in their first season back in the Championship.
McKenna’s teams are consistent in results and consistent in their ability to entertain. Ipswich are the side neutrals took to their hearts this season as they did battle with the parachute-payment-flush trio Southampton, Leeds United and Leicester City at the top of the table.
Last season’s accounts show Ipswich were the biggest spenders in League One (accounting for £91 of every £100 of their income) but in modern football that counts for little in relation to finances at Championship level. It makes what they have achieved all the more remarkable.
McKenna’s players have felt the benefit of his coaching ability, with even the more senior members of the squad seeing improvement in their game while forging strong relationships with a manager who is close to their age. His attention to detail is a trait McKenna shares with Mourinho, who brought him into the first-team set-up as assistant manager at United from their academy, while his clarity in explaining tactics keeps Ipswich running like a well-oiled machine.
“It’s unrecognisable, even when we were chasing the Premier League initially (they were second at Christmas in 2014, a point off the top) — you compare that to what it is now,” says former captain Chambers. “Every game is a sell-out, and has been for two years.
“We (in those days almost a decade ago) were chasing the play-offs and we were getting 18,000 fans. That’s still good but it’s unrecognisable the way the training ground and the stadium have had a facelift, the members of staff, the organisation… it’s a completely brand new club with the way that it’s run. It’s really nice to see. I don’t look at it with any jealousy. I was part of a time where it wasn’t like that, but now it is.”
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In March, Ipswich announced a “significant investment” into the club from Bright Path Sports Partners, a U.S. private equity firm which deploys Native American capital for investment in professional sports franchises, facilities, and related opportunities. The investment, of up to £105million, gave the company a 40 per cent minority stake in the club, who said “the investment is being made to support the club in the long-term”.
Another supporter is Ed Sheeran, the Suffolk-born global popstar, who sponsors the clubs shirts. Sheeran toasted the promotion from Miami but elevation to the Premier League is set to cost him as the sponsorship deal includes a promotion clause that raises the price.
Ipswich have lost six league matches all season after being beaten four times in 2022-23 and have made Portman Road a fortress — they have only tasted defeat there on a single occasion in each of the past two campaigns, with the most recent coming against Leeds in August.
“We’ve only lost once last year, once this year at Portman Road,” says fan Fairs. “We’ve gone from having 15,000 to 20,000 fans to having sell-outs and never losing at home. We’ve seemed to find a way to win, even in games where we’ve been behind at the end in games at home, there’s just this attitude that if we go a goal down everyone just shrugs their shoulders because we know we’re going to be fine at Portman Road.
“The last few weeks have been a bit tense and there have been draws rather than wins at home, but I don’t remember a feeling like it as an Ipswich fan. There’s a generation of fans who don’t know what it’s like to lose at Portman Road.”
The Ipswich Town coach arrival! Wow! What a welcome 💙 pic.twitter.com/Xz0gd6KtUZ
— BBC Suffolk (@BBCSuffolk) May 4, 2024
As Ipswich’s team bus wound its way to the stadium 90 minutes before Saturday’s kick-off against relegation candidates Huddersfield Town, the air was thick with the smoke of blue flares and fans packed 10 deep against crowd barriers waving flags and wearing Hawaiian shirts adorned with McKenna’s face. At the final home game of last season, the same sort of welcome worked perfectly as Ipswich went on to beat Exeter City 6-0 and secure promotion — 12 months on, the fans hoped the same would happen again.
Since victory over Coventry City on Tuesday, where 2,500 travelling fans sang themselves hoarse as they celebrated a 2-1 win to take them to the brink of promotion, nobody in Ipswich has come down off the high provided by their football team. The truth is that these are the moments football fans live for. It is not about actually being in the Premier League itself — that reality soon takes the shine off for many a promoted club — but it is the beauty of the journey that makes it.
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These are the five days when fans feel immortal. To sit on the cusp, after 22 long years away, of the greatest day of their lives is to laugh in the face of every challenge that led to this point. Nothing compares. There is no top-flight equivalent of this, the thrum of a town ready to crash into the elite and remind the world what it means to be from Ipswich and to love its football club.
At every turn of this promotion race where Ipswich have been written off, they have delivered. When Southampton stuttered and Leeds blinked, McKenna’s side held steady. With the spring sunshine beating down in Suffolk today, fans had early cause to celebrate as Southampton went ahead away to Leeds before not needing to worry about events in the game at Elland Road at all when Wes Burns stroked home to give Ipswich the lead.
A second from Hutchinson just after half-time put any fears of a final-day disaster to bed as Ipswich ran down the clock to the final whistle and jubilation for players and supporters alike.
In the shadows of stands named after Ramsey and Robson, McKenna’s legacy as a fellow manager of Ipswich was sealed — he is the man who brought the good times back to Portman Road.
“We’re not the most well-off town,” says Fairs. “It’s got a bit run-down in the austerity era. But it’s (the team’s success) brought 25,000 people into the town every other Saturday, so there’s been a real boom for local business.
“I remember the Premier League years, but you didn’t appreciate it because you just assumed it would carry on. But it didn’t. And there’s a middle generation of kids who are probably late teenagers now who have never known us to be a Premier League side. It’s so much bigger now than it was even 10 years ago, with the global exposure of it. We felt like we’d missed that boat and been left behind.”
Ahead of schedule and as a club united, Ipswich are finally on that boat.
“I know it’s been done before,” a beaming McKenna told the mass of fans celebrating on the pitch, “but it’ll never be done like we’ve done it again.”
He might just be right.
(Top photos: Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
