Brian Barry-Murphy is sitting in his Cardiff City office after training on Thursday working out how to answer a question on his reputation for emotional intelligence. He tries to play it down when there’s a knock on the door. Calum Chambers, the former England centre-back, walks in, Barry-Murphy laughs and mentions that he’s been discussing the 30-year-old’s impressive array of former managers and how “intimidated” he feels.
Chambers’ club career took him through Southampton, Arsenal, loans at Middlesbrough and Fulham, then Aston Villa and now Cardiff. “I’ve told the roll call of Chambers’ managers: Pochettino, Wenger, Emery, Karanka, Scott Parker, Ranieri, Unai again. I’m intimidated!” Barry-Murphy lists. Chambers smiles. “It keeps getting better!” he replies, nodding to his current head coach. “He has to say that!” Barry-Murphy responds.
It's an easy exchange between manager and player who clearly get on. It’s also a glimpse of the emotional intelligence that makes Barry-Murphy one of the most admired head coaches in the pyramid. He’s guided Cardiff to the top of League One with a big game at third-placed Stevenage on Tuesday.
“If you look at Calum, he’s a case in point,” Barry-Murphy says about the importance of emotional intelligence. “He's giving everything to the team every single day, and some days you play him and some days you don't and you then have to imagine what it's like to be in his shoes.”
Barry-Murphy has this natural empathy. As player-coach at Rochdale in 2017, he was one of the few allowed to visit his team-mate Joe Thompson in the Christie Hospital in Manchester. Thompson was battling cancer, managed to return to Rochdale where Barry-Murphy would regularly pop into the physios’ room to check how Thompson’s rehab was going. Thompson spoke at the time about how “very emotionally intelligent” Barry-Murphy was. Thompson tragically passed away this April, aged only 36.
“He was in the Christie,” Barry-Murphy recalls of his 2017 visit. “They had to essentially take away all the cancer and strip him back to his most vulnerable and weakest and then they could build him back up from that. An instinct told me I had to see him to make sure he knew we’d be behind him in his most difficult moment.
“You see how fragile life is and you learn to enjoy every part of this game because the game is so beautiful. I love football. I love what we do every day. It's genuine privilege for us.” Barry-Murphy points to his wrist. “We wear the wristbands for Joe.” They were given by Thompson’s family to Rochdale, and carry the message: “Don't live life to survive. Live life to thrive”.
Barry-Murphy lives life that way, seizing opportunity such as when there was early chatter about Cardiff. “Joe was pretty big on me taking this job, actually. He said to me, ‘Don’t stand still’. The more cancer came back to him, the more he kept talking about ‘there's no time to stand still or to presume it's going to last forever. So just keep pushing, keep doing different things’.”
Brian Barry-Murphy: A Profile
Born in Cork 47 years ago, Barry-Murphy always has done. “I love trying to prove you can do things that people think you can't. I've always had a sense of trying to go against the grain or challenge the perceived path we should take. It goes back to our schooling. We grew up in Catholic Ireland. Even though there was a heavy sporting influence in our schools, you have to get a good education. Having a professional career is not going to happen for anybody. And if you do think it's going to happen, you're going to fall flat on your face.”
But there were local inspirations like Roy Keane and Denis Irwin. “Those guys would have shown to us in our schooling days what is possible.” Barry-Murphy was at school with Ronan O’Gara, the Irish rugby great who's now the head coach of La Rochelle. “We had an adventurous side to us. We always had a sense of trying to do things that seemed difficult.”
Barry-Murphy could have stayed in Cork and been a GAA star. His father Jimmy was a Gaelic legend. “Yeah, a huge figure,” Barry-Murphy reflects. “I was obsessed with my father. I watched every single game he played from the age of five, winning All-Ireland trophies, which would be like the FA Cup here.” His father proved a talented coach as well as player. “What I took from him a lot was - and maybe this is the reason for (his) emotional intelligence – is how he interacted with players, how he coached them and how he looked out for them. That's big in GAA.”
But his father did cast a shadow. “When I was in Ireland, I was always known as ‘that guy's son’. I’d hear people whispering. I was a much better hurler than I was footballer. But I started playing soccer - football.” Basically to be himself. “My father always told me to do whatever I want. When I came to the UK, it was almost an opportunity for me to step out of his shadow.”
He joined Preston in 1999. “David Moyes still played with us in the reserves sometimes. He was like a maniac, 24/7, driving a young group of lads to places that he believed we could go. He was inspiring.
“When I first went to Preston, I was very homesick, but I just had to get on with it back then. You don't want to go back home because you're going to be seen as a failure.” Such experience enhanced his emotional intelligence.
“When I was at Man City I saw quite clear comparisons between the way that Guardiola worked and David had worked. Completely different styles of play but they had the same values in terms of an obsessiveness and a very clear idea about the way they wanted to play.
“You hear loads about siege mentality in the dressing room and they were the same. ‘This is the way we're going to train, we're going to be so obsessed with it that by the time we come to the game we're so clear in our minds that it liberates the players’.”
Barry-Murphy’s coaching journey began towards the end of his playing career at Rochdale, even learning from Pochettino in 2018. “We played Spurs in the Cup at Spotland and it was exceptional. Harry Kane came on and scored a penalty but we managed to get a late goal (through Steve Davies) and get a replay at Wembley. Fernando Llorente scored a hat-trick, we got hammered, but Pochettino gave me some interesting insight into the way he saw the game and that made me want to read the book.”
The book was “Brave New World: Inside Pochettino’s Spurs”, essentially a diary of the 2016/17 season but in reality more a guidebook to what makes Pochettino tick. “When I read the book, I thought how obsessive he was about improving players and trying to win games with understanding it wasn't always possible. It made a lot of sense to me.” Pochettino’s obsessiveness extended to the precise measure of washing powder to be used for the first-team kit before games.
Barry-Murphy absorbed even more lessons during three successful years working with Cole Palmer, Liam Delap, Oscar Bobb, James McAtee and others with City’s Elite Development Squad. “All those are of the highest level skill-wise, it's clear. If you look at someone like Oscar Bobb, what I saw was this real love of the game. All those players have it. When I watched Palmer for the first season, I couldn't believe how much of a throwback he was to what I watched growing up with the great teams of Manchester United, Gazza, all those players. Cole reminded me of that. He was the kid just playing.
Barry-Murphy: 'Morgan Rogers' finishing was very poor'
“When I went to went to Man City, I went because Joe Shields and Jason Wilcox asked me because of the work I’d done at Rochdale. They were saying to me that I was coming into a dressing room that Enzo Maresca had made professional and made ready for the first team. But I still saw lads who were really down to earth. Delap was like that, but also Palmer was just a normal young lad who wanted to show his friends and family how good he was. He would do some crazy things like you'd see him FaceTiming his family or friends and telling them before games he was going to score a hat-trick. And he’d do it!” Barry-Murphy recalls Palmer coming on for Bernardo Silva against Burnley in 2021 and then dashing across the road. “He played for Pep in the Etihad and then came across and played for us in the stadium and scored a hat-trick (in a 5-0 win over Leicester). It seemed normal to him. But I thought if this seems normal to him, there's a good chance he's not normal!
“Pep and Txiki (Begiristain) were a big influence on reminding Cole about the things that they saw as most important for his development. That was teaching him to be very hard working and not to get carried away by being too expressive. He could do things that I’d never seen before. Same with Oscar Bobb and McAtee. You would see them in positions in between the lines. I said to McAtee one day about finding space and he said to me, ‘I don't really need to find space. I want the (opposing) players to be closer to me so when they're closer to me, I can find a team-mate who has more space to go and finish’. That is a different level!”
They all responded to the quality of City coaching. “If you look at that Man City Academy, Romeo (Lavia), Oscar Bobb, Liam Delap, Morgan Rogers, those kids are so switched on. Most of them, even Cole, know to get in that first team under Pep is going to be a pretty limited opportunity. So they want to know that wherever they go next, you (as their coach) are going to give them the chance to put themselves in a shop window or to improve.
“Morgan Rogers was a brilliant player, but his finishing was very poor. We could work on this and then if he genuinely believes that you're saying that all for his benefit, you're fine.
“For Liam, Pep was obsessed with him being calmer in front of goal because Liam has got the hardest shot you've ever seen. He has a shot like a rocket. What I saw from him was this ability to be quick as anyone when he runs in behind. For Liam, it was just about putting it together more consistently. I'm sure under Enzo (Maresca at Chelsea), he'll fine-tune that.”
Working with Pep Guardiola was an education
“What I took more than anything else from Pep was the obsession with training. I learned the beauty of repetition and practice. The way Kevin De Bruyne makes the movement. The amount of the building blocks that go into that is insane. What I saw was this constant repetition, stripping it back. The pass would go to Riyad (Mahrez), Kevin would go towards Riyad, and then at the last moment when opponents were expecting him to take the ball to feet, he would dip and sprint for the endline. He makes it looks so simple.
“I just picked up so much from so many of those guys. Pep always said about remembering ‘where you come from’.
We're going to play against Chelsea (in the League Cup next week) and Enzo's like a really sophisticated Italian. I’m from Cork. I came from a GAA background, you play for the team where you come from, we represent the community. The beauty is in a group of lads coming together and having a common goal.”
He’s always promoted youth: Luke Matheson, Aaron Morley and Fabio Tavares at Rochdale. Six of his EDS players made their City first-team debuts in 2021/22. At Leicester City, where he worked with Ruud van Nistelrooy, as they slid towards relegation last season, Barry-Murphy felt there was hope for the future. “What I saw there was an academy chock full of young players who were of the highest potential.” Jeremy Monga, Jake Evans and Silko-Amari Thomas to name but a few.
Barry-Murphy enjoyed his time at Leicester despite descent towards the Championship. “It was such a brilliant experience for me, testing my way of working, but such a difficult time for Ruud and the club. You'd get heavily beaten and then you have to go again. It felt very difficult to break that cycle. The supporters felt very disillusioned.”
Rebuilding Cardiff City
He left and in June took over at Cardiff who’d dropped into League One. “Probably luckily for me that they got relegated. Otherwise, I wouldn't have got the job. The reason the club appealed to me so much was because of its potential, and this band of young players who came through their academy together and were potentially able to be at first-team level.”
Youngsters like Dylan Lawlor, Ronan Kpakio, Cian Ashford, Rubin and Joel Colwill are all getting plenty of experience. “They have a deep feeling for the club. We played recently in the Vertu Trophy (the EFL Trophy against Arsenal Under-21s at Cardiff City Stadium) and we were in the dressing room afterwards. We’ve a young lad called Jack Sykes, 16-year-old striker (who came on). He was in a daze and I said to him, ‘you OK?’ He said, ‘Brian, I can't believe I've played in this stadium for this club’.
“When we play at home, you see a lot of these players will walk around the pitch together. They're all from the same academy teams. Then you're looking to bring that together with the players from outside of the city. Callum Chambers, (Callum) Robinson and Chris Willock are coming from their own journeys. Chris Willock has been to Benfica and back.”
Barry-Murphy has tapped into local talent and also the local passion emanating from the fans’ forums. He was about to head off to another supporters’ club event. “All these fans’ forums in the valleys and Cwmbran and Barry Town and it just stretches miles,” he says. “I knew there was a huge fan base here but it’s way beyond what I expected. There’s a real passion for the club from within the city and a huge well of support outside. The potential for the club to grow is enormous.
“Our ambition is to get the team out of this division. And trying to do something special by doing it with so many players who've come through this academy.”
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