Leyland appointed Director of Global Coaching by City Football Group

This summer he was involved in City’s change of first-team coaching staff, having previously worked with Assistants Pep Lijnders and Kolo Toure and Set Piece Coach James French when he was at Liverpool.

Leyland had been First Team Post-Match Analyst at Anfield from July 2013 to December 2021, with Manager Jurgen Klopp once describing the “big part” he had played in their success.

After Liverpool he took on the new role of Coach-Analyst at Newcastle United under Eddie Howe, who said he was “integral” to his set-up. Appearing on Episode #55 of the TGG Podcast, in September 2023, Leyland said: “Although I was only there 18 months, it 100% made me a better practitioner, just by changing the environment, the feel and the people I worked with.

“The way the manager works at Newcastle, and his coaching staff, they are incredible, they are so elite. Their processes, their delivery of training sessions, their review of matches and the detail they go into in analysing the performance of themselves and the players is mind blowing.”

Speaking about his role as Head of Coaching Methodology at CFG, he explained: “We have 13 teams in the City Football Group. It’s grown pretty rapidly over the last few years, starting with Manchester obviously as the first and flagship team.

“The ownership group have expanded across the globe and, as a group, as City Football Services, we want our teams to play with a collective identity or ideology and to do that there needs to be a methodology.

“It needs to be founded on objective data and based on fact. My role is to try and align that across the 13 teams within the group. The variety of people within the group and the variety of cultures and languages and identities is so far-reaching that it’s something I’m going into every day and learning something new.”