Thorup regrets not bringing his own staff to Norwich

Instead, the rest of the staff – First Team and Set Piece Coach Nick Stanley, Goalkeeper Coach Tony Roberts and later First Team Coach Jack Wilshere – were all club appointments. Roberts and Wilshere (who has now been appointed Interim Head Coach) had both worked with Sporting Director Ben Knapper at his previous club Arsenal.

Speaking to Danish newspaper Tipsbladet, Thorup said: “I have learned a lot. If I am going abroad again, I need to have a bigger staff around me of people I know. 

“From the outside, it is really about the players to start with when you start as a coach, but you work just as much with a staff and an organisation that has to understand your thoughts, and it has really taken a long time, and we didn’t get there either.”

There is a clear logic in clubs wanting to appoint the staff themselves, instead of letting the Head Coach do it. First of all, the average tenure of a Head Coach in the Premier League and Football League is 14 months, so club appointments avoid a churn of staff and a raft of pay-outs. 

Only Riddersholm has left Norwich with Thorup, in contrast to the situation at Chelsea when Antonio Conte departed with his eight assistants in the summer of 2018. That cost the Blues £26.647m in total severance pay. 

Having new staff can mean different ideas and challenge for the Head Coach. This is why Ange Postecoglou says he has taken new staff with him to every club he has been at, including Tottenham. 

“I have always worked with different staff, I’m not the person who takes staff with me,” he said in April 2020. “By bringing in new people, it forces me as to make that message relevant to the new person coming in the door.

“It’s a brave decision to bring in someone you have never worked with before when you’re already successful. Bringing in people I am potentially going to be challenged by is great for me.”

However, the Australian has looked isolated during a testing season at Tottenham. 

The counter – and prevalent – argument is that you need people around you who can quickly ‘get the boat going in the right direction’, in the words of former Roma and Germany Head of Performance Darcy Norman. 

Dave Reddington, who worked under long-term double act Roy Hodgson and Ray Lewington at Crystal Palace, told TGG that a Head Coach would need to be “very self assured and confident” and have “a very strong character” in order to have a completely new staff. 

Elsewhere in his interview, Thorup suggested he was sold a long-term vision at Norwich, when in actual fact there was the short-term requirement of reaching the play-offs.

“I always say we didn’t have enough time,” he said. “We have obviously worked with a long-term perspective, and we also knew that the first season would have bumps in the road. That’s why we also made some decisions based on a longer-term view. That’s why we can be surprised how things can change all of a sudden. 

“If the communication from the start had been that we were going to reach the top six and be one of the play-off clubs, we would probably have made some other decisions along the way. Then we wouldn’t necessarily have played with the youngest team in Norwich in generations, as we did in one of the games, where we had an average age of around 23.5 years, which is younger than some of the FC Nordsjælland teams I have sent onto the field.

“We probably prioritised what we knew would give us some performance here and now instead of giving some of the young players a chance. There have been some things along the way that we would have done differently if it had been solely about the performance.”

He said he had no hard feelings about Wilshere, who joined his staff in October 2024, taking over from him.

“I was well aware of Jack’s terms of employment, so I knew that at some point he would step up as Head Coach, and we had also made a good plan together with him,” Thorup said.

“If it had been Glen who had taken over, I would probably have raised my eyebrows more than once, but not when it’s Jack. The premise for bringing him in was his next step in his career, where he would move on from Norwich or Glen and I would move on from Norwich so he could become Head Coach.”

Sporting Director Knapper arrived at Norwich in November 2023 after 13 years at Arsenal, where he had been Analyst and then Loans Manager.