Meet Des Buckingham — the man piloting Mumbai City to the top Premium

Des Buckingham has been a big influence on Mumbai City FC and piloted the team to the top. He feels that the Indian players are more than capable of competing with and challenging their peers on the international stage.

Des Buckingham loves to fly planes. He also loves to help football teams fly high. Buckingham coached New Zealand to the Olympics, was the youngest manager in Australia’s A-League and, more recently, navigated Mumbai City’s journey to the ISL League Winners Shield in some style. The 38-year-old from England spoke to The Hindu in Kozhikode during the Super Cup, in which he fielded an all-Indian squad that went on to tie for first place in its group. Excerpts:

What made you accept Mumbai City’s offer? Indian football must have been an unknown quantity for you at that time.

Yes, it was. It was two things [that influenced my decision]. The first one is my connection with the City Football Group. So I was working in Melbourne City, a sister club within the City Football Group network. The other was I could see a lot of similarities between the Indian Super League and the A-League in Australia. This was the ninth season of the ISL. And the A-League is only 17 years old, so they are relatively new.

If you look from where season one of the ISL was in terms of length of time, amount of games, and where it is now, there has been a massive development and there is so much that comes with that. I see the excitement of Indian football and what I felt I could bring to try and enhance it from the players here, the club here, both in the short term and hopefully the long term.

How do you look at your time at Mumbai City so far?

I think most people would look at the externals and people often judge on trophies and winning. Winning the league [ISL League Winners Shield] this year was nice because it was the first trophy out of Covid. And playing at the AFC Champions League was another big moment. But for me, it has been the journey of 18 months; those moments are cherries on top of the work that has been achieved, not just by me and my coaching staff, but by the whole group of people we have at the club. It is also about how we won the league, the records that we broke — I think we were unbeaten in 18 games and had 11 consecutive wins — and the way we played football, which people said was something that they hadn’t seen here before.

From what you have seen of Indian football, where does it stand on the global stage?