Twelve days after Donegal lost the All-Ireland final of 2014, they lost the man who had brought them there.
More than that, they lost the man who had created the team that won the All-Ireland two years earlier, and who had changed the game forever.
The news of Jim McGuinness’s departure at that moment was a shock, but it was hardly surprising. He had already been working for 18 months with Glasgow Celtic as a performance consultant. He had already started his journey in soccer.
It felt, quite frankly, that the GAA had done well to hold onto him for as long as it had – that he had outgrown what GAA coaching could offer him.
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Donegal GAA people were devastated, but they saw it as pretty much inevitable. He stayed with Celtic for three more years, including time working under Brendan Rodgers, before he went to Beijing to coach with Roger Schmidt.
Schmidt is the manager of the current Primeira Liga champions Benfica, and a man who is seen as being in the vanguard of European soccer coaching. These are major figures to be working alongside.
When McGuinness moved from China to Charlotte Independence in the North American League, it was his first head coaching role in soccer. They won just one of his 14 games in charge, and he was sacked six months into his first season.
He returned home where it seemed for a couple of years that every vacancy in the League of Ireland would see his name get mentioned. He has worked with the Derry City U-19s, and won a national trophy with them in October of 2021.
He was spotted by some eagle-eyed dog-walker or gossipmonger in Tuam Stadium, helping Galway in their preparations for the 2020 Covid Connacht championship. The frenzy created by 35 seconds of shaky phone footage of that training session spoke volumes for how enduring his coaching legacy is.
Another furore was created last year when rumours spread that he was joining Conor Laverty’s Down set-up. His time in soccer had not dimmed his standing among GAA teams and supporters.
But he still appeared to be on a different track. McGuinness was pictured in December of 2022 alongside Ireland legend John O’Shea, former Chelsea goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini, and a class of 17 others receiving their Uefa Pro License badges from Packie Bonner, Jonathan Hill and the FAI. Stephen Kenny was the guest of honour at the induction ceremony.
[ Malachy Clerkin: Jim McGuinness’ return makes Donegal a serious proposition againOpens in new window ]
Gaelic football was something he loved, something he analysed with trademark incisiveness in this paper and previously on Sky Sports . . . but it appeared that it was not something he wanted to pursue full-time.
And reading local Donegal newspapers’ reactions this week, it was clear that his name being mentioned last week was almost seen as too good to be true – that they felt they were being set up for a fall.
So when the news broke on Monday night that the deal was done, it is genuinely a paradigm shift in how the GAA is going to be run in that county – McGuinness’s personality could well be the panacea that gets the much-maligned academy, the county board and the senior intercounty squad all moving in the right direction. That’s a lot to put on the shoulders of one man, but Donegal people feel it’s possible.
Gaelic football is presently stuck in a rut. There will be some who would say that it was Jim McGuinness who put it there. But I was speaking to Kieran McGeeney at some stage in the middle of the last decade and he raised a point that has always stuck with me.
I’m paraphrasing slightly, but he basically said – ‘for 120 years, six players on every team didn’t have to defend. That’s not the case anymore’.
Like all great revolutionary ideas, this was blindingly obvious if you thought about it. But it was McGuinness who foresaw it.
What was revolutionary and shocking in 2011 is accepted practice now. Kevin Heffernan and Mick O’Dwyer would have their supporters, but there’s an excellent case to be made that Jim McGuinness is the most influential coach in the history of Gaelic games.
After Spain won two European Championships and a World Cup in four years between 2008 and 2012 it seemed inevitable that teams would either have to play like them or admit defeat. But Germany won the World Cup in 2014 by playing in an entirely different way – the pressing game found a way to beat the possession game.
Roger Schmidt is seen as perhaps the most extreme of the German high-energy pressing coaches that are dotted around Europe’s biggest clubs. The effort he asks of his players is unprecedented, even in the high-octane football which is so much a part of that branch of the European coaching tree.
McGuinness has experienced a lot since 2014. Gaelic football needs an answer to the problems we saw throughout this year’s championship. Every team sees only one way to win – the only difference is the extremes to which teams are willing to go. It needs a new way of thinking that is so obvious no-one’s thought of it yet. It needs thinkers like Jim McGuinness.
