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Fworm northampton town Manager John Brady talks about his friendship with compatriot ange postcoglouAnd the discussion suddenly raises a question. Postecoglou himself has laughed about how you can tell if a manager is off duty if he looks relaxed, which the Australian certainly doesn’t have at Nottingham Forest. So, given how pressured management is, how ungrateful it can be, given how fleeting both work and even the feeling of victory can be… why keep holding back?
Brady is in a better position than most to have answers. His work with the League Managers Association has ensured that thinking about all this is one of his responsibilities, and it comes after what was considered a tough job at Northampton.
In the summer of 2021, they had a budget that was befitting a club in the bottom half of League Two, and it looked as if it would be reduced. Instead Brady led them back to League One within two years and then to a 14th-place finish in the third tier – the club’s best finish in more than 15 years. The 50-year-old man can’t help but smile now.
“That’s the attraction for me,” says Brady. “Absolute Addiction is a group where you can help them perform beyond what they ever thought possible. And when you can also connect it to the fans… restart a club, reconnect the fans, and build a culture that people can believe in again. There’s no better feeling than that.”
And now, a man who has tasted success wants it again. Brady, originally from New South Wales, is one of EFLThe most distinguished coach of. There aren’t many people who have also been running successful sports businesses throughout their sports career, and have taken the time to specifically study how to improve.
By the time the former winger was at then-Conference side Stevenage in the mid-2000s, he was running a company with 40 employees. It provided schools with equipment and specific coaching, as well as other pathways. Not bad for someone who took the opportunity to travel to Brentford for a trial at the age of 17.
Brady has now sold most of the business as he focuses on management, but the way he got into it came from the insights that now aid his coaching.
“The biggest thing I realized as a player in the Conference and League Two was that you’re not really in control of your career, because it’s mostly short-term contracts,” he reflects.
Brady’s timing is testament to this, as he has played for 14 different clubs.
He explains, “The only thing you can control is your performance, so the only thing I knew was football, and I knew it inside out.” “I loved learning about speed, agility, balance and coordination in detail, so I started looking at how I could make a living from sports like this.
“And having that business gave me a real financial base.”
Brady feels that his coaching was also influenced by something that set back his playing career.
“I didn’t feel like I was up to the level I should have been, and I understand why I wasn’t,” he says. “I was an overthinker. I would focus on everything and just burn myself out… instead of playing with a little more freedom.”
Thinking about the game so much means Brady is able to explain how it works. This insight was honed from early managerial experience at non-league Brackley Town, before overhauling Northampton’s underage set-up.
“Not being able to fulfill my potential still motivates me,” Brady says. “I believe having my experiences allows me to connect more deeply to a player, first finding out their background and what they need. Some of them are blocked from improving. You need to find what unblocks them.
“That’s how you make players better: You create a culture that allows empowerment and growth. My passion is to make individuals better…helping others play beyond what they think is possible.”
There are obvious examples of Brady’s coaching, such as Mark Leonard at Birmingham City and Kieron Bowie now at Hibernian. That’s why, as he says, reaching the first-team job at Northampton “just felt like home”.
“The first thing I said was ‘I don’t want to know what you can’t do, I want to work on what you can do,'” he explains. “Then it’s about empowering the players to make important decisions at this time… We’ve had an incredible group over that period.”
This ties into Brady’s “addiction” to getting back into management. You can feel the joy when Brady talks about how the team developed, and the way the community got behind Northampton as they missed out on automatic promotion after scoring the first goal and ultimately suffered heartbreak in the play-offs before returning back to League One for the 2023-24 campaign.
“Transitionally, we would tear teams apart. By the time I got to League One, we were dominating possession,” he said.
“I played for a number of clubs in the area, I ran a business in the town, coached a number of kids who were now going to games. So the connection was very deep. Whenever I brought a player in, I told them about it.”
Now that’s a story he enjoys telling. Brady eventually left Northampton because, after allowing the city to dream, financial realities hit. He lost a lot of players to better paying clubs and resigned in December 2024.
After this, Brady made sure to take time to improve himself. This involved a lot of work with LMA, including their Diploma in Football Management and the Leaders Course. Brady has frequently debated coaching not only with football giants such as Mikel Arteta and Gareth Southgate but also with rugby union’s Stuart Lancaster and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr in the NBA. This period has also seen him run in the London Marathon for the British Forces Foundation and spend six weeks with Villarreal.
In such work Brady has reflected much on the evolution of football and particularly the “post-Pep era”: the decline of the positional game.
“I was asked to deliver a session with all the fellows at St George’s Park on a relevant topic at the LMA Technical Masterclass,” recalls Brady. “So I said ‘rest defence’ – something you hear a lot now. So I did the same with how you set up the rest of your defense against a Bournemouth who sit in a 4-4-2 and break fast; a Nottingham Forest who sit in a block of 4-5-1 [Chris] Wood high and then in a 4-3-3 with Mo Salah, where he stays high and wide and you lock him down.
“But modern trends… some of this language is changing.
“The game has become faster and more attacking, but if you look at the EFL trends, a common theme is that the leading teams have less possession. Arsenal are the anomaly, but then you look at their set-pieces, as well as Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, even Man City going into that 4-5-1 block.”
As he speaks, Brady laughs, noting how his own playing career was “4-4-2 versus 4-4-2 and who could fight the hardest”.
He adds: “And if someone played 3-5-2, it was a bit like, ‘Wow, they’re the new masters’.”
The EFL has become so sophisticated now that Brady feels it is important to simplify the messages.
He claims, “From the beginning, I thought football was about control, and that’s possession. Now, it has become a game of attack.” “That’s how I simplified it in my mind.
“When you’re putting it on the grass, it should be in a way that shows you have complete confidence in what you do. It should be like that to the players. ‘If we do that, we’ll win today.’ You have to instill that in the players, then they will go out and perform well.”
Brady has long realized that this is what helps eliminate doubt and over-thinking: complete trust from the top.
He thus helped Northampton overcome the misery of missing out on promotion on the final day to Bristol Rovers in 2021–22 and then losing to Mansfield in the play-off semi-finals.
Brady now has full confidence in himself.
“I never took shortcuts,” he says boldly. “I have gone a long way to sharpen every tool: leadership, psychology, strategic and technical details and soft skills.
“It really took courage when I resigned and I stand by that decision. I believed I had earned the right to do something big.
“The next club that hires me isn’t just getting a manager. They’re getting someone who can change the culture, unite the fans, and prove to be a game-winner. A game-changer.”
Brady wouldn’t have it any other way.