The unflappable Kieran McKenna is sitting on the Ipswich Town open-top bus, having just earned promotion to the Premier League.
The 37-year-old manager is underdressed. Grey top over a white T-shirt, he’s smiling and occasionally waving to the long-suffering people of Suffolk, but there is no outpouring of joy.
Sky Sports are also on the bus. As hoarse and enthusiastic as McKenna is calmness personified, the questions come thick and fast, the answers slow and methodical.
With Tell Me Ma blaring as his players dance in blue headbands and scarfs, Sky Sports wonders how he will cope next season following rapid promotion from League One to the Championship to the top tier of the English game.
“We kept an incredible level of consistency, in all aspects, not just squad, the playing style and our identity,” says McKenna, before taking half a beat: “It’s a massive jump up and we’ll try and keep the best of what we have here.”
Style and identity require technique and bravery to maintain the possession-based approach he honed at Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United.
Sky Sports compares him to former Ipswich managers Alf Ramsey and Bobby Robson. McKenna smiles and waves to a familiar face in the crowd as he offers a forgettable, polite response.
“Before I let you go,” says Sky, “what has been your favourite moment today?”
“Well, we drove past my house, and my wife, kids, Mum and Dad came out on the street. So that was nice.”
McKenna exudes the sort of Zen-energy needed to survive in the Premier League. See his inscrutable reaction to Wes Burns’s goal against Huddersfield Town that put Ipswich on a direct course to the promised land; he glanced into the Portman Road pandemonium, made a slow turn, behaving as if his day was done and the dog needed walking.
“He’s honest, down to earth, calm and level-headed,” a season-ticket holder told journalist David Walsh outside the ground. “You never see him losing his head or haranguing referees,”
At 22, life was upended for McKenna as chronic hip problems forced him to revisit his education, and forsake a career with Tottenham and Northern Ireland.
“I remember Jimmy Neighbour and Mike Stone, my youth-team coaches [at Spurs], telling me three or four months into my first year as a scholar that I’d be the one who became a manager,” he said previously. “I didn’t know what they meant; I’d never thought of it, never seen it in myself. As a player you’re so focused.”
Before coaching sojourns at Leicester City, Nottingham Forest, and the Vancouver Whitecaps, while studying Sports Science at Loughborough University, he was a box-to-box midfielder for Enniskillen Town United and Ballinamallard United in between a brief stint in Gaelic football with Enniskillen Gaels.
He joined Spurs at 16.
“As a captain it was a quiet leadership with him,” said Ray Sanderson, a development coach with the Irish Football Association. “Not the shouting and the rabble-rousing type of stuff. He would be a quiet individual but inside there would be a lot going on.”
Following early retirement, a career-defining ego check was needed when Spurs academy head John McDermott pushed him towards a degree and rewind in his coaching steps.
“You’re coaching Loughborough in step eight of non-league or Nottingham Forest’s under-nines and you’re thinking: ‘Six months ago I was working with Spurs’ youth team,’” he recalled. “But it was an excellent move. You’re taking in such a bigger breadth of knowledge, experience and critical thinking. It gave me a chance to step back, hone my beliefs and work with people from different fields.”
Tottenham brought him back as the academy’s performance analyst and that turned into under-18s coach. After a youth cup semi-final run in 2015 and having spurned a chance to join Liverpool’s youth set-up, his boyhood club offered him a job.
Manchester United’s academy head Nicky Butt spotted McKenna first, informing the club how he set up Spurs’ teenagers. Indy Boonen, a former United academy player, elaborated on his game-specific methodology: “The way we trained was how the opponent played on the Saturday. If you played against West Brom, you trained how they are and focused on their weaknesses.”
José Mourinho also liked what he saw at the Carrington training ground, promoting him to the first-team dugout alongside Michael Carrick, where McKenna also served as an assistant to Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Ralf Rangnick, building a sturdy reputation amid Old Trafford mediocrity.
“Not many places will have more intensity than there and you need a thick skin,” said McKenna. “There was a lot of good stuff done over that period and I know how that was recognised and received internally. I was always proud of the work we did there.”
Ipswich Town heard enough via the grapevine to make him their rookie manager in December 2021. That season they finished 11th in League One, with McKenna’s impact immediate and sustained. The Tractor Boys won seven of his first 10 games before going 11 unbeaten and not conceding a goal for a club record 547 minutes.
Not many people believed his style of play could yield results, never mind promotion through the rough and tumble lower divisions of English football.
“I had one or two of the players who were here last season, saying they thought it would be difficult getting out of League One playing a brave brand of football where you open the pitch up, play with the ball on the floor, try to make sure it stays in play, build from the back and look to open space up,” he told The Guardian in January 2023.
Ipswich only lost four of 46 matches last season, scoring 101 goals. The closet team to them were League One champions Plymouth Argyle with 82 goals. This season they lost six, scoring 92 goals, to finish a point behind champions Leicester City, who lost 11 times.
A former Northern Ireland U-21 skipper, McKenna is a little bit British, a little Irish and all Fermanagh. Born in London in 1986, his parents Liam and Mary moved the family to the shores of Lough Erne to run the Manor County House, an 18th century hotel, spa and fancy restaurant.
It was quite a change of direction for his car mechanic father and nursing mother.
“Seeing the work they’ve put in, the hours, the way they managed people, the passion they put into it, definitely influenced me,” he said. “My dad pretty much lived in the hotel in the way some might say I live at this football club.”
The last club to hopscotch from League One to the Championship to the Premier League was Southampton in 2012. Ipswich have been waiting for 22 years. Nothing happened by accident. Marcus Evans sold the club to Gamechanger 20 Ltd, an Ohio-based investment fund, in April 2021. It took the new owners seven months to find McKenna.
Since then, no English club has more points and only Manchester City have scored more than Ipswich’s 222 goals from 19 different players.
“From the first day he [McKenna] came in, there’s been so much information to take on board,” said Burns. “But you can see from the outside the improvements that we’ve made as a squad and as individuals. He’s taken us all to the next level, which is a sign of an incredible coach.”
Now comes the hardest part. Ipswich want to keep him as much as Manchester United might want rid of Erik Ten Hag. That could prove the most challenging crossroads in McKenna’s turbocharged career: deciding what to do next.
