“He is the type of person who will sit in a room and watch 5,000 throw-ins,” John Coleman says of the England assistant head coach, Anthony Barry – but, if anything, he is selling his former Accrington Stanley player short. Barry once sifted through 60 hours of footage to analyse all 16,154 throw-ins from the 2018-19 Premier League season, in the name of research for his pro licence dissertation: the undervalued set piece.
His studies earned him top marks, his work was published as an academic paper and he impressed Frank Lampard, a classmate on the Football Association course, so much that he asked Barry to join his backroom staff at Chelsea in 2020.
Rewind three years and there was a natural scepticism when the Wigan manager, Paul Cook, a player-coach at Accrington when Coleman first signed a teenage Barry in 2005, wanted to make the Liverpudlian his first-team coach. At that point, Barry had recently retired aged 30, most of his playing career in non-league, and his only coaching experience was a voluntary role with Accrington’s under-16s.
“We couldn’t get any references on him,” the former Wigan chairman David Sharpe says. “So we met him, he came to the training ground and within a minute we warmed to his infectious character. Paul was raving about him: ‘He is going to be the real deal.’ But we very much just went off his character, because we hadn’t seen any of his sessions.”
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Some of the biggest names in the game are on the receiving end this week and it has been this way for a while. He has coached many of the most decorated players: Cristiano Ronaldo, Kevin De Bruyne, Thiago Silva.
Barry spent three years at Chelsea, where he first worked with Thomas Tuchel, and also embarked on a part-time role with the Republic of Ireland under Stephen Kenny.
Barry was involved in 12 Ireland games, where results improved as his time progressed. The late loss to Portugal was the only defeat in a 10-game spell, which ended with revenge in Luxembourg and a contract extension for Kenny.
In terms of his set-piece specialism, Ireland scored directly from a free-kick or corner five times in 2021, conceding twice. But his influence was much wider than restarts, and players raved about his training-ground approach. “Sometimes you don’t have to do anything spectacular but you just have to be clear, concise, and make a lot of sense,” said Daryl Horgan. “He did that with everything.”
In one memorable moment, Kenny embraced Barry after a brilliantly orchestrated corner routine against Qatar resulted in a James McClean goal.
“Anthony had a great rapport with the staff and players, he was thought-provoking, an exceptional coach, and a joy to work with,” said Kenny upon his exit.
Then Roberto Martínez invited Barry to join his Belgium staff and they also worked together with Portugal.
“Roberto had lost Shaun Maloney, his assistant at Belgium [who became manager of Hibernian], and I called Roberto saying: ‘There’s only one man you should go and get,’” says Sharpe, the head of football operations at Bradford City. “He impressed him as much as he impressed me.”
Tuchel, too, grasped Barry’s talent, particularly around set pieces, and the German ensured Barry was part of the package when he went to Bayern Munich, where the pair worked with the England captain, Harry Kane. The challenge of winning the 2026 World Cup with England represents their third undertaking.
Barry’s fingerprints are on the squad, the coach having worked at Wigan first with Dan Burn, when they were promoted as League One champions in 2017-18, and then with Reece James, whom Tuchel managed at Chelsea, the following season.
“We signed Reece on loan and I remember Reece saying some of the sessions Anthony was putting on at Wigan were better than what he had been getting at Chelsea,” Sharpe says. “In the first couple of weeks of preseason, the players were saying: ‘Who is this guy? He’s top. He’s put on some of the best sessions we’ve had.’”
Terry Skiverton played with Barry at Yeovil and later studied alongside him on the pro licence course. Liam Manning, John Eustace and Michael Carrick were in the same cohort. “He was always a student of the game,” Skiverton says of his former team-mate. “He wasn’t quick or the biggest or the strongest, but he had a really good football brain – he knew where the second balls, the knock-downs, were going to be and technically was a really good player.
“He knew how he wanted to play. We always talked football and he was always trying to gain edges.”
Skiverton was in the classroom when Barry wowed his peers with a presentation on throw-ins, referencing the work at Liverpool of Thomas Grønnemark, who spent five years as a throw-in coach under Jürgen Klopp. “When he went to Chelsea the lads absolutely loved him,” says Skiverton, the assistant manager of AFC Wimbledon. “He was looking after Chelsea’s set plays and before the set-piece coach was in vogue Anthony was thinking outside the box with his throw-ins.
“Chelsea were scoring for fun [from set plays] at the time. Anthony is a very good communicator – there’s always clarity in his voice. He doesn’t shout from the rooftops but when he does talk there is really good technical, tactical detail.”
On a trip to Nyon in Switzerland, Skiverton and Barry exchanged ideas with up-and-coming coaches from Italy, Sweden and Spain. “We went into a room with Xabi Alonso, Raúl, Victor Valdés. We had to critique them and at the time I was coaching for Yeovil thinking: ‘Bloody hell.’”
Barry completed his League Managers Association diploma the same year he passed his pro licence. “He’s a bit of an animal when it comes to stuff like that,” Skiverton says.
Coleman, who hopes to be at Wembley when England host Albania on Friday, first met Barry in Liverpool soon after Barry’s release from Everton, where he played in the same youth team as Wayne Rooney and prided himself on being one of the fittest players, stamina born from treadmill sessions and running in Calderstones Park. A £150-a-week contract at Accrington followed.
One of Barry’s first games for the Lancashire club was a friendly at Dundonald Bluebell, 45 minutes from Edinburgh. “We turned in a really poor performance and he had the guts to stand up and fight his corner when we were criticising him ... little did I know he would go on to do what he’s done,” says Coleman, the Gillingham manager.
“When myself and Jimmy [Bell, Coleman’s long-term assistant] lost our jobs at Accrington [last year], he was on the phone a couple of weeks later and invited us to Bayern Munich v [Borussia] Dortmund and made a fuss of us over there.”
Those who know Barry talk of his down-to-earth personality, but another recurring theme is his meticulousness, built on endless hours of work. “I know there have been instances of him sitting with a player and going through the last 100 shots they have taken,” Coleman says. “He will have had to be armed for those conversations, so he will have watched those 100 shots beforehand himself. When you’re that conscientiousness and keep working hard, you’ll get rewards.” – Guardian
