‘I don’t want to name- drop,” says David Hughes, the Newport County manager, mindful of his reply to a question about the coaches who have shaped his career to this point, and whether he canvassed their opinion before taking the job this summer. The 47-year-old has spent the past three seasons at Manchester United, in an instrumental academy role as a development-phase coach, and prior to that worked at Aston Villa, Cardiff, clubs for whom he also played, and Southampton. This may be his first real shot at frontline management – aside from a few months in charge of Barry Town more than two decades ago – but he is anything but inexperienced.
The close season always brings change but it is hard to imagine a starker shift than Hughes swapping a global institution for Newport, with one of the smallest budgets in League Two. He has added two performance analysts to his team but it is a skeleton operation compared to United’s academy structure, where he worked closely with Nick Cox, who is moving to Everton as their technical director. “Big, big clubs have huge numbers of staff, different levels of responsibility and accountability,” Hughes says. “But we’re really pleased with our small staff. We came back for pre-season and the goals were green from last season, so we went out as staff cleaning the goalposts and I’m thinking: ‘We’ve got a team here.’ Everybody’s prepared to muck in.”
