Andree Jeglertz transformed Man City by listening: ‘I’d never met that kind of manager before’

The one thing Jeglertz will tell you is his goal.

“To keep everyone happy,” recites Everton and Japan forward Yuka Momiki, who played under him at Linkoping while on loan from OL Reign (now Seattle Reign) between 2021 and 2023. “He said he wasn’t able to ask something of you on the pitch if you’re not happy off it. I had never met that kind of manager before.”

And what sort of footballer — what sort of person — emerges from that conversation? How hard do you run? How great is your drive?

“My two and a half years in Sweden were my turning point as a footballer,” says Momiki. “That was because of him.”

The Athletic spoke to those closest to the man who has led City to the top of the Women’s Super League (WSL) and on the brink of a first title in a decade to discover the leader behind the success.

What emerges is not a tome to a tactical genius but a manager who listens and has a tireless drive to develop those around him.

Anyone interested in management would do well to trace Jeglertz’s footprints from Sweden to Manchester. Although it’s belated advice for opposition coaches in England’s top division.

The 54-year-old is close to achieving in his first season in England what no manager beyond Chelsea’s technical area has managed to do for six long seasons: conquer the WSL.

Under Jeglertz, who was appointed City manager last summer after the departure of long-time manager Gareth Taylor, City could lift the WSL title if they win their remaining matches against Liverpool and West Ham.

It is a season that has had favourable assists: the sudden unravelling of perennial champions Chelsea, a season free from European football, and injuries kept at bay. Few, though, expected such swift dominance.

A former defender, Jeglertz’s playing career was a modest tapestry of the Swedish top-flight (Malmo, Umea, Gimonas). While he won the Women’s Champions League (known then as the UEFA Women’s Cup) with Umea in his first full-time coaching role, defeating Frankfurt 8-0 across two legs, that triumph was over two decades old by the time he reached England’s shores. The women’s game’s limited coverage meant his other honours with Umea — reaching two more UEFA Cup finals and five domestic trophies — were appreciated on a more colloquial level.

Jeglertz has flitted between coaching in men’s football and women’s football, including spells as head coach of Swedish men’s side Djurgardens IF and Umea’s men’s team, either side of his six-year tenure with Finland Women, whom he led to Euro 2013, where they lost just one group stage match despite being in a group featuring Italy, Sweden and Denmark.

His more recent third-placed finishes with Linkoping in Sweden’s top-flight were impressive but not headline-grabbing, while Denmark’s Euro 2025 campaign, in which they lost all three group stage matches, struggled to whet the appetite.

Yet, Jeglertz has coaxed consistency from a group of players that struggled to do so previously, inculcating a high-calibre team with the one quality that often eluded them: unflappable faith in their abilities.

“Obviously, his tactical knowledge is high,” says Jesper Ny, Jeglertz’s assistant coach at Linkoping between 2022 and 2023 and with the Denmark national team afterwards. “But every manager on this level has a high tactical knowledge.

“The thing that stands out is his focus on the human. That doesn’t mean that other managers don’t do that. But he has found a way to get people involved and accountable for their actions, which drives their motivation forward.

“That’s why they’re doing well at City. He’s taking care of the people around him.”

The luggage carousel continued to rotate. Cornelia Jeglertz maintained her stare, even though there was nothing on it. The time was unnatural, sometime after midnight.

The Jeglertz’s family holiday to a small island in Mexico had taken an unexpected detour: flight delayed, luggage lost and, invariably, an absence of any humans manning their hotel’s front desk.

“All of a sudden somebody shouted ‘Andree!’” she recalls, laughing. “Of course, he’s met someone he knew from Sweden who could help us.”

Cornelia has a bottomless stock of these sorts of stories; tales of her dad’s imprint and their reverberations.

Cornelia gets it. “Everyone tells me my dad is good with people,” she says in a tone that suggests this is more fact than opinion. “But he never stops asking questions about me — (even though) he literally grew up with me.”

This interest has roots, Cornelia says. The early spells of her father’s management career coincided with years spent teaching at an elementary school — a period, she says, which reinforced not only his passion for working with people but the power of teaching through listening as opposed to force.

Even as Cornelia embarked on her own playing career in football, “my dad understood if he was going to coach me, I needed to ask for it,” she says. In hindsight, she’d have asked for more. Regardless, football remains a shared language.

While Cornelia, her mum and brother, Adam, have tried not to speak about the prospect of a WSL title with Jeglertz, it is a challenge. They watch the games, and her boyfriend and his co-workers will bring it up in conversation. Locals who once regaled her with tales of her dad’s triumphs with Umea speak of his exploits in Manchester.

The fervour feels surreal. This is the same person who eats tacos every Friday night out of duty to his daughter, regardless of the distance between them (“This is a very important, and very Swedish, thing for him”), who makes a 15-minute phone call before training feel like a concentrated pause in time.

“He genuinely wants to get to know them: to know the person behind them and to know the relationship they have and how that affects their game and how they act in a group,” Cornelia says.

“That’s the secret because I can imagine there are many coaches out there that have very good tactics and have the same ideas that he has. But do they really want to know those things?”

Jeglertz recalls 2009 with a grimace.

Djurgardens, the 2005 Allsvenskan champions, sat at the bottom of the table. The 4-4-3, front-footed-full-back style had been ditched, replaced by “survival football”. Upon returning from away matches, he and the team were greeted by the sight of broken glass and smashed windows at the club’s training facilities. Matches and training sessions were regularly interrupted by fans, demanding answers for the poor form from the one man whom they believed could supply it.

In the end, Djurgardens survived, courtesy of an extra-time victory in the second leg of their relegation play-off match against Assyriska.

“It was an amazing feeling,” Jeglertz says, allowing the relief of the moment to briefly steal over him 17 years later, before returning to the present. “But it was the worst year in my career.”

Yet, the crucible was also fundamental. That year was paramount in Jeglertz’s understanding of where precisely to start with a new team.

“When you start with a new group, you need to start where the group is,” Jeglertz says. “(Not doing that at Djurgardens) was the biggest mistake of my career. We had these ambitions: to be top three in the league, play this style, so we started there when we came in.

“But we didn’t have the players for it. So we were playing a system too difficult for the players. That was the main reason why we didn’t succeed.

“This is what I learned there: that you don’t ever start in another place, no matter what ambitions you have with the team. You always need to start where the team is.”

Ny quickly learned there was no point attempting to outwork Jeglertz.

“I arrived at the training ground first one time when we worked in Linkoping together,” Ny says, laughing. During last summer’s Euros, Jeglertz organised a hike for the staff to a local beauty spot on a free afternoon. “We all got up to go, and he said he was staying behind, working,” Ny says.

The episode is not meant to paint Jeglertz as some martyred workaholic; he is described as gregarious and quick to laugh, a connoisseur of good wine and better food. He is the kind of guy “secure enough in himself”, as City midfielder Sam Coffey says admiringly, to sport a short-sleeve hoodie on the touchline.

Jeglertz does not waste time in one space by permitting his mind to wander to another. The distance between his family (Linkoping was over 830km/510 miles away; Denmark and Manchester nearly double that) reinforced the need to be present at work to allow him to be present away from it.

“Even if it’s just for 15 minutes over the phone, that 15 minutes becomes very important,” says Cornelia.

The same intensity is applied to match preparation. For each opposition, he curates a “risk analysis”, a fastidious and exhaustive catalogue of any possible influence or threat posed and all corresponding solutions. The result is a sense of safety and calm among players and staff, says Levenstad. “He knows everything that can happen.”

Modern football’s head-coach role has increasingly become a monument to an individual’s philosophy or style. Alternatively, Jeglertz seeks the thoughts and opinions of his staff and players, from tactics and structure to the pre-match speech in the dressing room. The more thoughts that sit in direct conflict with his own, the better.

“He actually didn’t hire me in his first year at Linkoping because he thought we were too similar,” Ny says.

The active search for conflict is rooted in Jeglertz’s desire to improve himself and those around him.

“He could just repeat what he did the season prior or what he was doing 10 years ago,” says Levenstad. “But he really wants to become the best in the world, he’s always curious to improve himself, to get to know people who can develop him.

“He’s also a mentor. He takes people he believes in, makes them comfortable, then helps them push beyond that. My thoughts mean something. I’m not just there to move the cones; I’m there to contribute to the whole thing.”

Before bothering with tactics and systems, Jeglertz would impart what Momiki describes as a “goal-setting presentation”, where players and staff set team-wide goals while also sharing individual ambitions on and off the pitch with each other.

Rather than feel awkward or intimidated, Momiki says a bond was formed. “We dug deep into ourselves,” she says. “It made us proud and love each other as a team.”

The open communication also lessened the pressure on players, says Denmark and Bayern Munich striker Pernille Harder.

“For me, he understood that playing for Denmark, being the captain, there is a lot of pressure. He really wanted to hear me out on how I was dealing with it, what he could do to help me perform at my best,” she says.

At City, Jeglertz has been praised for conferring freedom and flexibility and thus more tactical dynamism compared to the more rigid and strict possession-style football espoused by former manager Taylor.

The trick, say former players, is Jeglertz’s humility to build a team out of their own strengths, not his style, a vestige of 2009.

“I see some of the elements (at City) are similar to us when I was at Linkoping,” says Momiki, who has faced City with Everton. “Andree always wants us to play with our best quality. So different players, but it’s the same principle by using the players’ best quality, tapping into that.”

His methods are not foolproof. While Denmark under Jeglertz embarked on a promising start, defeating Germany 2-0 in the Nations League in his first match and eventually qualifying for Euro 2025, his final months were pockmarked by poor performances and defeats, including a 6-1 loss to Sweden in the Nations League just before the Euros and a failure to gain a single point in Switzerland.

The knock-on effect was a drop in confidence, an attribute that was critical to play in Jeglertz’s system, Harder says.

Part of the reason behind Denmark’s drop in form, Harder says, was the knowledge that Jeglertz was leaving the team at the end of the Euros, a fact that was leaked to the media ahead of the defeat by Sweden, stealing away Jeglertz’s opportunity to speak to players directly.

“He had to tell us on game day,” says Harder. “It wasn’t nice for Andree. He’s a very respectful person; he wants to do things in the right way.

“He tried to deal with it in a good way, to move on and focus on football, but, maybe unconsciously, it affects more than you think.”

How Jeglertz navigates the next stage of City’s journey will also be a test of his methods. This season, Jeglertz has not had to compete on multiple fronts and has mostly avoided scrutiny of limited squad rotation due to the positive results. But as City add more players to their ranks, including Beth Mead and Katie McCabe from Arsenal, Jeglertz’s ability to rotate more will be tested.

But even in those final months with an exit door looming and Denmark slipping into successive losses, Jeglertz never wavered in his character.

“The way he reacted at the Euros, it showed what a good person and leader he was because he took a lot of the responsibility for the performances on his shoulders,” she says. “I felt he took too much because it’s always a mix, but he never put anything on us.”

It explains why Harder, formerly of Chelsea, looks on from Germany with a smile at Jeglertz’s success at City.

“I understand now he’s more of a club coach than a national team coach. He’s so into the development of players, the style of play, he needs more time. I’m just happy for him.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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