Tanya Oxtoby: 'There were no real visible role models of an indigenous background when I was playing'

Michael died from sarcoma in 2018. A tumour had been found in his hip. The family chose to fill his final months with joy and Oxtoby recalls dressing up as Santa at Christmas, only for her watch to give her away. She recalls her brother's knowing look, "as if to say, I know it's you!" she smiles as grief begins to sound like strength. "When he left us, you can look at it one of two ways. It's really sad. But he lived an amazing life for 39 years - probably more amazing than some of us live in a whole lifetime. I think the people he touched and the way he affected people's lives… that's his legacy.

"I know he's still watching us. I know he's around. I see him every day in Albie, in his little mannerisms, the way he is. I'm like, 'oh, wow - that is too close to home'. He'll say something or do something, and I'll say to my mum, 'he's just like Mike'."

Albie is Oxtoby and her partner Alice's five-year-old son. The United boss is one of few mothers working in the top two tiers of the women's game in England and says her club have been supportive of her finely-balanced life. Albie joined his mum on the bus back from the Magpies' 2-1 win at Southampton in February. "The girls entertain him no end," she smiles. "It's nice for the players, too, to see a different side of me as well. They probably think I'm quite blunt, to the point, direct. And then, obviously I'm a massive big softy underneath, but I just don't show it."

Why don't you show it? Is there a need to let out that bluntness? "I think I have to. You have to get the balance, but the balance comes over time."

I bring up an interview she gave to The Irish News in 2025, in which Oxtoby describes herself as "a massively introverted person". She nods. "A classic example this weekend. We had friends over. It takes a lot - that takes a lot out of me. I love having them there, they're great, and I love spending time with them. But I get to a point where I'm like, 'OK guys, I'm going upstairs now. I need some quiet time'. They're all still sat there, getting their buzz off the social interaction, but I'm just like, 'I need to switch off'.

"When you're in a front-facing job, that's really, really hard. People in the office or around here wouldn't expect that you're quite a shy, introverted person, because the role that you play every day is extroverted. But that's exhausting, hence why I have a lot of conversations, especially with Grace (Williams, director of women's football), saying, like, 'I will go a hundred miles an hour - but at some point I have to stop, and you have to help me to know when I need to do that, because I need to go and recharge'. I need a day where I don't speak to anyone.

"If we have a day off, my idea of heaven is I don't speak to a single person, and I'm just pottering around doing nothing. That's where I recharge. I always call them tokens. I start the day with, let's say, five tokens. I walk in the building, do a meeting - that's one token out the door. By the time I get home I might be minus three tokens, because I've had to deal with so many things that are uncomfortable for me."

When she was younger, she wanted to be a basketballer. "I thought I was really good," she says. "It turns out I was not." She left home at 12 to take a football scholarship at a boarding school almost 1,000 miles away in Perth but struggled to adjust and ended up living with her aunt. The move helped shape her though and later, as a student at the University of Western Australia, Oxtoby double majored in Psychology. It took five years and elements of her studies have proved applicable in her dealings with players. "But that's also a two-way street. It's them trying to also understand me and know, I suppose, how to get the best outcome when we’re chatting as well."

But some managers have little desire to be understood. Some simply want their authority to be respected. "If you want an environment that has got a good culture and is respectful, that has to be two-way. It has to be," she counters. "There are non-negotiables and things that we're not going to agree on, and that's OK. But at the end of the day, you've got to have the capacity to have a bit of back-and-forth. Otherwise, what's the point? That, to me, is more of a dictatorship, it's not necessarily a partnership.

"The best cultures I've been a part of, there is certainly an element of, 'I'm not budging on that', but the rest of it is collaboration and trying to get the best out of ourselves, because what fits one player doesn't always fit another and everyone's circumstances are really different."

Between 2021 and 2023 Oxtoby was assistant to Emma Hayes at Chelsea. She says her time in West London, which brought back-to-back Women's Super League titles and three successive FA Cups, influenced her tactical approach. "If you have a very distinctive way that you want to play, you better have the best players in the world to be able to execute that every single time," she says. "In my opinion, football is fluid and you need the ability to be flexible.

"I always say I want the players to feel confident they can make decisions. We want them to be decision-makers. If you're at Wembley in front of 80,000, they're not going to hear me. If I want them to play a certain way, they have to be able to make decisions for themselves and I think that's when you get the utopia and the best out of people, because they - rightly or wrongly - make a decision, take accountability for that choice whether it came off or it didn't, and we move on from it and it's a learning.

"Everyone has their own style. We have principles, we have a certain way that we want to play, but what that looks like week to week may vary a bit, because that's the challenge. It keeps players on their toes as well."

Oxtoby followed the Magpies' rise to the second tier from afar. They have lost just twice in WSL2 since her appointment but, glancing around her office in this modular building, she acknowledges there is a degree of delicacy in plotting a path forward. "And I think it's not about changing everything all at once - that's really clear. I've never done that, whether it was Northern Ireland or Bristol City. It's staging it and thinking about what's going to give us the biggest bang for our buck right now - how do we have the biggest impact, and what area is that in? And making sure that we nail that down first, then slowly layer on top.

"I think if you come in and just blow it up… maybe the staff in the building feel like I have! But for me, I've just gone, 'these are the main things we need to go after'."

Is part of the challenge she faces at Newcastle akin to fixing a plane in mid-air? "You're tinkering with it, but you're not ripping the wings off and trying to rebuild all at once. It's trying to do it in a way that's sustainable. If you rip it all apart, you're bound to have to take five steps back. And we're not in a position to do that."

The speed of progress "tests my patience at times" but she credits staff and players' openness to new processes. "And having people around you that shape the way you are authentic is important. Sometimes, just knowing you're enough being you is key. That, for me, is probably the piece now. We've got great leaders here and they're all very different. But I want them to be different, because I don't want them to be anything that they're not. The way they influence every single person in the group differently is what it's about. We don't want robots. The world is robotic enough, I think."

Those in her profession are not always given to reflection but Oxtoby recounts two significant memories. The first is of taking her dad to Wembley for Manchester City Women's 3-0 FA Cup final win over West Ham in 2019. "We were sat watching. He was like, 'one day, that will be you'. I laughed. I just thought, 'good one, nice one mate'. But he had tears in his eyes.

"He reminded me of it in the Chelsea era when we won three FA Cups in a row. That was a real opening of the door into my world, and he got to see what we get to experience here (in women's football in England) and the support we have. It was a pretty special moment."

The other is from 2018. She was at Perth Airport preparing to fly back to England after Michael's funeral - for which she'd put together a soundtracked slideshow of photos and videos of the two siblings and their family - when her phone rang. The 40-minute call ultimately led to her taking the Bristol City job, her first managerial post in the WSL. She thought he would have wanted her to do it but "I'm not open about that sort of stuff," she adds. "It was a year's worth of emotion crammed into ten days."

Her career flowed from there without much time to grieve. Oxtoby says she compartmentalised some emotions but, at the time of this conversation, the eighth anniversary of Michael's passing is approaching and it is on her mind. "Normalising some of those feelings is my way of coping with it. The rest of the time I kind of park that and pop it there. There are times when Albie will smack me in the face with it, which is good - it's a reminder. He'll say stuff like, 'do you miss your brother?' Those little comments when you're not prepared for it… or he'll get sad and he'll go, 'I wish I'd met my uncle Mike - why is he in heaven?' Then you're having a whole conversation with a child about that. It's those moments you can't control, and you have to allow yourself to feel it."

Albie, whose middle name is Michael, has a photo of his uncle on his bedside table. Last Christmas, while her parents were over from Australia, Oxtoby sat with Albie and put the slideshow on. "It was the first time I'd watched it back since the funeral. That's a long time ago. That's how long grief takes, to allow yourself to feel that. It was the right time: 'do you want to see your uncle Mike?'

"He's got real innocence in his eyes, so he was like, 'is that you, mummy, when you were a kid?' It's nice. But it's just taking those moments when you feel ready to deal with them," she says. "There's no timeframe on that. Everybody does it differently."