‘Asia opened my eyes’: Mark Jackson on coaching across Australia, Thailand and Singapore

Mark Jackson’s coaching journey through Asia has already taken him across three very different football environments.

From leading Central Coast Mariners to a historic treble in Australia, to stepping into the pressure and expectation of Buriram United in Thailand, and now taking charge of ambitious Singaporean champions Lion City Sailors, the Englishman has been forced to adapt not only his football, but his approach to culture, communication and leadership.

It is an experience that Jackson says has “opened my eyes” to football in this part of the world – and convinced him that the level across Asia remains significantly underestimated, particularly from Europe.

Sitting down with The Asian Game for an extended Continental Corner conversation in Adelaide, Jackson reflected on the lessons learned across Australia, Thailand and Singapore, why coaches need to embrace before they educate, the importance of patience in building a football culture, what Australian and Southeast Asian football can learn from each other, and just how high he believes Lion City Sailors can climb on the continental stage.

THE ASIAN GAME: You’ve now coached in Australia, Thailand and Singapore. What have those experiences taught you about how different football cultures can be across Asia?

MARK JACKSON: It’s really opened my eyes to football in this part of the world. It’s really given me an appetite to stay. That’s clear because the quality and the passion for football here is massive. I’ve got a real appetite to stay and be successful here.

I’ve managed to do that in two countries now, Australia and Thailand. My target is to do exactly the same and be as successful, if not more successful, in Singapore.

Working in different countries brings its challenges. Myself and Cameron Toshack, who I work with, we always use these three words when we go into a club. It’s kind of our mantra: embrace, integrate and educate.

We look to embrace where we’re going. That’s really, really important. I think if you go into a new country, a new culture, you need to embrace what it is, what the club is, and find out about the history of the club.

Then you have to integrate yourself in there as well. At my last club in Thailand, there was just myself and Cameron who went there, so we had to integrate with the staff. Here, there’s myself, Cameron and Lucas, but we still have to integrate with members of staff at the football club.

That’s a big part of it – how we integrate.

Once you’ve done those two things, embraced what the culture is, what the country is and what the club is, and you’ve integrated yourself in there, then the next thing is you start to educate in what you want.

You have to do that fairly quickly, but for me the first two are really important. If you try to go in and just dictate and say, ‘I want to do it this way, this is my way’, although that is important, I think you get more buy-in if you’re showing that integration and embracing the culture that’s already there.

Once you get in there, get people on board and get them working and understanding things, then you can start to develop that education and that way of working.

That’s worked well.

TAG: They’re three very different clubs and experiences as well. Central Coast Mariners were probably among the smallest clubs with one of the smallest budgets in Australian football. Then you went to Buriram and now Lion City, two giants of their domestic leagues where the expectation is to win. How different are those challenges and pressures?

JACKSON: Certainly at Central Coast, they’d won the Grand Final the year before but lost a lot of players, so it was a bit of a rebuild of the squad.

I was a new manager going in there, getting a group of players to play the type of football I wanted them to play. There had to be a lot of change as well, so it took a little bit of time. I remember losing the first four games and everybody was panicking, but what the owner, Rich Peil, and Matt Simon, the sporting director, did was show full belief in me.

I think that’s important. That gave us the platform to go on and achieve a historic treble, which was fantastic.

When I went to Buriram, it was a different challenge. Of course, once you achieve what we did at Central Coast, the expectation is there as well, but it’s a constant cycle of losing players there. It’s very, very challenging.

The opportunity came to go to Buriram, and the expectation was to win every game, compete and win trophies. That was good for me. I want that challenge because I always put that pressure on myself as a coach. Internally, I always have that pressure on myself. At Buriram, it was there externally as well.

But we managed to navigate that using the philosophy we have about embracing, integrating and then educating how we want to play. That worked really, really well.

It’ll be exactly the same here at Lion City Sailors. It’s a club that has won and wants to continue winning, but also wants to push itself on. Speaking to [club chairman] Forrest (Li) and [director of football] Luka (Lalic) when I first came, and the different board members as well, it was clear that I would have the support from them to help the club move forward.

There’s an expectation for us to win, of course, but I think we’ve got the resources to make big strides forward in the coming months and coming seasons.

TAG: What do you think people misunderstand when they talk about Asian football as though it is one single football environment? Particularly from an Australian perspective, we talk about ‘Asian football’, but everywhere is so different.

JACKSON: I think people underestimate the level of football as well. I was one of them when I came over to Australia and we were playing in the AFC Cup, which is now the Champions League Two, we were playing against some teams I’d not heard of before. I’m not afraid of saying that.

Sometimes when you’re in England, you can get very cocooned in European football and the Premier League, and you don’t know what’s around in the rest of the world. Even now, when I go back home, people don’t really understand the level – and the level is very good out here. Very good.

Each country has its own uniqueness. You talk about Australia and how there’s such a long off-season now and having to deal with that and other things within that culture.

Singapore, where I am now, the league isn’t massive. There aren’t many teams in there, so that’s a challenge as well and something people might not be used to. There are all these little different things, but mainly it’s about the culture of that particular country and understanding what that is.

But, yeah, I think people underestimate the football in this part of the world.

TAG: You’ve experienced three different environments now in Australia, Thailand and Singapore. What do you believe separates the strongest football environments from those still trying to develop?

JACKSON: Finances are a big thing. Finances in football in this day and age are massively important. But I’ve proved that finances aren’t everything because we did what we did at the Mariners. But it does play a big part. When you’ve got the budgets to get better players and things like that, it helps, but it’s not all about that.

I fully believe it’s about creating the environment around the football club. Of course, you need certain elements within the infrastructure of the football club. Does everything need to be multi-million-dollar? No, it doesn’t. But you need certain facilities to help you be successful.

Creating that culture within the club is so, so important – that understanding, that way of playing. And changing that is very hard to do.

For me, finance is a big factor, but in modern football it’s about giving people time as well. I’ve said this before in previous interviews: a lot of clubs talk about, ‘We want to get a manager in, we want to have this culture, we want to play this certain type of football.’ But after three games they’re panicking and wanting to change the manager. You see it all over the world.

That’s where I was really successful at Central Coast Mariners, because after four games I’d lost four games in a row – the worst start for a defending champion.

But the owner and sporting director, Rich Peil and Matt Simon, basically said, ‘If anybody thinks this is going any other way, they can walk away. This manager is staying with us. We trust in what he wants to do. We believe in his way of playing and his way of building the football club.’

I think other football clubs need to follow that suit because implementing change is not always a quick fix. I think I’ve become fairly successful and good at doing that in a quick manner, and we’ve got ways of how and why we do that. But it’s not an overnight thing. It takes a little bit of time.

I’ve really felt that support from Forrest, Luka and the rest of the club here. We’ll get that support to do that, and then it’s up to us to do our stuff.

TAG: Australian football is in a state of flux at the moment. What could Australian football learn from Southeast Asia, and conversely, what could Southeast Asia learn from Australian football?

JACKSON: That’s a very in-depth question. If you were going to task me with changing football in there, that’s probably a job in itself. But I think the Australian league now, you can visibly see it’s going a lot younger.

When I went into Central Coast Mariners, every player wanted to go overseas. That was it. That ambition is good, of course it is, I think what the country does need to do is entice the players to stay a little bit longer.

You’re seeing the marquee players disappear a little bit from places like Australia. But in any country, if you want to grow football or take it to the next level, you need the attraction of big players coming in. Of course, there’s a financial backing needed for that as well.

But if you are playing younger players or local players, those experienced players can come in and help educate them about what it takes to go to the next level.

In Singapore at the minute, I take my job very seriously. Yes, I’m the head coach of Lion City Sailors and we want to bring success to the club and take it to the next level.

But because we have a large proportion of the Singapore national team players in our squad, I also want to help develop those players, give them the opportunity to play at these levels of competition and go deep in these competitions – Champions League, the Shopee Cup, things like that.

That will help them and their country get better internationally as well. I think getting the balance between having good foreign players, influential foreign players, but also embracing the local players in that country is vital.

It’s vital to help grow their national-team performance as well.

TAG: Lion City are a hugely ambitious club. They want to establish themselves as a significant club within Asian football, and you could argue they have already achieved that to a degree. What does becoming a genuinely competitive club in Asia require beyond simply investing money in players?

JACKSON: Continually, year after year, going deep in these competitions. It’s really, really important that they do that. The club has been in the final of this competition before, so again that needs to be the aim: going deep into these competitions. And then you actually have to win these competitions, which is massively important.

I think consistency and stability helps. Of course I’m going to say that as a manager. But if you sit down and look at it, as I said in my previous answer, recruiting the right manager is important for a football club. Then giving that manager time and support to see that through is important as well.

It’s never going to be smooth. There are always going to be turbulent times, but that’s the case in any business when you’re trying to implement change. Giving consistency and having stability within your football club will help.

Then it’s about trying to grow every year and get better.

I think successful clubs who want to go to the next level can sometimes rest on their laurels a little bit and think, ‘We’ve made it. Whatever we did last year must have been good because we won.’ But there are always ways to improve. There are always ways to get better. Certainly at the Sailors now, they’ve been successful and they’ve won things, but we want to go to the next level and compete there.

So I think constantly reviewing things is important. How can we be better? And that’s across all departments. I said before about how we work in a multidisciplinary way. It’s not just about what happens on the pitch. How can you be better as a football club?

We do a lot of things very well, but there are always ways we can improve and make them better. That constant reviewing of performance will establish that high-performance thinking. If you have that reviewing and that high-performance thinking, then ultimately you get high performance.

I think that’s what everybody is trying to achieve, and that’s how we as a football club can go further as well: planning it, doing it, reviewing it and trying to get better.

TAG: You mentioned trying to take the club to the next level. How high do you think the ceiling is for a Singaporean club in Asian continental competition?

JACKSON: We want to be winning these competitions. There’s no point in being in these competitions if you’re not going to say that.

Like I said, the club has been in the final, so they’ve shown they have the capabilities to do that. We have to do that consistently, and we have to do it consistently while balancing the other competitions as well – the Shopee Cup, the domestic league and the cups.

They’ve shown they can do it, and I fully believe we can get to that level.

TAG: Having achieved success in Australia and now returning with Lion City Sailors, do you view Australian football differently from the outside compared with when you were here on the inside?

JACKSON: No, not really. I always knew there were good players here, good teams and good players. It’s an underestimated league for me. When I first came, I said to people back home that people underestimate the level of players here.

I know it’s come in for a lot of criticism and things like that, but you’ve still got good players here. We’ve analysed Adelaide a lot. We know they’ve got good players. We know it’s a great club. Particularly their stadium – if they get the fans in under the lights, it can be a very, very tough place to play. I’ve had some good games here. I’ve had some average games here, some not-so-good games here, so I’ve had mixed experiences as well.

But they have a good team.

From the outside, I always keep my eye on Australian football, particularly Central Coast. I’ve always got a passion for this side of the world and this country and the football. I hope it grows and I hope it gets back to where I know it can be.

But in the meantime, I’m with the Sailors now and I’m trying to help grow football in that country. I’m trying to help develop the football club and take us to the next level.