Manchester City legend Vincent Kompany has Burnley on track for return to Premier League

There was silence and transfixed expressions as he spoke. They’ve been following him ever since. Burnley, top of the Sky Bet Championship since mid-October, are 18 points clear of Watford in third and on course for promotion with a 100-point season.

“It was true, the players here were massive winners,” Kompany says. “Winning trophies is for the very few and, to me, overachieving is also winning. And Burnley was a club that had overachieved for many, many years. So, there is a core [culture] here that has been right for many years and a solid foundation. As a manager, you just have to give it the version of what you think will be best for the future.”

When he talks, you listen. That’s the essence of Kompany, a man whose father was a mayor and late mother an activist, who communicates with an authority that led his former teammate David Silva, when Kompany left Manchester City, to joke, “Who is going to give us lectures now? I think they could use him at the UN.”

Kompany has revamped both Burnley’s squad and playing style, but in such a way that he has taken people with him, making ten first-team signings, six of them under 24, yet retaining and re-inspiring a core of experienced fighters pivotal to the club’s remarkable run of six years of Premier League survival – on a budget.

When you drive over the River Calder and enter the inner quarters of the Barnfield Training Centre, the sign is still there, spelling out what Kompany wanted to keep. “It says, ‘Legs, hearts and minds,’ ” the 36-year-old says, with a smile. “You know: that hard work, that grit. That feeling of coming out at Turf Moor every weekend and it being a difficult place to come to. I wanted to retain all that. The rest are just my own additions, the things that I believe in, but they’re no more than that.”

We’re at Shuttleworth College, a secondary school in Padiham, where Kompany has just wowed everyone with his contribution to a session for pupils on mental health. A number of clubs are quietly outstanding in their community work and Burnley are one, but Kompany exceeds expectation, sitting himself in the middle of the kids and coaxing a heartfelt discussion about anxiety, despite the shyness of some. There are TV crews here and when one of the organisers tries to move Kompany on to the media part of his visit, he gestures to the pupils at the table he is sitting on and says firmly, “Hang on. We’ll do the rounds and keep sharing.”

This was Monday, the start of the EFL’s annual Week of Action, a scheme that showcases its 72 clubs’ efforts in the community, which created a social value of £865 million and involved almost 10,000 people working to deliver projects last season. Shuttleworth College is the hub for Burnley’s schools mental wellbeing project which, across the local area, has helped more than 4,000 students struggling with issues from exam stress, to anger management, self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

“Young people really interact with [Kompany],” Michael Colquhoun, the director of projects at Burnley’s community arm, says. “Them talking with somebody who has played at the highest level, knows those pressures, is amazing to see.”

On the surface, it may appear that Kompany didn’t move the dial at Anderlecht, who finished fourth and third in his two seasons in charge, but the club were riven by boardroom instability and have plummeted since he quit in the summer. In hindsight, his leadership may have been a sticking plaster keeping the place together.

In that first meeting with the squad at Burnley he promised “a difficult start but an incredible future” – the message being: players would have to work hard, initially, to absorb his new ideas, but rewards lay down the line. True to that, Burnley started with one win in their opening five games, as a new team gelled and got used to his switch to an expansive, positionally detailed, possession game.

Now, across the Premier League and Championship, Burnley are behind only Manchester City and Swansea City for passes per game, doubling their output under Sean Dyche, their previous manager.

Their young recruits Jordan Beyer, 22, Taylor Harwood-Bellis, 20, and the creative Dutch left back Ian Maatsen, 20, are key to a style based on careful build-up play and then explosive attacking from wide. Yet, at the same time, Burnley have made the most midfield tackles of any Championship side.

The start was “difficult in terms of the work we had to do behind the scenes and the uncertainty of bringing the squad together,” Kompany says, “but it has exceeded expectations and that’s credit to the players, and then the rest of it is managing habits and making sure we keep our standards as high as possible, and making sure getting better is a priority still.”

Good communication is at the heart of this, because, Kompany says, “We have a lot of people within the staff, not just myself, who can relate [to the group] because we’ve been players. Michael Jackson [the former caretaker manager] was a footballer for a very long time in the lower divisions and made the best he had in terms of ability. Then you have Craig Bellamy [the assistant manager], who played and failed and succeeded and failed and succeeded. Then [a first-team coach] Floribert N’Galula, who was the player who never had a career because of his injuries.

“So we have all these different angles and through communicating we can see patterns and say to a player, ‘OK, this is where something went wrong, and this is where I went wrong when I was in your position, and this is what can help you.’ ”

He talks about taking players on journeys. The winger Anass Zaroury, 22, was signed for euros 4 million (about £3.5 million) from Charleroi, in Belgium, and forced his way into Morocco’s World Cup squad. The midfielder Josh Cullen, 26, jettisoned by West Ham United after 15 years striving to make it there, was rebooted by Kompany at Anderlecht, then brought to Burnley, and looks at last to be headed to England’s top flight. Developing people is a passion.

“If someone has been progressing very quickly, it’s exciting to think, ‘What if he can keep doing that for the rest of his career? And where can he get then?’ ” the Belgian says.

Still only 36, at what point in the road is Kompany? “At the very beginning of a journey [as a coach] in which I intend to get better every day. I can improve at everything. And I hope if you ask me the same question in five or ten years’ time, you’ll get the same answer,” he says.

His principles echo those of Pep Guardiola and, although Kompany tires of questions about his City days, it is impossible not to ask what influence Guardiola has had upon him. “I took from every manager I had but, for me, Pep was the starting point. It’s a way of looking at football, looking at spaces, and then you make your own game out of it, so you become your own version.

“He was the starting point of making me understand why I was doing the things in my career and how I could create a ‘why’ for other people when I became a manager,” he replies.

Kompany dislikes talk of promotion. “There are 92 clubs [in the pyramid] and it’s a case of year by year trying to get a bit better and as high as we can. I have an incredible faith that, in football, chaos will always make people make wrong decisions, so we just have to stay calm and keep making the right ones.”

He signed a “four to five-year contract” with Burnley and says: “I’ve never been able to go into something without having a long-term idea. It’s what motivates me.” One attraction of returning to England was that his family base is in Hale and, when at Anderlecht, he spent long periods separated from his wife, Carla, and their three children.

He talks to the Burnley schoolchildren about finding “balance” – but does he manage this himself, given management’s demands? “Very little balance in this life,” he reflects. “The simple answer is you are not achieving it but you are constantly looking for it. So you make the effort and you find your moments of balance, rather than perfect balance.”

It sounds like he accepts being consumed by the job. “Yeah. I need it,” he says. “I think I’d be less happy if I had a less consuming life.”

– The Sunday Times

Originally published as Manchester City legend Vincent Kompany has Burnley on track for return to Premier League