A unique footballing education pays off for Paul Clement and Swansea City

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It takes a brave individual to walk away from a role with one of the biggest clubs in world football to become a manager for a club battling for their Premier League survival. However, Paul Clement is not your usual managerial talent. His own playing career never went past the non-league stage and he started focusing on the coaching side of things in his early 20s.

Clement gained valuable experience working at the Fulham academy and at Chelsea, where he worked his way up from the youth ranks to be a assistant under esteemed managers in Guus Hiddink and Carlo Ancelotti.

Clement became a trusted assistant for Ancelotti and the pair made a formidable managerial team, winning the Premier League and FA Cup with the Blues, the Ligue 1 title in France with Paris Saint Germain, and the Champions League and Copa Del Rey with Real Madrid.

After leaving Madrid when Ancelotti was sacked, Clement looked to embark on his own managerial career, taking up the role at Championship side Derby County in June 2015. Despite guiding the Rams to fifth place in February of the following year, his services were terminated after just 33 games in charge.

Clement then teamed up with Ancelotti once again, when the Italian was appointed to replace Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich at the start of the 2016/7 season. While he had suffered from a bitter experience of being sacked by Derby, Clement still had managerial ambitions of his own and was successful in getting the Swansea City job.

The 45 year-old was walking into a club that was the true definition of being in crisis, having just sacked their second manager for the season (Bob Bradley), and were sitting in rock bottom on 12 points with just three wins for the season. It was about as far away from the circumstances of his previous job in Munich as you could find.

However, Clement was prepared to roll up his sleeves and get to work. After observing a victory against fellow strugglers Crystal Palace from the stands, his official first game in charge was a home fixture against Arsenal. A humbling 4-0 defeat was a sign of the job he had on his hands. However he was not daunted by the challenge that lay ahead.

The next game was another tough fixture, this time away to Liverpool. Rather than rolling over and accepting their fate, Swansea took the game to their opponents, exposed their defensive weaknesses and inflicted the first home league defeat for the Merseyside club in a year.

It was the moment when the Welsh club seemed to believe that they could defy all the odds and survive the drop. Swansea won three of their next five games against Southampton, Leicester and Burnley and were competitive in defeats against Man City (1-2) and Chelsea (1-3).

However, they endured a horror spell in March and April, during which they picked up a solitary point from six games, including a potentially crucial loss against fellow relegation candidates Hull. After they finally managed a victory against Stoke in the middle of April, the club found itself two points from safety with four games to play.

Nonetheless, every season there seems to be a team that goes on a run that secures their survival and this time around it was the Swans, even though they did not have the easiest set of fixtures, having to play Manchester United, Everton, Sunderland and West Brom.

They managed to secure 10 points from those games, while conceding just two goals in total. From their side of things, drop zone rivals Hull could only claim one point, against Southampton, and were relegated before the last round of the season.

After clinching a 2-1 win against West Brom in the last game of the season, the Swans, under Clement, had amassed 26 points in 18 games (8 wins, 8 losses and two draws). If you take the Crystal Palace game into account, that record makes even better reading (29 points in 19 games). Their record in the second half of the season saw them sit comfortably in the top half of the table.

A noteworthy fact is that Swansea finished one point above Burnley and Watford, who they had given an eight and seven point, respectively, head start at the commencement of the Englishman’s managerial reign.

When you are down at the bottom, you need everyone on the same page, but especially your key players, who must step forward and set the example. Clement looked to the experienced duo of Fernando Llorente and Gylfi Sigurdsson to take the lead and they responded in fine style.

In the 18 games that Clement has been in charge, Llorente scored nine goals, while Sigurdsson scored five and delivered seven assists. It is the kind of quality that the bottom three teams did not consistently have and were, therefore, relegated.

Although Swansea have had their fair share of managers in their time in the Premier League (six in all, as well as two stints by caretaker manager Alan Curtis), they deserve a deal of credit for surviving six seasons in what is arguably the toughest league in the world.

This season was the the closest the Swans have come to dropping down to the Championship, yet they found the resolve to get themselves out of the situation they found themselves in. The club also has to take some credit in taking a gamble on Clement, who was not one of the “usual suspects” that clubs usually turn to in desperate times.

Clement was certainly deserving of his place on the Manager of the Year list, for orchestrating the survival of Swansea from such a perilous position. The footballing internship that the Englishman undertook to get him to this stage of his career is one that aspiring young managers should look to follow.

While they may not get a tutor to learn from like Ancelotti, they will get valuable experience that they can use to boost their own credentials. Clement is now in a strong position to make some important changes in the summer and look to secure Swansea’s place in the league for a sustained period of time. After the disarray that the club went through in the second half of 2016, the future suddenly looks a whole lot brighter in the coastal city in Wales.

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