Tony Pulis tells Sky Sports he wants five years in charge at West Brom to develop club

Tony Pulis wants five years in charge at West Brom to develop the club, he has told Sky Sports.

In an exclusive interview with Soccer Saturday reporter Johnny Phillips, West Brom boss Pulis mapped out his plans for the future and said: “I’d love to have five years here, where people would back me and give me the opportunity to push the club forward on and off the pitch.”

Pulis led West Brom to a 1-0 win at Manchester United on Saturday and has steered the Hawthorns side clear of the relegation zone since taking over from Alan Irvine on New Year’s Day.

You can watch the full interview on Soccer Saturday on Sky Sports News HQ HD from 12pm this weekend, but here, Phillips blogs on meeting the former Crystal Palace boss and discovering the secrets to his success…

Chris Brunt’s free-kick, which flew past David De Gea and into the Manchester United goal via a wicked deflection off Jonas Olsson’s calf, brought the three points West Bromwich Albion needed to reach the 40 points manager Tony Pulis had demanded from his team this season.

It wasn’t a pretty way to win a game of football but not one supporter cheering on from the away section at Old Trafford will have cared. For the second campaign running, Pulis has guided a team clear of relegation trouble long before the final day.

Pulis still insists the task of turning around Albion’s fortunes is tougher than the proposition he faced at Crystal Palace, and that the job is far from complete. “It’s all about perceptions in this game,” he told me.  

“The perception was that West Brom had been a Premier League club for five or six years so should be set up okay. But since Roy Hodgson and Steve Clarke left they’ve gradually slipped, so there is lots of work to be done.

“There’s stuff here that shouldn’t be here and there’s stuff elsewhere that should be here. We just haven’t got it at the moment in the way I’d want, but the lads that are here have worked really well and have really knuckled down and in a lot of the games have performed well.”

Pulis was speaking from the media room at West Brom’s training ground, and during the course of our interview it was clear he wanted to change so much more than just the results on the pitch.

There is a type of player Pulis readily identifies with and one of the few things he was able to do in January was bring in Darren Fletcher.

“If you’ve got people around you who aren’t as dedicated as you are and aren’t prepared to put the work in then that frustrates me, so I’ve always tried to go for character first and foremost so you know that if the going gets tough you’ve got people around you who will stick with you,” he said.

“When I came in I had a meeting with the senior players saying I expected them to run the dressing room. I’ve done that at every club; Jedinak and Delaney at Crystal Palace. Shawcross at Stoke. I don’t want to be on top of the players all the time.”

Values

Pulis’ values were formed in a different era. Getting those values through to younger players is harder than it was. He would never pander to the needs of individuals ahead of the team, although he believes today’s footballers often come with a sense of entitlement and are suffering from a lack of role models.

“The problem we have in life is that there are not enough mentors out there. It’s a social problem not a football one,” he said.

“People become very selfish, they look after themselves. They put themselves first, second, third and fourth. I was brought up in a different era when there were more people out there prepared to help you, especially when things weren’t going well.

“I came from down the docks where if Mum ran out of bread, Mrs Jones next door would give her half of hers and Mum would do the same next time for her. If you fell over people would be there to pick you up, they wouldn’t be stepping over you.

“This country, this island, used to be famous for that and it annoys me that we seem to be losing that sometimes.”

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Investment

Changing the culture of the dressing room is one task, another might be to change attitudes in the boardroom. Albion have never invested the sort of sums needed to compete at the highest level.

Pulis believes a strong relationship with the chairman is crucial: “The most important relationship is between the manager and the chairman. If that is going well, and everyone knows you’re together, then you have more chance of succeeding.”

So should chairman Jeremy Peace take a leaf out of Peter Coates’ book at Stoke when it comes to working with Pulis and investing in the team? “Peter Coates and their family were different,” said Pulis.

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“They allowed you to manage. They gave you the money but they had the trust and faith that I could take them to a level they were aspiring to. They did fantastically well. They knew their football and they knew I could do a job and over-achieve with a certain amount of money, which initially took place in the Championship.”

Plan

It’s hard not to get the impression that it is his way or the highway when working with this manager, which may not marry with Peace’s model of football management. But Pulis has every right to insist on complete control of football matters. In 23 years of management he has built up an impressive CV.

So how long would he like to be at West Brom– a club that is now on its sixth manager in six years?

“You never know, I won manager of the year last year and then left the football club before a ball was kicked again,” he said.

“If you said to me ‘How would you map it out?’ I’d love to have five years here where people would back me and give me the opportunity to push the club forward on and off the pitch.”

Watch the full interview with Tony Pulis on Soccer Saturday, from 12pm on Sky Sports News HQ.