The comment from a Queens Park Rangers staff member sitting in the first-team section of the club canteen was an impromptu blurt of shock and awe. It didn’t quite travel to the far end of the room where players gathered after training, but it was loud enough to be heard two tables away.
It made you sling your neck up and take your face out of the plate of chicken, rice and roasted sweet potato.
Jimmy Dunne, the club captain and Republic of Ireland international, is hard to miss at the best of times. The 6ft 3in centre back towers above most and now it’s like his head is a beacon.
Think Eminem in his heyday. Had events in Prague turned out differently, this dye-job could even be a nice homage to the Romania squad from the France ’98 World Cup.
Alas, Dunne’s bleached blonde look is very much on point for a club that is counting down the days to the summer holidays. QPR are 14th in the Championship and will finish the campaign 12th, at best, 17th at worst.
It’s Monday morning when The 42 arrives at their €23 million training ground – opened three years ago – 20 minutes away from Heathrow Airport.
It’s the start of a long season’s final week, and there are definite end-of-school vibes around the place. If they were a bunch of schoolkids, they would be signing each other’s uniforms and promising to be best friends forever.
In football, everyone knows the reality.
After QPR travel to Ipswich Town today, for a game that does have real significance for the hosts in their Premier League promotion race, plenty of these players will go their separate ways. They will leave the WhatsApp group and cross paths as rivals or perhaps teammates elsewhere down the line.
New Ireland recruit Harvey Vale is otherwise engaged as players and staff settle down for food after training at 1pm. The only person who matches Dunne’s physical presence is first team coach and head of defensive coaching, Steve Bould.
Steve Bould is on the QPR staff. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
The former Arsenal centre back, who won three league titles at the club, two under George Graham and one with Arsene Wenger, has stayed out on one of the three main training pitches to put some defenders through some extra work.
QPR have been safe for weeks and it’s shown. Three defeats in a row mean the players were never going to be given this Monday off.
There is still work to be done, of course.
Earlier that morning, before training at 11am, another stalwart of a bygone era is busy. Andy Impey was a diminutive winger and quintessential 90s/early Noughties Premier League player. He is now a transition coach for those youth team players aiming to break into the first team.
QPR’s rule is that for an academy graduate to officially be classed as a first-team player and move into their dressing room they must play 1,800 minutes of Championship action, the equivalent of 20 games. Kieran Morgan and Ryan Colley are the latest to do so this season.
There are teenagers on trial from Liverpool, Mali, Ghana and Jamaica. The agent of the latter is sitting with Impey after being spotted at the same Phoenix All Stars Football Academy in Kingston that produced Aston Villa’s Leon Bailey.
This part of the business is relentless, and in the recruitment office just down the hall a game from Germany on the large TV is being dissected.
The 42 is here because of one man, though, a coach who “gets my elbows dirty and work in the shadows.”
Athlone native Anthony Hayes turns 40 later this year and has been steadily compiling a varied and impressive body of work throughout the English game over the past 15 years.
His title at QPR is Academy Head of Methodology, overseeing the development of 17 to 21-year-olds as well as leading the various staff within those departments. Since November he has also been the lead Development Squad (U21) coach after the departure of Paul Furlong.
Hayes was preparing for Wednesday’s London Senior Cup final against non-league side Dulwich Hamlet but planning for the future has been underway since April, when players started to be informed if they would be kept on or released.
“We want to get as many players into the first team but the reality is we won’t so we need to make them employable within the Football League, and that’s the second part of the remit. It is a business model. We have to produce players who can play the game for a living, and we can’t lose sight of that,” Hayes says.
QPR have posted combined losses of almost €65 million for the last three seasons, during which time they have finished 15th, 18th and 20th in the Championship. Debt levels as of 2025 were in the region of €150 million, while significant investment in the TSG Elite Training & Performance Centre has helped with Financial Fair Play compliance.
Still, a further injection of capital will be required by the three-man ownership consortium of Malaysian billionaire Ruben Gnanalingam, Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, and US investor Richard Reilly if QPR are to meet their aim of earning Category 1 classification for its academy as part of the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP).
Local rivals Brentford are just a few miles away and they celebrated that milestone last month, an achievement not lost on Hayes seeing as they were the first professional club he worked with before they decided to close the youth set up and make several roles redundant.
Hayes during his Brentford days. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
There are an estimated 100 staff (full and part time) at QPR’s training centre and that will increase considerably with Category 1 classification requiring a minimum of 45 permanent roles.
It’s that work in the shadows, getting the elbows dirty, that will bring it to fruition.
…
Life was ready to take Anthony Hayes in a completely different direction when he was a teenager.
Music World felt like the centre of the universe in Athlone.
That’s the shop parents, Seamus and Dympna, ran in the town for 31 years.
Hayes was 16 when he broke into Athlone Town’s first-team, playing part-time in the League of Ireland First Division while studying business in the local Institute of Technology.
“The plan was to run the business.”
Hayes never realised the potential he had as a footballer but Seamus saw enough in his son to plant the seed that coaching was the way forward. Rather than try to selfishly guide Anthony down the path of taking over from him, he wanted his son to embrace a challenge that truly belonged to him.
“What has stayed with me is that I’ve always been determined to show I am good enough to be a coach here because I was never good enough to be a player,” Hayes says.
By 19 he had earned his Uefa B Licence through the FAI while also still playing part-time with his local side and later Limerick 37.
The words of an Irish coaching sage, the right-hand man to Brian Kerr with Ireland, remain pierced in the consciousness. “Noel O’Reilly, God rest him, he was very encouraging and he told me at that age that when it came to coaching and playing at the same time, you could only do one at a very high level. You had to dedicate yourself.”
Hayes (centre) in caretaker charge of Charlton Athletic. Alamy Live News.
Alamy Live News.
Hayes tore his ACL not long afterwards and the change in his life’s direction was swift. A career guidance counsellor in Athlone IT suggested coaching in the United States. By 2010 he was working for a soccer school in New Jersey. Within a week he met the woman who would change his life.
Athena is the Greek Goddess of – among other things – wisdom, good counsel, war and heroic endevour.
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For his wife, Athena Hayes, you can add patience and understanding.
“The bleed from professional life into personal life, that spillover at times has been really disgraceful,” Hayes says. “The ones who pick you up and show you love from the disappointments in football are the ones we neglect the most.”
A case in point is when Athena, still on maternity leave with their second child in early 2024, followed Hayes up to Sunderland where had been appointed first-team coach. Hayes worked all hours while she and the kids held the fort in an apartment hundreds of miles from home. They returned south at the end of that season after just a few months and he was appointed to assistant boss at Gillingham Town.
He was sacked in January 2025 while out for a walk in a local park with his family.
“I got the heads up from [manager] Mark [Bonner] that we were going to get the bullet and a few minutes later I got the phone call. It was done very quickly. I was holding my three-year-old’s hand at the time.”
A short stint with Crystal Palace’s U21s was the bridge between his QPR appointment. Stability at the start of his career has been followed by upheaval. Athena, though, has been the constant.
Hayes followed her from America back to London. Her father is Greek-Cypriot and her mum Chinese. Her brother, Nico, emerged through Arsenal’s academy, later playing in the first team, and in 2019 became the first naturalised Chinese citizen to play for the national team.
Athena is an east London girl and wanted to return home to become a teacher. Hayes remembers the date they landed in the UK. “The 14th of January 2011.”
He was fortunate. An uncle in the city let him live rent-free and offered the use of his car. He got a job in a west London sports centre doing some coaching and earning money cash in hand.
A break came when his father-in-law passed his CV to Brentford’s head of academy recruitment, Shaun O’Connor. There was no job offer, just the opportunity to visit a few times a week and shadow the coaches of the academy. He’d pick up cones, listen, watch, and take notes.
“It’s become a rat race to get to a first team from the 18s or 21s. Some are trying to do it really quickly. It’s like AI, it takes the stress out of getting a solution. It gives you the solution but the struggle is removed to get to an end point. What have you learned?
“What I see as a problem is that there are too many impressionist coaches. There are not enough coaches who actually understand what their value is as a human being.
“What do they want to train, how do they want to train, how do they believe young people should be taught and developed? You only get that from different environments and working with good people.
“You have to do what works for you, you have to be authentic because you can’t change your personality and put on a show every single day for players. You can’t be something you’re not,” he says.
But Hayes did have to change. It was after a few months of shadowing that Brentford’s academy manager, Ose Aibangee, approached him with the immortal words: “Oi, so you’re the Irish boy.”
Hayes was told to do 30 minutes with the club’s U14s later that evening. He had nothing planned, so had to think on his feet. Aibangee provided positive feedback on his enthusiasm, body language and quality of session but offered one critique followed by some saliant advice.
“If I can’t understand a fucking word you are saying then how can you expect a 13-year-old kid from west London to understand you?”
Hayes laughs.
“He was right, I had to slow down to make sure my points landed in the session.”
Hayes (left) oversees part of the session.
Hayes was made full-time that summer and over the next four years progressed to work closely under Lee Carlsey.
“Football clubs will be built on people and the quality of people that you have in the building. It’s quality of people that will help each other and help to make the players get better.”
The path forward was clear. Hayes and Athena bought their home in late 2015. By early 2016 Brentford made the decision to shut their academy. Hayes took redundancy rather than re-apply for a role elsewhere.
There were also a couple of seismic personal tragedies around this time. His uncle and aunt, Larry and Martina Hayes, were two of the 38 victims of the 2015 Tunisia terror attacks in which tourists were murdered at their hotel.
Hayes also lost a cousin to suicide and as the years pass away from home the draw to return to family, his parents and his sister, is strong.
“Life hits you with perspective. Time is running out. The clock is ticking, and there is always that clock that we can’t see in the background. It’s morbid but it’s the reality. I want to have an impact in my life, with my family and in my work with players. I want to help make a difference.”
It shows the relentless change in football that 10 years after redundancy from Brentford’s academy, just a few miles down the road, that last month the club was awarded Category 1 status
QPR are attempting to chase down their near neighbours rather than the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Fulham in the English capital, while League One Wycombe Wanderers is only 20 miles away and they are heavily backed by Kazakhstani billionaire Mikheil Lomtadze.
“I had the belief that I could get a job elsewhere because of the work I’d done,” Hayes says of that clean break with Brentford.
And he was right. Charlton brought him into their academy by the summer of 2016, and that was the start of a seven-year association that would eventually see him work up to assistant first-time coach before being placed in temporary charge of the when they were struggling in League One in 2022.
The week before his appointment he had collected his Pro Licence from the FAI. He remembers all the positivity from fans when he was announced. “Then we lost our first game the next day against Stockport in the Cup. After that we lost to Joey Barton’s Bristol Rovers.”
He was still on Instagram and Twitter at the time and for some reason stayed up until 4am reading all of the abusive messages.
The third game was against Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton in the Carabao Cup and they beat the Premier League side on penalties after a 0-0 draw.
“All of a sudden I’ve gone from being a glorified PE teacher to the new Mourinho. I deleted my social media after that. Nonsense.”
His experiences from that time have not scarred him, and he admits that a first-team environment is where he aims to work his way back to, insisting that he is ready to lead rather than be a follower.
“You go into a Saturday after working great all week and it’s completely different. People change, players change, staff change, I changed on a matchday because of the crowd, the score line, the referee, what’s at stake.”
Hayes appears to be a very healthy blend of realist and dreamer. He is refreshingly enthusiastic about making a difference to his players’ lives and having a positive impact on their experience in football, yet his ambition to become a head coach or first team boss is at odds with this manifesto, especially as his eyes are wide open to the fact you are only ever “three games away from a crisis” and the grim stats from the League Managers’ Association.
Throughout the four divisions in England, the average time a manager gets is currently 21 months, and the LMA cite how 56% of 165 first-time managers appointed since January 2013 have not gotten a second job.
Hayes is no snake oil salesman. As you would expect, he can be fluent in the language of football, a lexicon that can feel like it has been infiltrated by middle managers with too much time for LinkedIn.
His assessment of his role now, and how effective it can be, cuts through so much of the jargon that often makes player development feel like an exact science.
QPR players in action during training.
“The jump from here to the first team is massive. We can’t prepare them for what that jump truly is. We can prepare them for the fall, we’re good at that, but all we can do is push and probe, make our programme as demanding as possible and expose them to a variety of experiences so when they go over they’re ready for a senior player ripping their head off because they haven’t passed the ball to the right foot.
“Having seen it, there is nothing you can do at developmental level to prepare them for going into Loftus Road with 20,000 people. There is nothing we can do. All you can do is give them a variety of experiences and hope by the end of it [they are ready].”
Hayes and the QPR staff can track players’ physical output and get a sense of how they deal with adversity by regular one-to-one meetings. Some players in the modern game are much stronger than you think and others are as soft as you might imagine.
There are players who find the demands and expectations too tough to handle. Hayes says fear can be a good thing for a player so long as it doesn’t cripple their decision making or execution.
“Players need different things. We have to try understand them as best we can to help them in those moments. Clarity is important for players, we want to put them in a place where they’re free to make mistakes.
“The moments of adversity are when you can learn . . . Some young players don’t see that now, all they see is struggle and strife but . . .”
A knock on the door interrupts Hayes’ train of thought. We have been sitting in one of the first-team’s recreation areas and Jonathan Varane – half brother of Raphael – is almost apologetic as he asks if he can come in.
Hayes ushers him in and realises there is plenty more to get through before training at 2pm.
…
The open plan space where the various football departments operate has individual offices around the perimeter.
On the left as you walk in, there is the Head of Performance, incorporating Strength and Conditioning.
There is also the Head of Recruitment and further along is Data Operations and Head of Methodology. This is the office of Hayes’ line manager, Jon De Souza, who was appointed in 2024.
Andy Impey during training.
There are also three banks of long office desks with enough room for 24 seats. At the top end are three more intimate meeting areas and a group of four analysts have gathered in one with their laptops out on the table.
At the bottom of the room is where Hayes works alongside Isaac Watts, the club’s Lead Academy Performance Analyst. Imogen Porter, the Lead Academy Psychologist, is also in-training with the club.
Just to the left is the office of first team head coach Julien Stéphan while the chief executive is 29-year-old Christian Nourry. He meanders in and out of his office, phone in hand and earphones twirling around his finger as he goes about his business.
He was hands-on in the meetings back in April with those development players who would not be earning a new professional contract. Four of those released spent this Monday with the first team, while one scholar who was told he would not earn a new deal simply never returned to the club.
Alex Carroll is the Academy Director and also drops by for an informal introduction. Ross Bennett is the Head of Integrated Performance and is part of the pre-training meeting in the boardroom with Hayes, Watts, Head of Academy Goalkeeping Jack Hadley, and Lead Academy Physical Performance Coach Nick Karamouzis.
They work through the session plan to the minute, examining an Excel sheet on a 60 inch TV hanging on a wall. The bookshelf on the one opposite has autobiographies of club legends like Clive Allen, Les Ferdinand and Stan Bowels, as well as QPR – The Complete Record.
They’re planning for a cup final, one Nourry has made clear earlier on that the club wants to win, but there is still give and take with the first-team’s needs.
There is also a discussion about the best time to infrom the U21 squad that this pre-match training session will be their last on the grass this season. The sun is out in London this week – 19 degrees when The 42 visits – and with the end in sight it’s suggested it’s best they’re only told after Tuesday night’s Cup final that they have a couple of days off before final action plan meetings on Friday heading into summer.
Hayes on the QPR training pitch.
After lunch it’s time for Hayes and Watts to gather the players back downstairs in one of the analysis rooms – an intimate cinema experience with the lights off – to go through their clips of final opponents Dulwich Hamlet.
The meeting is kept to 15 minutes, there are some clear instructions laid out by the pair, and players are asked to contribute to ensure the messages have landed. They are engaged and encouraged to speak up.
At the end of the meeting they are ready to get out on the grass, although Timothy Akindileni is asked to stay back. The 18-year-old centre back was signed from Aberdeen the previous year and spent the second half of this season on loan with National League side Morecambe.
They were relegated with a few games to go and Akindileni was recalled. Hayes asks the teenager how best to describe the experience in one sentence. The response is a bit more in depth, detailing what it was like playing alongside senior pros, the shock of having to perform in front of big crowds, and dealing with a manager dropping you from the starting XI without any warning or communication, despite performing well.
Overall, the sense is that the few months of senior football will stand to him. Hayes informs him that he won’t be part of the cup final squad the following day because he will be training with the first team instead.
His journey will be one to keep an eye on.
The sun is beating down for training and the sprinklers have been on for 30 minutes ahead of the players’ arrival. Hayes’ squad usually train on pitch three but there are two combine harvesters getting to work on the process of relaying it.
Pitch one is for the first team and off limits so it’s pitch two in the middle where they get to work. Each surface is a hybrid of astro turf and grass and the total cost is in the region of £3 million. For context, that’s a little bit more than the first tranche of €3m government funding for League of Ireland academies.
THE QPR development squad prepare for pre-match analysis.
One of the products from that system is Cian Dillion. The 20-year-old striker joined from Shamrock Rovers in January last year and there are a couple of others who are eligible in Philip Sanyaolu and Ridwan Hassan, both of whom were born in Ireland but moved to England as children.
Andy Impey meanders over during the session, chatting casually about his own experiences at this stage of life in the game during the early 1990s and how difficult it is to adapt to life as a full-time professional.
He jokes about some of the favourite rave spots he had around London at this time, and, when our old friend Steve Bould reappears on the far touchline to have a look, Impey recalls the Tuesday Club drinking sessions when players from various clubs around the city would invariably end up at the same spot.
Of course there is an Irish kitman, too. David Kennedy from Wexford used to be a lorry driver before he opted for a career change. He went back to college in his 40s, went travelling Down Under before Covid and then landed a job working with Reading.
He’s been part of the set-up at QPR for the last few years and is settled with his better half. He may also consider invoicing the FAI for the amount of talent he’s identified as Irish-eligible, regular reports sent back to a grateful contact in their Dublin headquarters.
Irish kitman David Kennedy.
Kennedy is also looking forward to the end-of-season kitman awards at St George’s Park next week – an event Kyle Walker will speak at - as colleagues from around the country gather to see out the year in style.
When the session is nearly over, some players disperse and others break into two groups. Hayes takes some defenders and midfielders to one end, working on patterns of play and positioning, while Impey works with wingers and strikers on movement in and around the box.
Hayes’ day is not done, and at 4pm there is another meeting with some more staff from the academy. Scottie Marshal is the Professional Development Phase Coach, Tom Charles is the U18 head coach, and Freddie Wilkinson is the U18 Performance Analyst. They sit in a row with their laptops on the desk and another large TV screen on the wall.
They are preparing the individual player action plans as part of the Individual Development Programme (IDP) that underpins English football’s academy system. The emphasis is on being as clear, concise and consistent with the information and meetings with players.
This is the last week of the year but there is no let-up with the work ethic among Hayes and his peers.
It’s been non-stop since he arrived into the office a little after 9am, and there is just about enough time to pick back up where we left off when Varane politely interrupted us.
“My fear is that too many in the game are trying to make it an exact science,” he says. “I don’t think you can, there are too many variables, the jeopardy, not knowing what can happen. It’s why we love it.
“We have to be careful. Nobody knows all of the answers and those who try [to say they do], that’s bullshit. Players will always teach you something new and surprise you with what they’re capable of.
“The reality is, you never know what anyone can do until you throw them in. Sometimes it can just be by accident rather than design and the player can take their chance.”
Hayes has reached this point by doing the same, but that balance in life is still something he is striving for.
Anthena has her dream job as a secondary school teacher in east London. It means Hayes takes the kids in the mornings and gets the eldest ready for pre-school before dropping the youngest with his in-laws.
As he points out, he then drives the equivalent of Athlone to Dublin from their home in east London by jumping on the M25 to make it to QPR’s training ground in the west.
His wife then sorts the kids in the evenings, by which time Hayes usually returns around 7pm.
“That’s the routine that works for us,” Hayes says. “You have to find what works best for you.”
His QPR side romped to a 5-1 victory in that London Senior Cup final but that result was by no means the important part of Hayes’ week.
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'All of a sudden I’ve gone from being a glorified PE teacher to the new Mourinho... Nonsense'
“WHAT THE FUCK did Dunney do to his hair?”
The comment from a Queens Park Rangers staff member sitting in the first-team section of the club canteen was an impromptu blurt of shock and awe. It didn’t quite travel to the far end of the room where players gathered after training, but it was loud enough to be heard two tables away.
It made you sling your neck up and take your face out of the plate of chicken, rice and roasted sweet potato.
Jimmy Dunne, the club captain and Republic of Ireland international, is hard to miss at the best of times. The 6ft 3in centre back towers above most and now it’s like his head is a beacon.
Think Eminem in his heyday. Had events in Prague turned out differently, this dye-job could even be a nice homage to the Romania squad from the France ’98 World Cup.
Alas, Dunne’s bleached blonde look is very much on point for a club that is counting down the days to the summer holidays. QPR are 14th in the Championship and will finish the campaign 12th, at best, 17th at worst.
It’s Monday morning when The 42 arrives at their €23 million training ground – opened three years ago – 20 minutes away from Heathrow Airport.
It’s the start of a long season’s final week, and there are definite end-of-school vibes around the place. If they were a bunch of schoolkids, they would be signing each other’s uniforms and promising to be best friends forever.
In football, everyone knows the reality.
After QPR travel to Ipswich Town today, for a game that does have real significance for the hosts in their Premier League promotion race, plenty of these players will go their separate ways. They will leave the WhatsApp group and cross paths as rivals or perhaps teammates elsewhere down the line.
New Ireland recruit Harvey Vale is otherwise engaged as players and staff settle down for food after training at 1pm. The only person who matches Dunne’s physical presence is first team coach and head of defensive coaching, Steve Bould.
The former Arsenal centre back, who won three league titles at the club, two under George Graham and one with Arsene Wenger, has stayed out on one of the three main training pitches to put some defenders through some extra work.
QPR have been safe for weeks and it’s shown. Three defeats in a row mean the players were never going to be given this Monday off.
There is still work to be done, of course.
Earlier that morning, before training at 11am, another stalwart of a bygone era is busy. Andy Impey was a diminutive winger and quintessential 90s/early Noughties Premier League player. He is now a transition coach for those youth team players aiming to break into the first team.
QPR’s rule is that for an academy graduate to officially be classed as a first-team player and move into their dressing room they must play 1,800 minutes of Championship action, the equivalent of 20 games. Kieran Morgan and Ryan Colley are the latest to do so this season.
There are teenagers on trial from Liverpool, Mali, Ghana and Jamaica. The agent of the latter is sitting with Impey after being spotted at the same Phoenix All Stars Football Academy in Kingston that produced Aston Villa’s Leon Bailey.
This part of the business is relentless, and in the recruitment office just down the hall a game from Germany on the large TV is being dissected.
The 42 is here because of one man, though, a coach who “gets my elbows dirty and work in the shadows.”
Athlone native Anthony Hayes turns 40 later this year and has been steadily compiling a varied and impressive body of work throughout the English game over the past 15 years.
His title at QPR is Academy Head of Methodology, overseeing the development of 17 to 21-year-olds as well as leading the various staff within those departments. Since November he has also been the lead Development Squad (U21) coach after the departure of Paul Furlong.
Hayes was preparing for Wednesday’s London Senior Cup final against non-league side Dulwich Hamlet but planning for the future has been underway since April, when players started to be informed if they would be kept on or released.
QPR have posted combined losses of almost €65 million for the last three seasons, during which time they have finished 15th, 18th and 20th in the Championship. Debt levels as of 2025 were in the region of €150 million, while significant investment in the TSG Elite Training & Performance Centre has helped with Financial Fair Play compliance.
Still, a further injection of capital will be required by the three-man ownership consortium of Malaysian billionaire Ruben Gnanalingam, Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, and US investor Richard Reilly if QPR are to meet their aim of earning Category 1 classification for its academy as part of the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP).
Local rivals Brentford are just a few miles away and they celebrated that milestone last month, an achievement not lost on Hayes seeing as they were the first professional club he worked with before they decided to close the youth set up and make several roles redundant.
There are an estimated 100 staff (full and part time) at QPR’s training centre and that will increase considerably with Category 1 classification requiring a minimum of 45 permanent roles.
It’s that work in the shadows, getting the elbows dirty, that will bring it to fruition.
…
Life was ready to take Anthony Hayes in a completely different direction when he was a teenager.
Music World felt like the centre of the universe in Athlone.
That’s the shop parents, Seamus and Dympna, ran in the town for 31 years.
Hayes was 16 when he broke into Athlone Town’s first-team, playing part-time in the League of Ireland First Division while studying business in the local Institute of Technology.
“The plan was to run the business.”
Hayes never realised the potential he had as a footballer but Seamus saw enough in his son to plant the seed that coaching was the way forward. Rather than try to selfishly guide Anthony down the path of taking over from him, he wanted his son to embrace a challenge that truly belonged to him.
“What has stayed with me is that I’ve always been determined to show I am good enough to be a coach here because I was never good enough to be a player,” Hayes says.
By 19 he had earned his Uefa B Licence through the FAI while also still playing part-time with his local side and later Limerick 37.
The words of an Irish coaching sage, the right-hand man to Brian Kerr with Ireland, remain pierced in the consciousness. “Noel O’Reilly, God rest him, he was very encouraging and he told me at that age that when it came to coaching and playing at the same time, you could only do one at a very high level. You had to dedicate yourself.”
Hayes tore his ACL not long afterwards and the change in his life’s direction was swift. A career guidance counsellor in Athlone IT suggested coaching in the United States. By 2010 he was working for a soccer school in New Jersey. Within a week he met the woman who would change his life.
Athena is the Greek Goddess of – among other things – wisdom, good counsel, war and heroic endevour.
For his wife, Athena Hayes, you can add patience and understanding.
“The bleed from professional life into personal life, that spillover at times has been really disgraceful,” Hayes says. “The ones who pick you up and show you love from the disappointments in football are the ones we neglect the most.”
A case in point is when Athena, still on maternity leave with their second child in early 2024, followed Hayes up to Sunderland where had been appointed first-team coach. Hayes worked all hours while she and the kids held the fort in an apartment hundreds of miles from home. They returned south at the end of that season after just a few months and he was appointed to assistant boss at Gillingham Town.
He was sacked in January 2025 while out for a walk in a local park with his family.
A short stint with Crystal Palace’s U21s was the bridge between his QPR appointment. Stability at the start of his career has been followed by upheaval. Athena, though, has been the constant.
Hayes followed her from America back to London. Her father is Greek-Cypriot and her mum Chinese. Her brother, Nico, emerged through Arsenal’s academy, later playing in the first team, and in 2019 became the first naturalised Chinese citizen to play for the national team.
Athena is an east London girl and wanted to return home to become a teacher. Hayes remembers the date they landed in the UK. “The 14th of January 2011.”
He was fortunate. An uncle in the city let him live rent-free and offered the use of his car. He got a job in a west London sports centre doing some coaching and earning money cash in hand.
A break came when his father-in-law passed his CV to Brentford’s head of academy recruitment, Shaun O’Connor. There was no job offer, just the opportunity to visit a few times a week and shadow the coaches of the academy. He’d pick up cones, listen, watch, and take notes.
“It’s become a rat race to get to a first team from the 18s or 21s. Some are trying to do it really quickly. It’s like AI, it takes the stress out of getting a solution. It gives you the solution but the struggle is removed to get to an end point. What have you learned?
“What I see as a problem is that there are too many impressionist coaches. There are not enough coaches who actually understand what their value is as a human being.
“What do they want to train, how do they want to train, how do they believe young people should be taught and developed? You only get that from different environments and working with good people.
But Hayes did have to change. It was after a few months of shadowing that Brentford’s academy manager, Ose Aibangee, approached him with the immortal words: “Oi, so you’re the Irish boy.”
Hayes was told to do 30 minutes with the club’s U14s later that evening. He had nothing planned, so had to think on his feet. Aibangee provided positive feedback on his enthusiasm, body language and quality of session but offered one critique followed by some saliant advice.
“If I can’t understand a fucking word you are saying then how can you expect a 13-year-old kid from west London to understand you?”
Hayes laughs.
“He was right, I had to slow down to make sure my points landed in the session.”
Hayes was made full-time that summer and over the next four years progressed to work closely under Lee Carlsey.
“Football clubs will be built on people and the quality of people that you have in the building. It’s quality of people that will help each other and help to make the players get better.”
The path forward was clear. Hayes and Athena bought their home in late 2015. By early 2016 Brentford made the decision to shut their academy. Hayes took redundancy rather than re-apply for a role elsewhere.
There were also a couple of seismic personal tragedies around this time. His uncle and aunt, Larry and Martina Hayes, were two of the 38 victims of the 2015 Tunisia terror attacks in which tourists were murdered at their hotel.
Hayes also lost a cousin to suicide and as the years pass away from home the draw to return to family, his parents and his sister, is strong.
“Life hits you with perspective. Time is running out. The clock is ticking, and there is always that clock that we can’t see in the background. It’s morbid but it’s the reality. I want to have an impact in my life, with my family and in my work with players. I want to help make a difference.”
It shows the relentless change in football that 10 years after redundancy from Brentford’s academy, just a few miles down the road, that last month the club was awarded Category 1 status
QPR are attempting to chase down their near neighbours rather than the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Fulham in the English capital, while League One Wycombe Wanderers is only 20 miles away and they are heavily backed by Kazakhstani billionaire Mikheil Lomtadze.
And he was right. Charlton brought him into their academy by the summer of 2016, and that was the start of a seven-year association that would eventually see him work up to assistant first-time coach before being placed in temporary charge of the when they were struggling in League One in 2022.
The week before his appointment he had collected his Pro Licence from the FAI. He remembers all the positivity from fans when he was announced. “Then we lost our first game the next day against Stockport in the Cup. After that we lost to Joey Barton’s Bristol Rovers.”
He was still on Instagram and Twitter at the time and for some reason stayed up until 4am reading all of the abusive messages.
The third game was against Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton in the Carabao Cup and they beat the Premier League side on penalties after a 0-0 draw.
His experiences from that time have not scarred him, and he admits that a first-team environment is where he aims to work his way back to, insisting that he is ready to lead rather than be a follower.
“You go into a Saturday after working great all week and it’s completely different. People change, players change, staff change, I changed on a matchday because of the crowd, the score line, the referee, what’s at stake.”
Hayes appears to be a very healthy blend of realist and dreamer. He is refreshingly enthusiastic about making a difference to his players’ lives and having a positive impact on their experience in football, yet his ambition to become a head coach or first team boss is at odds with this manifesto, especially as his eyes are wide open to the fact you are only ever “three games away from a crisis” and the grim stats from the League Managers’ Association.
Throughout the four divisions in England, the average time a manager gets is currently 21 months, and the LMA cite how 56% of 165 first-time managers appointed since January 2013 have not gotten a second job.
Hayes is no snake oil salesman. As you would expect, he can be fluent in the language of football, a lexicon that can feel like it has been infiltrated by middle managers with too much time for LinkedIn.
His assessment of his role now, and how effective it can be, cuts through so much of the jargon that often makes player development feel like an exact science.
“The jump from here to the first team is massive. We can’t prepare them for what that jump truly is. We can prepare them for the fall, we’re good at that, but all we can do is push and probe, make our programme as demanding as possible and expose them to a variety of experiences so when they go over they’re ready for a senior player ripping their head off because they haven’t passed the ball to the right foot.
“Having seen it, there is nothing you can do at developmental level to prepare them for going into Loftus Road with 20,000 people. There is nothing we can do. All you can do is give them a variety of experiences and hope by the end of it [they are ready].”
Hayes and the QPR staff can track players’ physical output and get a sense of how they deal with adversity by regular one-to-one meetings. Some players in the modern game are much stronger than you think and others are as soft as you might imagine.
There are players who find the demands and expectations too tough to handle. Hayes says fear can be a good thing for a player so long as it doesn’t cripple their decision making or execution.
“Players need different things. We have to try understand them as best we can to help them in those moments. Clarity is important for players, we want to put them in a place where they’re free to make mistakes.
“The moments of adversity are when you can learn . . . Some young players don’t see that now, all they see is struggle and strife but . . .”
A knock on the door interrupts Hayes’ train of thought. We have been sitting in one of the first-team’s recreation areas and Jonathan Varane – half brother of Raphael – is almost apologetic as he asks if he can come in.
Hayes ushers him in and realises there is plenty more to get through before training at 2pm.
…
The open plan space where the various football departments operate has individual offices around the perimeter.
On the left as you walk in, there is the Head of Performance, incorporating Strength and Conditioning.
There is also the Head of Recruitment and further along is Data Operations and Head of Methodology. This is the office of Hayes’ line manager, Jon De Souza, who was appointed in 2024.
There are also three banks of long office desks with enough room for 24 seats. At the top end are three more intimate meeting areas and a group of four analysts have gathered in one with their laptops out on the table.
At the bottom of the room is where Hayes works alongside Isaac Watts, the club’s Lead Academy Performance Analyst. Imogen Porter, the Lead Academy Psychologist, is also in-training with the club.
Just to the left is the office of first team head coach Julien Stéphan while the chief executive is 29-year-old Christian Nourry. He meanders in and out of his office, phone in hand and earphones twirling around his finger as he goes about his business.
He was hands-on in the meetings back in April with those development players who would not be earning a new professional contract. Four of those released spent this Monday with the first team, while one scholar who was told he would not earn a new deal simply never returned to the club.
Alex Carroll is the Academy Director and also drops by for an informal introduction. Ross Bennett is the Head of Integrated Performance and is part of the pre-training meeting in the boardroom with Hayes, Watts, Head of Academy Goalkeeping Jack Hadley, and Lead Academy Physical Performance Coach Nick Karamouzis.
They work through the session plan to the minute, examining an Excel sheet on a 60 inch TV hanging on a wall. The bookshelf on the one opposite has autobiographies of club legends like Clive Allen, Les Ferdinand and Stan Bowels, as well as QPR – The Complete Record.
They’re planning for a cup final, one Nourry has made clear earlier on that the club wants to win, but there is still give and take with the first-team’s needs.
There is also a discussion about the best time to infrom the U21 squad that this pre-match training session will be their last on the grass this season. The sun is out in London this week – 19 degrees when The 42 visits – and with the end in sight it’s suggested it’s best they’re only told after Tuesday night’s Cup final that they have a couple of days off before final action plan meetings on Friday heading into summer.
After lunch it’s time for Hayes and Watts to gather the players back downstairs in one of the analysis rooms – an intimate cinema experience with the lights off – to go through their clips of final opponents Dulwich Hamlet.
The meeting is kept to 15 minutes, there are some clear instructions laid out by the pair, and players are asked to contribute to ensure the messages have landed. They are engaged and encouraged to speak up.
At the end of the meeting they are ready to get out on the grass, although Timothy Akindileni is asked to stay back. The 18-year-old centre back was signed from Aberdeen the previous year and spent the second half of this season on loan with National League side Morecambe.
They were relegated with a few games to go and Akindileni was recalled. Hayes asks the teenager how best to describe the experience in one sentence. The response is a bit more in depth, detailing what it was like playing alongside senior pros, the shock of having to perform in front of big crowds, and dealing with a manager dropping you from the starting XI without any warning or communication, despite performing well.
Overall, the sense is that the few months of senior football will stand to him. Hayes informs him that he won’t be part of the cup final squad the following day because he will be training with the first team instead.
His journey will be one to keep an eye on.
The sun is beating down for training and the sprinklers have been on for 30 minutes ahead of the players’ arrival. Hayes’ squad usually train on pitch three but there are two combine harvesters getting to work on the process of relaying it.
Pitch one is for the first team and off limits so it’s pitch two in the middle where they get to work. Each surface is a hybrid of astro turf and grass and the total cost is in the region of £3 million. For context, that’s a little bit more than the first tranche of €3m government funding for League of Ireland academies.
One of the products from that system is Cian Dillion. The 20-year-old striker joined from Shamrock Rovers in January last year and there are a couple of others who are eligible in Philip Sanyaolu and Ridwan Hassan, both of whom were born in Ireland but moved to England as children.
Andy Impey meanders over during the session, chatting casually about his own experiences at this stage of life in the game during the early 1990s and how difficult it is to adapt to life as a full-time professional.
He jokes about some of the favourite rave spots he had around London at this time, and, when our old friend Steve Bould reappears on the far touchline to have a look, Impey recalls the Tuesday Club drinking sessions when players from various clubs around the city would invariably end up at the same spot.
Of course there is an Irish kitman, too. David Kennedy from Wexford used to be a lorry driver before he opted for a career change. He went back to college in his 40s, went travelling Down Under before Covid and then landed a job working with Reading.
He’s been part of the set-up at QPR for the last few years and is settled with his better half. He may also consider invoicing the FAI for the amount of talent he’s identified as Irish-eligible, regular reports sent back to a grateful contact in their Dublin headquarters.
Kennedy is also looking forward to the end-of-season kitman awards at St George’s Park next week – an event Kyle Walker will speak at - as colleagues from around the country gather to see out the year in style.
When the session is nearly over, some players disperse and others break into two groups. Hayes takes some defenders and midfielders to one end, working on patterns of play and positioning, while Impey works with wingers and strikers on movement in and around the box.
Hayes’ day is not done, and at 4pm there is another meeting with some more staff from the academy. Scottie Marshal is the Professional Development Phase Coach, Tom Charles is the U18 head coach, and Freddie Wilkinson is the U18 Performance Analyst. They sit in a row with their laptops on the desk and another large TV screen on the wall.
They are preparing the individual player action plans as part of the Individual Development Programme (IDP) that underpins English football’s academy system. The emphasis is on being as clear, concise and consistent with the information and meetings with players.
This is the last week of the year but there is no let-up with the work ethic among Hayes and his peers.
It’s been non-stop since he arrived into the office a little after 9am, and there is just about enough time to pick back up where we left off when Varane politely interrupted us.
“My fear is that too many in the game are trying to make it an exact science,” he says. “I don’t think you can, there are too many variables, the jeopardy, not knowing what can happen. It’s why we love it.
“The reality is, you never know what anyone can do until you throw them in. Sometimes it can just be by accident rather than design and the player can take their chance.”
Hayes has reached this point by doing the same, but that balance in life is still something he is striving for.
Anthena has her dream job as a secondary school teacher in east London. It means Hayes takes the kids in the mornings and gets the eldest ready for pre-school before dropping the youngest with his in-laws.
As he points out, he then drives the equivalent of Athlone to Dublin from their home in east London by jumping on the M25 to make it to QPR’s training ground in the west.
His wife then sorts the kids in the evenings, by which time Hayes usually returns around 7pm.
“That’s the routine that works for us,” Hayes says. “You have to find what works best for you.”
His QPR side romped to a 5-1 victory in that London Senior Cup final but that result was by no means the important part of Hayes’ week.
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