Marc Skinner: ‘Football is chaos. If you can control chaos, you can be successful’

Marc Skinner has given his Women’s FA Cup winner’s medal from last season to his elder daughter and he wants another, to give to her sister. When it comes to Sunday’s Wembley final against Chelsea, there can be no purer form of motivation for a father who, asked what he does in his spare time, points to family.

“I’ve not got a rockstar lifestyle,” the Manchester United manager says. “I’m just a dad who works hard when I’m here and then goes home. We don’t make men’s football wages so we don’t have nannies, we work and we try to balance life. I love spending time with my kids and with Laura [Bassett, his partner]. I go home and I bath the kids every night, I feed them, I take them to bed and just spend time with them. I genuinely get a real love, warmth and a recharge from that.

“And then if I’ve got time to myself, I’ve picked up colouring lately, just zoning out and colouring in, and I don’t just mean felt-tip pens. But that’s a phase. You’re always ‘on call’ but just having those spaces allows me to think better. If you didn’t know this about me, I’m a really deep thinker, I read body language every day, I read how people feel, and it exhausts me. It takes a lot of energy from me, and so I need recharging.”

It is almost time for a summer recharge after a campaign in which United finished third in the Women’s Super League, a marked improvement on the disappointing fifth last season. Skinner, sitting at the training ground for an exclusive interview, says: “Last season I felt that we’d lost a little bit of the hunger that we need as a team. When you don’t have the most resources in the country, we need the hunger, we need to be hungrier than those teams.

“The season before, for us to finish second in that season and get to an FA Cup final, if you balance the success versus the budget, it’s an incredible achievement. So I think it had just softened us, and then what we did after last season, when we dropped to fifth, was we assessed what we were missing. And I felt like we were missing a little bit of experience but also the physicality. We’ve absolutely found that hunger again this year.”

Skinner’s reference to the playing budget in 2022-23 is backed by publicly available figures in each club’s financial accounts, which show that United’s wage bill (£3.4m) was a little more than half of Arsenal’s (£6.2m) and Chelsea’s (£6.1m). Nonetheless, there was naturally a negative tone to coverage of United when they dropped to fifth and then several senior players left in quick succession, including Mary Earps, the captain Katie Zelem and Spain’s Lucía García. They have defied those departures to qualify for Europe for the second time. But what was the mood like on the inside?

View image in fullscreen Marc Skinner and Millie Turner lift the FA Cup after the 2024 final win against Tottenham Women. Photograph: Manjit Narotra/ProSports/Shutterstock

“There was a lot of stuff going about that just wasn’t true,” Skinner says. “Mary chose to move on, Zel at that moment was embarking on a different situation for her and Lucía was getting a lucrative deal somewhere else, so we were almost forced to reinvent. Now we’re new, we’re fresh. Reinventing the team at that point has allowed us to have a reinvigoration, and that’s what we held on to.

“Omar [Berrada, the CEO] has come in, there’s a freshness at the club, and we’ve changed as a team, a club, so those are the things that we just embraced. Embrace the fact that football is chaos. If you can control chaos and live in the space of chaos, you can be successful.”

Berrada is part of the regime that has been in charge for about 15 months. Ineos is often perceived to treat the women’s team as second best but Skinner is more than satisfied with its engagement: “They’re ever-present. They’re going through the challenge of trying to make Manchester United great again, and yet they’re still present. Instantly, as soon as we got the result against [Manchester] City [to qualify for the Champions League], Omar, Collette [Roche, the chief operating officer] and Jason [Wilcox, the technical director] were messaging me.

“As a club, we’re moving toward statistical analysis for recruitment, and the women have been built into part of that package. We are as part of that as the men are. I can honestly genuinely say that, whatever is reported, I feel the support every day.”

The owners have backed Skinner with a new contract until 2027, with the option of an extra year, after giving him a one-year deal last summer, which he describes as “a holding space to see if we matched the Ineos projection” for the women’s team. “I’ve signed here because I can win here,” he says. “We’ve got challenges, we’ve got to beat this hold that Chelsea have on the league and obviously Arsenal and Manchester City are trying to do the same thing, but I want to challenge ourselves to bring success to the fans.”

Quick Guide Women's FA Cup gets new TV deal Show The Women’s FA Cup will be broadcast on Channel 4 and TNT Sports from next season in a three-year rights deal with the Football Association. They succeed the BBC as the broadcasters in the first standalone deal for the competition. The BBC extended its Women's FA Cup deal in 2019, agreeing to air both semi-finals and the final and to put out highlight reels and short videos. The new deal will bring a significant increase in the number of games broadcast live, with coverage guaranteed from the first round. TNT is to air 19 matches across the season and Channel 4 has committed to one match per round from the third round, with all six matches co-exclusive with TNT, which also holds rights to the men’s FA Cup and men’s FA Youth Cup. The Football Association's chief executive, Mark Bullingham, said: “This is a significant moment for the Adobe Women’s FA Cup. We have two broadcast partners who are deeply committed to growing the competition and taking it to new audiences over the next three seasons. Channel 4 and TNT are brilliant sports broadcasters and are the perfect combination for this very special tournament. We are delighted to be working with them and look forward to continuing to grow women’s football together.” Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback.

Those supporters are preparing for a third consecutive FA Cup final at Wembley. Nevertheless, some have often vocalised a desire for Skinner to be dismissed, so can he one day unite everyone behind him?

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“I don’t think I can,” he says. “I don’t think I want to, in all honesty; everybody has to have their opinion. The only sanity for me is when I even read comments around Pep Guardiola. And let me be clear, I’m not comparing myself to Pep Guardiola. I’m just saying, the successes that guy has had and then I see people calling for him to be sacked? It’s crazy.

“If a coach has lost the players, it’s clear, I think, and I’ve never once felt like that here. When we qualified [for the Champions League], I had a couple of players just saying: ‘You deserve that coach as well, for all the things you have to drive us through and all the scrutiny.’ And in the future when I’m not in this job, I don’t think I’ll face the same scrutiny. It’s the scrutiny of Manchester United because of how big and varied the fanbase is.

View image in fullscreen Marc Skinner proudly shows off his FA Cup winners’ medal at Wembley. He gave it to his elder daughter. Photograph: Charlotte Tattersall/MUFC/Manchester United/Getty Images

“The reality is, some media go looking for that story because it’s juicier. Whereas, how many interviews, honestly, have you done with fans where they go: ‘Marc, at the end of the Old Trafford game, waited behind and signed everything for all the kids, took all the photos and didn’t go until everyone had finished’? You don’t hear that, right? Because people don’t want to hear, but that’s my character.

“I’ve even heard comments around me being ‘David Brent-esque’ because I share anecdotes and I try and bring an interview to life, rather than just go: ‘Yes, no.’ It’s because I genuinely care about the women’s game, I’ve been in it since grassroots.

“If people actually spoke to me, which they don’t always get a chance to, I think they’d realise that I’m doing it for the fans. My job is to supply success to the fans.”

As our interview concludes, Skinner points out a huge image emblazoned on the walls outside the women’s team offices depicting last year’s Cup-winning side standing in front of a backdrop of United fans, all in red, at Wembley. It is a sight he desperately wants to see again on Sunday.

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