Leicester’s Amandine Miquel: ‘I don’t like to do the same thing twice’

When Amandine Miquel was growing up as a young French girl in Mexico, it was the legendary goalkeeper and occasional striker Jorge Campos whose unique, eccentric and colourful style helped her fall in love with football. Since then, hers has been a life well-travelled, taking in spells living in London and the Indian Ocean island of Réunion before seven years managing in France’s champagne region. After all those worldly influences, though, the style she is planning to bring to her new role as Leicester head coach is that of another country: Spain.

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“I’m not saying we’re going to play like Barcelona,” Miquel says, resisting a little laugh as she reveals she has taken inspiration from the Catalan style. “But for me it’s really about using the ball efficiently, movement and creating space, so when you make a pass there’s a reason, it’s not just to make passes for passes’ sake. It’s to open spaces, to be as unpredictable as possible.

“It’s going to take a little time, I don’t expect to have it [perfect] on the first game, but tactically I also have very good staff and it’s important that our team has a very strong tactical identity.”

When the 40-year-old’s appointment was announced in July, Leicester’s chief executive, Susan Whelan, called Miquel an “innovative coach”, something the former Chelsea youth player takes pride in: “I don’t like to do the same thing twice in training,” she says. “I don’t like to get the players bored. We like them to be involved a lot in the process and to hear their ideas – we’ll try to bring the best out of all the people we have.”

That was something she was renowned for at Reims, whom she guided to promotion to the French top flight and then established in the top half, despite having one of the division’s smaller budgets. She led Reims to fourth place last term but 12 months ago, as she entered the final year of her contract, she knew she needed a fresh challenge.

“I’d nearly decided before last season started that it would be the last one. I was coming to the end of my contract and I felt it would be hard to do more than what we had been achieving. We had one of the lowest budgets so it felt like every summer was a big struggle because we lost all the players that were ending their contracts, they were always taken by better clubs.

“Me and my assistant coach that joined me here [Amaury Messuwe], we were really tired of this situation and it felt like we could do more. When we realised we were finishing fourth we felt like ‘OK, it’s a good time to go,’ we felt it was the maximum we could achieve.”

“[At Leicester] it’s very different, in good ways. You have more staff, so you have more time to do your actual job, tactics and coaching, which I was doing less in France because we had to do recruitment and a lot of other jobs. So having your full time to focus on what’s really important is what I like – developing the team on the field.

“In Reims we were a very young team with an average age of 21 – here it feels like I have a pretty old squad. It’s nice because that’s what we were lacking because we didn’t have experienced players. You need a mix of young talent but also players who have been in those high-level situations.”

For Leicester, who finished 10th in the 12-team Women’s Super League in the past two seasons, Miquel feels the only way is up. “First of all, it’s great because I can only go forwards. Well, I can go backwards, but I hope not. But it looks like the possibilities are really big,” she says.

“We have to build a project and not rush. I don’t think you go from 10th position to fourth in six months. It took me five years in the first French division. So you have to take the time. The idea is to do the same thing, step-by-step, but making sure we don’t ever go lower than the season before.”

Miquel has been known for developing plenty of young talent at Reims, including the Haiti and Lyon midfielder Melchie Dumornay – named as the Women’s Champions League’s young player of last season – and appears to prefer to coach existing players rather than buying success.

In her first few days at Leicester she largely spent time getting to know her players with individual meetings about life, rather than discussing football. Nonetheless, coaching on the pitch is her true passion, something she realised while living on Réunion.

“I realised I wasn’t going to be a great player, so I said ‘OK, I’m not going to make it to a World Cup or the French national team, so I want to stay in football, what can I do?’ And I decided quite early that coaching was the second best thing after playing,” says Miquel, who was born in France but moved to Mexico aged six when her parents were teaching abroad.

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This is Miquel’s first managerial role in English football but not her first spell in the domestic game: she spent time at Chelsea’s youth academy while her parents were working in London. At that time, with Marcel Desailly, Frank Leboeuf and Didier Deschamps playing for Chelsea and Arsène Wenger bringing a French revolution to Arsenal, Miquel had plenty of idols to make her feel at home in London. It was because of that time – and their friendship and mutual respect – that has meant she has recently heard a lot from the new Chelsea manager, compatriot Sonia Bompastor, about life in London.

“She knew way before me that she was coming [to England]. She was asking me where it was best to take a house in London, so I helped her a little on that. Now she is saying ‘you’re following me’ and I’m saying ‘no, you’re following me!’ We talk a little on the phone and we have a very friendly relationship so I’m happy to play her again with a new, different team. A new club is a good challenge for her.

“It’s a harder one for her than me because she’s already No 1, so the pressure for her is more than for me because I have a lot to go upwards. I look forward to giving her a lot of trouble.”