Robbie Savage interview: ‘Why I need a body cam to protect me as a non-League manager’

A couple of weeks ago Robbie Savage had a big decision to make. Should he take a highly lucrative offer to be part of a huge TV show or remain with Macclesfield?

It is not the type of dilemma normally facing an (unpaid) head coach of a club in the third tier of non-League football, but then Savage is undoubtedly in an unusual position as the following exchange shows.

“I’ve sold the dream to players coming here,” he says. “I’ve got a kid from Blackburn [Rovers], James Edmondson, who is magnificent. His family have put their trust in me. If I was then to leave for self-gain or self-promotion I’m not that person [they trust]. I’m letting them down.”

Nevertheless, he asked the players in the WhatsApp group chat what they thought. Could he do some reality show, and then come back and resume his role as manager? The answer was a resounding no. He gave himself a weekend to think about it and stayed.

“I am genuine,” Savage says. “I am meticulous, serious, obsessive. You have to be. I want the narrative to change – this pantomime villain, this guy. Some people still see me as that.”

There is a pause.

“You can answer this question for me: will there be chairmen and owners out there looking at me, looking at my record, looking at what we’ve done at this football club and go: ‘He’s too big a personality’?”

Maybe, I tell him. But they may also like the publicity and attention he can draw.

“There is that,” Savage agrees. “But because I am insecure I look at the more negative side. In football, my glass is always half-full with the players. But when I look at the other perspective, owners and chairmen might look at me and think, ‘I won’t be able to dictate to him because he’s his own person. He has the biggest radio show, he’s got an opinion, he knows what he’s talking about, he’s strong, he knows his subject’.”

Public persona masks layers of insecurities

But that statement in itself could be a contradiction, I tell him. After all, it is not how someone who is insecure – and Savage admits to having felt so “body conscious” when he was a young skinny kid that he wore two pairs of trousers to make himself look bigger – talks about themselves.

“Maybe it’s imposter syndrome,” Savage says. “I know I can do the job. You give me a group of players in the Championship or Premier League and I will have a positive effect and have a style of football.”

So now we have gone from managing in step three to managing in the Premier League. It does not sound like someone who is insecure.

“I am in life,” Savage protests, nodding his head towards the office at Macclesfield’s impressive, progressive stadium. “You ask anyone in there now. ‘Sav’. I have a personality. I act sometimes. I put a persona on. I will come in here, I will be larger than life, to the point where the lads are calling me ‘Sav’ and I had to tell my assistant manager and first-team coach, ‘do us a favour, tell them not to call me ‘Sav’, call me gaffer’. Then they call me gaffer and I get embarrassed.”

Despite this, he says he does really believe he can manage in the Premier League. He backs his knowledge at all levels of the football pyramid. And he is prepared to earn respect.

Savage is a fascinating conundrum: he talks about insecurity and yet was a hard-working showman of a Premier League midfielder, captaining four clubs; a Welsh international who then launched a successful media career and has done 15 years as a host on BBC Five Live’s popular 606 phone-in show.

He talks about Imposter Syndrome and then name drops that he did a podcast on that very subject with the singer Robbie Williams. “He’s a friend of mine,” Savage says. “I have this, ‘why me?’ and I have told myself, ‘I’ve worked hard, I deserve it’.

“I have had a lot of people in my life who have taken advantage of me with financial guidance and all that and that comes around and it hurts the family. I am more guarded. If I let people in then I am all-in with them.”

He wants to prove people wrong and talks of haters “fuelling the fire” but is now 50 and feels contented. He has morphed from pantomime villain into popular personality. A young boy shouts, “Are you Robbie Savage!?” as we walk across the pitch at Macclesfield’s stadium before this interview. To which he shouts back, beaming, “Am I?!”

Body cam to combat abuse

But Savage is also, surely, the only manager at this level of football who has a member of staff wearing a body cam to games.

“Because of the narrative around me. I’ve had stuff thrown at me, had obscenities, there have been aggressive approaches,” he says. “As a Premier League player I thrived on it because they couldn’t get to you. I would play up to it. I would love it. It would inspire me.

“Now there is a nervousness. First game of the season, Worksop away, and there was a gentleman there. We got there at 1.30pm and he was there by the tunnel and his first words were: ‘You are a c---’. It’s on video. I said ‘that’s out of order’ and afterwards he apologised, twice. People might think it’s extreme [with the body cam] but I have to protect me and my family and that’s sensible.”

It is sad to hear. Savage has undoubtedly been a divisive figure in the past but it does him a disservice. He has a big heart, and often wears it on his sleeve, and wants to make people happy.

Savage is also passionate about doing well as a manager and is putting the work in – at one stage he gives an uninterrupted, five-minute answer that goes through the goals, moment by moment, in his side’s 4-2 FA Cup loss to Tamworth. He slams the table with his hand to make a point.

His involvement with Macclesfield stems from his friendship with Rob Smethurst, a successful local businessman who made his money in the motor trade and was born in the Cheshire town, and who purchased the assets of Macclesfield Town after the club were wound up in the High Court in 2020. He relaunched them as a phoenix club.

‘I sacked manager when we were top – it was justified’

They started in the North West Counties League and are working their way back to the Football League. Savage joined as director of football but was named manager last summer with a highly unusual statement from the club on its website that talked about “a campaign when we simply cannot fail”. But what does that mean?

“It’s true,” Savage says. “It means we simply have to get promoted because anything but is failure. Because of the expectancy I put on my previous managers as director of football.

“Danny Whitaker won us the league and I sacked him when we were top of the league. But we went on to win the league by 15 points so it was justified. I always go with my beliefs.”

Since then Macclesfield lost in the play-off final, which would have taken them into the National League North. Another head coach, Michael Clegg, was dismissed. Savage, who had been offered a manager’s job by another club, took over after realising “I’m not really cut out to be a director of football”. Now they are 13 points clear at the top of the Northern Premier League, and the only unbeaten team left in the top seven tiers of English football.

With hindsight Savage acknowledges that he was too demonstrative with his predecessors as manager. Would he want that? No. He would not do it again.

Now he is in the dugout – “I had told the board I was leaving to take the other [manager’s] job. But they rung me back and said ‘you should take our job’ and I took it” – which begs the obvious question: what happens if Macclesfield are not promoted this season?

“I won’t be the manager,” Savage says. “I will hand in my resignation, 100 per cent. Because we have one of the biggest budgets, we are 13 points clear. I will do that as a point of principle and then it will be down to the board.

“I will be saying ‘I failed in my goal’. If we don’t go up I will have failed and there will be so many people out there who will be delighted and say, ‘I told you so’.

“If I cannot finish top with this squad then why should I carry on because I have said to other managers ‘we’ve given you a Ferrari at these levels. We just need you to drive it. What we don’t need is for you to change the brakes, change the steering. Just drive it smoothly and love it and get the best out of it’. I am a man of morals and a man of principle and I love being a manager. I should have done it years ago.”

It begs another question on what will happen to his media career, which includes being a pundit for TNT Sports, should he continue as a football manager.

“So, if I am successful and this club goes up [to the National League] and we want to go full-time then I will have to make a decision on my media duties. Or if I get a job higher. I am open and transparent,” Savage says.

He offers an insight into his management style. There is the centre-forward, Danny Elliott, who was signed from Scunthorpe United. “Big signing. Marquee signing. But he’s quite insecure like me”, Savage says. “If he doesn’t score I can see in his face that he’s probably going away after the final whistle thinking ‘am I going to play next week?’”

Elliott struggled and was left out of the team but Savage’s approach from there was to call him, every time, to explain why. Now the striker is back and scoring. As a player that was what Savage craved – citing how even after a man-of-the-match display, he would ring his manager to ask if he would play the next week. It would take away his worry.

‘At school I couldn’t speak in front of people’

But where does that come from? “I don’t know, fear of failure?” Savage says. “At school I couldn’t speak in front of people, I couldn’t do the assembly.

“With swimming we had to wear trunks and I was that skinny and that body-conscious that I wore two pairs of trousers to make myself look bigger. I have done all that because of that insecurity.”

Being released from Manchester United by Sir Alex Ferguson, going to Crewe Alexandra, being in the B team and wondering if his football career was over before it had even started explains a lot. But Savage is clearly a success and yet still frets. “It’s just something inside me,” he says.

But as a self-confessed obsessive, and an emotional man, he has felt his bonds strengthen with Macclesfield. “I love it. I’ve had tears here. Emotion. Fall-outs,” Savage says.

“This is like a home for me and it has given me a purpose. So many footballers have nothing. They get divorced and they do so many things because they have that addictive gene, so what can they then be addictive about? I have got this. And I am addicted to it.

“I have my routine and it’s non-stop and it’s tiring. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”