Mat Sadler has joined football’s global career ladder

Dismissed by Walsall only months ago, Mat Sadler has taken an assistant’s job in Belgium. It may be the most ambitious and important move of his career.

Suppose somebody offered you the chance to stop being the boss, move to another country and become somebody else’s assistant. Most of us would wonder whether they had misunderstood the meaning of promotion. Mat Sadler has done precisely that, yet his move may be the cleverest decision of his career. The former Walsall head coach has signed a one-year contract to join Lee Johnson’s staff at Lommel SK, newly promoted to Belgium’s top division after 23 years away. On the face of it, exchanging an English manager’s office for the second seat on a Belgian bench looks like a step backwards. Look beyond the job title, however, and Lommel belongs to City Football Group, the global organisation built around Manchester City and comprising 13 clubs across five continents. Sadler has not simply found employment after being dismissed by Walsall. He has gained entry to one of world football’s most sophisticated international networks. Belgium might be where he starts again, but it need not be where he finishes.

For readers who do not know a full-back from a flat-pack wardrobe, Sadler is a thoroughly Midlands football man. Birmingham-born, developed by Birmingham City and handed his Premier League debut at only 17, he appeared capable of reaching the very top. Indeed, he was once identified among a group of young footballers considered potential future England internationals. Then injury intervened with the casual cruelty sport sometimes displays. Five operations and years of interruption changed the direction of a career that might otherwise have made him a household name for club and country. He rebuilt himself through Watford, Shrewsbury Town, Crawley Town and Walsall, accumulating hundreds of professional appearances and an education that no coaching course can reproduce. He knows the Premier League, the lower divisions, the treatment room, the dressing room and those unforgiving Saturday afternoons when potential means nothing because somebody must have scored more goals by five o’clock.

Walsall is my club. I have been a season-ticket holder for many years, while my son, daughter and grandchildren are occasional but regular attendees, particularly at away matches, which become wonderful family days out regardless of what happens during the inconvenient 90 minutes in the middle. There is the journey, the motorway food, the optimism before kick-off and the painstaking reconstruction afterwards of every managerial error we could clearly see from 80 yards away. I once spent time filming at Walsall’s training ground, where Mat could not have been more helpful. At one stage he quietly began moving footballs out of our camera shot. We did not like to tell him that we might have preferred them left in, but it revealed something about him: no performance, no ego, simply a decent man noticing something that needed doing and lending a hand. That does not make someone a great manager, of course. Decency alone has yet to win promotion, although football might be a rather pleasanter industry if more people possessed it.

Nor should affection varnish Sadler’s record at Walsall. His period in charge was impressive, exciting and, eventually, deeply frustrating. During the 2024/25 campaign, Walsall spent 119 days at the top of League Two, established a 12-point lead, won nine consecutive league matches for the first time in the club’s history and appeared to be cruising towards automatic promotion. Then the momentum vanished. A 13-match winless sequence cost Walsall a top-three finish, and defeat by AFC Wimbledon in the play-off final completed a collapse few supporters could quite believe. The following season brought an uncomfortable echo: another excellent beginning, another Christmas near the summit, then another decline. By March 2026, Walsall had won only once in 11 matches and fallen to 11th, prompting the club to dismiss Sadler with ten games remaining. Many supporters, myself included, thought the decision should have arrived sooner. Yet it is equally true that, at his best, he was among the division’s most impressive managers. He had demonstrated leadership, developed a young side and taken Walsall within one match of promotion. His failing was not an absence of ability but an inability to renew the formula once momentum had turned against him.

That distinction matters because almost every manager in League One or League Two is eventually dismissed. It is less a possibility than an occupational tradition. Many never receive another significant opportunity. Sadler has been fortunate, certainly, but luck usually arrives carrying a CV. Lommel and City Football Group have not recruited him because they feel sorry for a man who lost his job in the English fourth tier. They have looked at the whole record and concluded that the intelligence, character and coaching potential remain valuable. Walsall had to judge him against immediate results and the possibility of another lost season. A large international group can take a longer view. It can ask not merely what Mat Sadler achieved yesterday, but what wider experience might allow him to become tomorrow.

This is where the story becomes less about football than modern business. Traditionally, football clubs behaved as separate institutions. They hired their own coaches, recruited their own players, protected their own methods and competed against everyone else. Multi-club ownership changes that. City Football Group links clubs across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, allowing coaching knowledge, recruitment intelligence, technology, performance analysis and people to circulate through the network. Think of an international company whose local businesses retain separate names and customers but gain access to the expertise of the wider organisation. For more than a century football clubs principally learned by trying to beat one another. Some now also learn alongside one another. The badge remains local; the operating system is increasingly global.

Walsall is already part of a smaller example. Its owner, Trivela Group, describes itself as a multi-club football organisation and also controls interests including Drogheda United and Silkeborg. The idea is that clubs can share development expertise, commercial knowledge and opportunities for players and staff rather than solving every difficulty independently. Trivela is modest beside City Football Group, but the principle is recognisably similar. Aston Villa and Birmingham City are pursuing their own models under ambitious ownership, reminding us that this new structure is not compulsory and may not prove superior in every circumstance. Football is conducting a great business experiment in public while the rest of us remain occupied arguing about handball decisions. Some owners are creating international club families; others are concentrating their attention upon one great institution or building broader sporting and regeneration ventures. Nobody yet knows which model will dominate the next generation.

For Sadler, the opportunity is astonishing because coaches now possess pathways through these organisations just as young players do. Success at Lommel could lead to becoming its head coach, moving to another club within the City network, joining a larger coaching operation elsewhere or eventually returning to England with international experience and an immensely strengthened CV. Could he one day work at Manchester City? Yes, he could. That is not to suggest he has been secretly selected to replace Pep Guardiola, and even the most optimistic Saddlers supporter should postpone ordering the commemorative mug. It means he is now inside the organisation, learning its systems and demonstrating his ability before people whose football interests extend around the world. The old managerial career ladder led from a smaller English club to a slightly larger English club, usually before collapsing beneath the manager without warning. The new route may travel through Belgium, Australia, America, Spain or anywhere else within a global network.

There is, of course, a danger. A football club is not merely a branch office with a badge above reception. It carries civic pride, inherited loyalties and family memories. Supporters must believe their club exists to pursue its own success, not merely to develop a player, coach or commercial opportunity for a more important relative elsewhere in the group. The real test of multi-club ownership will be whether it strengthens each local institution or gradually reduces smaller clubs to useful squares on somebody else’s corporate chessboard. The benefits are obvious: specialist knowledge, wider recruitment, investment and opportunities that an independent club may never afford. The emotional risks are equally real. Supporters continue to fall in love with individual clubs while those clubs increasingly join families of their own.

On Tuesday evening, Mrs Olley and I went to Bescot with good friends who support Aston Villa and Birmingham City. No Blues colours were worn, obviously; standards must be maintained. Villa beat us 5–0, playing in their famous first kit while Walsall, mysteriously, wore our change strip despite being at home. It was nevertheless a perfect evening. We laughed, exchanged the necessary insults, admired some excellent football and enjoyed one another’s company. That is the beautiful contradiction at the heart of this story. Behind the scenes, football is becoming a global industry of interconnected businesses, shared data and international career routes. In the stands, it remains wonderfully human: family, friendship, teasing, hope and the willingness to return even after conceding five.

Somewhere in Belgium, Mat Sadler is beginning again. Perhaps he will return one day to the English lower divisions. Perhaps he will become a successful European head coach. Perhaps he will eventually walk into Manchester City as part of its coaching staff. Nobody can know. What we do know is that Lommel is not a consolation prize for a sacked Walsall manager. It is an extraordinary opening into football’s global future and may be the first step towards Sadler becoming the manager many of us always suspected he could be. Football’s business model may be changing beyond recognition. Its heart, thankfully, is not.