In an Italian restaurant in the French city of Reims, the Still brothers are meeting up for a rare get-together. Finding the time is not easy these days. Not in their line of work. But this is the best place to meet, not least as this is where the middle brother, Will, has become a household name.
Last season, at the age of just 30, Will Still took over as caretaker manager of Stade de Reims, one of the most historically successful clubs in France. He became the youngest manager in Europe’s top five divisions. He did not yet have a UEFA Pro Licence qualification, so his club were fined €25,000 (£22,000) for every match he oversaw.
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But it was worth it.
Reims were aiming to avoid relegation when they turned to Still and went on an astonishing 19-game unbeaten run. This year, with Still now in a permanent post, his Reims side are enjoying their best start to a season since 1974.
Interest has only grown, enticed by the tale of the young English-speaking coach who apparently went from playing the video game Football Manager to the real thing.
Will Still laughs. “He was more geeky than I was — I just followed him,” he says, nodding at his brother Edward, sat opposite. “He was on Football Manager the whole time. We weren’t allowed a PlayStation but, when that changed, I was more FIFA.
“But it was football, and whatever was football, we tried.”
The Still brothers’ love of football has paid off in a big way.
Will’s older brother, Edward, 32, is also a football manager. He has been head coach of Belgian top-flight sides Charleroi, Eupen and Kortrijk, as well as holding backroom roles at Club Bruges, Royal Antwerp and Shanghai Port. Next to him sits Nicolas, the youngest of the three at 26, who joined Will as an assistant coach at Reims over the summer, having previously worked alongside Edward.
Their CVs are already impressive, particularly when one considers that none played football at a professional level. So, how did these Anglo-Belgian West Ham fans turn their football obsession into coaching at the highest level of the men’s game?
The Athletic joined them on their rare catch-up to find out. Here are some of the highlights of the conversation…
The Stills grew up in Grez-Doiceau, south east of Brussels, to English parents Julian and Jane. They were three of five siblings, with two older sisters, Felicity and Elspeth. The family moved to Belgium for their father’s work in 1989. They would spend their holidays in Nottingham, where their mum’s parents lived, as well as visiting Canterbury, Kent, the home of their dad’s parents.
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Will: It was always English at home. French in School. And football was in Dutch half the time. When I’m in Belgium, I feel British. When I’m in England, I feel Belgian. And when I’m in France, I just feel lost somewhere in the channel.
Edward: We had a beautiful childhood. We had a massive garden. Loads of footballs. Everything you could ask for. Dad talked to us about sport all the time. There’s the two of us and then Nico comes along. It’s five-a-side in the garden every weekend. From September until May it’s football, watching Match of the Day, listening to BBC Radio Five Live. Then May comes around and we all start playing cricket. On holiday, it’s golf. Hours of Football Manager and FIFA.
Will: There was no pressure on us. But if you did something, you had to commit fully. We had to be the best that we could.
Nicolas: There were standards.
Ed: We could be crap, but crap and committed!
The family bought season tickets at Sint-Truiden, known as STVV, after Will joined their academy aged 12. He stayed for a year. He was a centre-half and the closest to making it professionally, while also being a decent fast bowler in cricket. Edward was a central midfielder and Nicolas was a goalkeeper.
Will: Ed was an artist of just casually walking around the centre circle. Nico wanted to look the best.
Edward: Tape on his fingers…
Will: … socks over his knees.
Edward: White boots. The ball goes in and he’s…
Will: … checking his hair or something.
Nicolas: If you can’t be the part, you have to look the part!
Will: We went to watch Sint-Truiden and we just kept going. Dad liked it.
Nicolas: We knew that once a fortnight we would go on a Saturday night to a football game. We were quite lucky to be able to do that.
Will: They were our club. It was football, football, football. It wasn’t conscious. It’s just what we did. When our parents divorced, Ed got his driving licence and we were living at home and it was us three against the world.
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Edward: That changed the dynamic. Our mum had to go back to work. She hadn’t worked for 20 years. That created a stronger link between the three of us. We were 18, 16 and 11. Our sisters had gone to university.
Will: We then got season tickets at Standard Liege and we’d go to Anderlecht, too, as they were close to home. They weren’t always playing on the same day. We just went to every game we could. Ed would drive, Nico would have a chant and we’d sit there trying to watch it. We watched games differently when Ed began to coach.
Edward: I had notebooks. Piles of them. Writing down all the lineups, the changes, the systems, the patterns, why they were winning games. From about 17, I’d write everything down. I’ve still got them.
Will: I was useless. If I read a page, I’d read half of it and then stop. Ed is the total opposite. Proper intellect.
Edward: I was built like cardboard — injured all the time. I was lucky because one of the coaches said you should come and help the kids (at Racing Jet Wavre, now Wavre Sports FC). It was Nico’s age category. I coached the B team from age 15. I had a season together with Nico at under-17. I was 22 and at university. It was really cool.
Nicolas: We won the lot — the league and cup.
Edward: I found it really special creating a team and there’s a special feeling watching young players improve.
Will: I didn’t enjoy youth coaching. I coached an under-12 group for a year at 17. I didn’t mind the one-on-one stuff but, in an arrogant way, it annoyed me as they were not as good as me.
Nicolas: When a kid you were coaching 10 years ago sends you a message, that’s really special. You don’t get that from playing.
Careers in football were not yet on the cards. Edward went to university, spending a year in Loughborough studying international relations, before returning to Belgium to study Political Sciences and Management Sciences. But Will explored further. He went to study at Myerscough College in Lancashire. As part of his course, he coached at EFL club Preston North End. It gave him direction.
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Will: Before I went to college, I studied physiotherapy and I was absolute garbage. Hated it. In the January exams, I got 1.7 out of 20. I probably got the one because I put my name down.
Ed’s clever, he’s smart, he can do loads of things. I’d be living under a bridge without football. I’m so happy I had this one conversation with my dad. He said: ‘Go and do it’. So I went to college, found all the things that are possible in football: coaching, sports science, sports psychology, video analysis. That’s when I enjoyed coaching, at Preston. The academy kids were good. You ask them to do something and they did it.
We realised Belgium was a million years behind everyone else in terms of analysis, tactics and video. I came home from college and we knocked on doors, we went to training sessions and sent emails. We were lucky that we knew a psychologist who worked for Sint-Truiden. He let me have a word with the manager.
Edward: It was targeted because the head coach was an ex-video analyst, Yannick Ferrera. He knew the value of video analysis.
Will: I felt stupid. But I said to Yannick: “This is what I’ve learned to do in college. Can I be of any use?”
“Can you film a game?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re playing Excelsior Virton in the first game of the season in two months. Go and film their game tomorrow. Come back with something.”
That is the start of it really.
Nicolas helped Will, then 22, film the game. Three days later, he returned and presented Ferrera with his work. He was impressed and Will stayed for an internship. That turned into a first contract.
Sint-Truiden were promoted to the Belgian top flight after their first season (2014-15). Ferrera was then headhunted by Standard Liege and took Will with him. Chris O’Loughlin, now sporting director of Union Saint-Gilloise, was appointed head coach at Sint-Truiden.
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Will: Chris said: You’ve got to help me find a replacement. I had no idea who worked in football, so I said: “Ed’s really good.”
Edward: I’d built a portfolio at university, on Brendan Rodgers’ 3-4-3 at Liverpool, things like that. It had four or five teams with real analysis in it.
Will: So Ed fills in and does a lot more because Chris couldn’t speak French.
Edward: I finished university in October and was doing an internship in Canada. So at exactly the moment I finished my studies, Will has gone to Standard and I’ve sent my application to Sint-Truiden. It just fits perfectly. Pure luck. If he’s still at Sint-Truiden when I come back, I would have had to find a job somewhere else.
Edward joined Sint-Truiden in 2015 and stayed for two years. After the first year, O’Loughlin was dismissed and replaced by Ivan Leko. When Leko joined Bruges in 2017, Edward went with him. Again, that left a vacancy at Sint-Truiden.
Nicolas: After Will and Ed, they thought: “Well, there’s a third brother, so let’s give him a shot!” I had never thought of doing the same as them. I had seen how difficult it was for Will.
I came out of school and didn’t know what to do. I tried a couple of things. Marketing, economics. I tried uni. But then this opportunity came up — go on then. I did a couple of games, analysed key notes and stuff. Then ended up getting the job. I was 19.
Nicolas would later join Leko and Edward as a video analyst at Bruges. By then, Will had joined Lierse SK in the Belgian Second Division. He had won the Belgian Cup with Ferrera at Standard Liege, but they were dismissed in September 2016.
Repeatedly, the brothers would be thrown in at the deep end. Will tasted management first when, after a poor start to the 2017-18 season, Lierse manager Frederik Vanderbiest was sacked. The club president called Will onto the team coach.
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Will: “Right, training tomorrow — you’ll do it. And the team on Saturday.”
“What? I’m 24. What about the others?” Next to me is Nico Van Kerckhoven, who has more than 40 caps for Belgium, and Patrick Nys, who has played hundreds of games in Belgian football.
“No no. I don’t want them — I want you to do it. I trust you, you have good ideas.”
“I haven’t got a choice, have I?”
“No.”
I shat myself. I rang Ed and said: “What do I do?”
Ed said, “Go back to basics: 4-4-2, low block, wait. Don’t concede and you’ve got a point.” First game, home to AFC Tubize, 1-1 draw. Great. The president is going to appoint a new manager. I’ll be fine. Instead…
“Great game, Will. Much better. Good team performance. What are you going to do next week?”
I rang Ed and he just said: “Do it again.”
I’m 24, I was a baby. I had players in their 30s. It all made no sense. The second game was away to Union Saint-Gilloise. Ed was there with Dad. We were 3-0 down at half-time. I’m standing there in the national stadium, which is where Union played their games, thinking: “What am I doing? I have no idea what to do, what to say.” I looked up to the stands and Dad and Ed were giving encouragement.
I walked into the changing rooms and I just had a moment where it came out. “We’re useless, we’re absolute s****. Either we do something about it or we curl up in a little ball and die.” We lost 3-2 eventually but, from that moment, we went on a run — 10 games unbeaten, winning seven of them. I have no idea how.
Will downplays his success, despite going from Preston Under-14s to facing Kylian Mbappe & co in under a decade.
Will: Someone asked me recently, “What makes you so special?” Nothing! I’m Will, I’m big, I’m ginger. Nothing makes me special.
But throughout his early career, he made an impression, coping when faced with sink-or-swim scenarios. What do his brothers think of him?
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Nicolas: There is a simplicity about him. Even now, he sticks to who he is and what he does. The players relate to that. They feel comfortable.
Edward: Will has an amazing capacity to connect to people emotionally. Especially in a dressing room. He’s a different person with the players than he is sat here. He gets players. Will can take a group somewhere special. He can get more out of the group just because of that energy and connection. When you build an emotional connection, it is stronger than anything.
One of his greatest strengths is that he lets everyone — staff and players — do their thing. The players take confidence from that. It creates something really strong. When you put simplicity, that emotional power and add in knowledge — “This is me, I don’t know everything, you just do your thing” — it fits and works.
Will: I don’t like controlling people. If I give someone the freedom to do what he wants, then he’s going to come up with his version. I’m not saying everything in his version is wrong or right, but I’ll take what I need from that and get the best out of them.
When Will went to Preston for his first taste of coaching elite football, he described the feeling of meeting the other English kids as “adapt or die”. It is a phrase that applies across his early career and those of his brothers, too. Will was appointed head coach at Beerschot temporarily in 2021, becoming the youngest post-war head coach in Belgian football (age 28). Edward was appointed head coach for the first time at Charleroi in 2021 (age 30).
But Will and Edward are different characters with different styles.
Will: Ed is structured. Disciplined. Everyone knows exactly what they have to do and when they have to do it. Every detail is covered.
Edward: When we were watching games together, we realised we watched different things instinctively. Will was really good at watching individual players. He would get a feeling about a player…
Will: … what they could do, what they couldn’t do. Where they were best on the pitch. How they understood or perceived the game. Ed was more general, collective…
Edward: … how that team was moving compared to the other team. What patterns were happening. Even now, I struggle to watch one player. We learnt from each other.
Nicolas has been learning from both.
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Nicolas: In terms of preparation, I’m closer to Ed. He is really detailed. When we worked together, I would play devil’s advocate. You push someone to make sure you’ve covered everything and now I’m doing the opposite with Will.
It’s cool being their brother. It gives you certain advantages that you don’t have when you work alone. I’ve worked with other coaches and you think. ‘Ah, I can’t say what I want here’.
Edward: In the second job we had in Eupen (last season), when we were fighting against relegation, (Nico) was more of an assistant. We had to be careful. We sounded like the same person!
Will: At the start of the season, he gave a session at Reims and I thought: “F***! That sounds the same as me, the energy, intensity.”
Nicolas: That’s one of the things about working with your brothers. It is different. You do have to adapt. But also to the players and the other coaches around you.
Already, the brothers have faced contrasting highs and lows. While Edward and Nicolas were in the Champions League with Bruges, Will was in the Second Division with Lierse. When Edward took charge of Charleroi with Nicolas as an assistant, they finished sixth, while Will endured a difficult season at Standard, finishing 14th.
These days, Will is flying at Reims, assisted by Nicolas, while Edward is out of work after leaving strugglers Kortrijk.
Edward: It can be tough. When the two of us are sat next to each other on the plane going to a Champions League game, walking on that pitch, in Dortmund, the day before…
Will: … I was drifting around in the second division.
Edward: I wanted Will to do well. He wanted us to do well. But you are respectful of what the other is going through. At Charleroi, everything we touched worked in the first season. Will had the worst possible season (at Standard). I remember your emotional state at the end of it… it was on the verge of depression.
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Will: I didn’t know where I was going. “My career is f*****.”
Edward: Eighteen months later, the tables have turned. Everything that Nico and Will are doing at Reims is turning to gold. I’m out of a job.
Will: Nico was always sitting in a puddle of gold!
Edward: I know they are really respectful of my position at the moment. I want them to qualify for Europe next season.
Will: Last year I felt horrible. We went on that unbeaten run. The whole world is talking about it. Meanwhile, they were fighting against relegation in Eupen. I was really happy for myself. But it just felt wrong. I felt guilty.
Nicolas: When Ed was at Kortrijk at the start of this season, Will and I were always watching his games. You put yourself in his position, knowing what it feels like.
Edward: I’ll send a text before and after every game. But you know that, actually, I can’t help them. And visa versa.
After spells shadowing his two brothers, could Nicolas one day head out on his own, too, and become a third top-flight manager in the family?
Nicolas: My analysis is good. I can base my work on that. If being an assistant means I can improve my coaching, then that is an advantage of being their brother. But I’m in no rush at all.
Will: He’s only going to a club in the Premier League or the Champions League.
Edward: If it looks good…
Will: Or if it’s sponsored by Adidas or Nike…
Edward: “I want a hair gel deal, a nice car, but not big cars, a sports car…”
Will: And he needs a barber every Thursday!
GO DEEPER
The restoration of Reims: The real story of Will Still and the Ligue 1 side
(Top photo: Peter Rutzler/The Athletic)