The final stop of former Watford and Birmingham City forward Troy Deeney’s playing career came when he signed on as a player-coach for League Two side Forest Green Rovers in August 2023.
Within four months, Deeney was handed the manager’s job at The New Lawn and tasked with dragging 23rd-placed Rovers out of the relegation zone, but struggled to turn around the team’s fortunes.
Following a 2-0 defeat to Harrogate Town in January 2024, Deeney called out his players, saying he would ‘rather watch the Antiques Roadshow’ and singled out his right-back Fankaty Dabo as ‘awful’.
Deeney reflects on his Forest Green rant
Still looking for his first win in the job, Deeney was later handed a four-game touchline ban for his conduct towards a match official during a previous game, and he was sacked. Rovers owner Dale Vince later claimed that he hadn’t necessarily wanted to appoint Deeney in the first place, but the club’s director of football had promised to give the frontman a shot at the manager’s job when it next became available, as part of enticing him into the player-coach role. Nobody at the club expected the opportunity would arise so soon.
“Lessons were learned,” Deene tells FourFourTwo in his assessment of his time with the club. “Although he tries to give me stick any time he needs to, I appreciate Dale Vince giving me the opportunity – he says he didn’t give me the opportunity, but he did.
“It’s about the environment there, because they’ve got the talent, they’ve got the ownership with the money, they’ve got all the grand plans, so it’s about having someone pull it all together. We tried to do that in the short time we were there, with Dave Horseman and Louis Carey.
“It’s a great place. Robbie Savage went in as manager recently and I’ve genuinely been wishing them all the best, I just wish Dale would stop talking about me. If Robbie gets them up, I’d like to say I played a tiny percentage in that, like half a per cent. There are lads there that we worked with – some that we brought in are still there.”
Did Deeney almost care too much, hence his emotional outbursts? “My rant was just immaturity,” he admits. “It wasn’t caring too much for myself – since then, I’ve been all right, life is good. It was caring so much for those players who didn’t realise they were letting the opportunity slip through their hands – not to stay in the League, forget that, because people get relegated, it happens. It was the opportunity to be a professional footballer.
“Some of those people don’t have jobs now, so ultimately I was right, but how I said it was wrong, you have to own that. The timing of saying it was wrong as well, but in hindsight I was dropped into a position where I was expected to fail.
“We were at the bottom of League Two, the director of football was in his first role, the CEO was in his first role and I spoke to Dale once. Then you go, ‘By the way, get that all sorted as quick as you can’. I wasn’t allowed to bring in everybody I wanted, either.
“We tried to make the best of it and I made some mistakes along the way, but it hasn’t deterred me. If anything, it’s made me more focused to want to do it again.”
Indeed, Deeney is very open to making a return to management. “Absolutely,” he says. “But now with the hindsight of that experience, you’d ask so many more questions. The bit of satisfaction for me is that everything I said turned out to be true.”
“At Forest Green I could have done so much better, but that hasn’t deterred me, I’ll come again. I’ve just done my LMA manager’s diploma so I’m not sitting here sulking, and when it’s that time, we’ll do what we need to do.”
