Nathan Jones channels Southampton misery to drive Charlton to the Championship
Nathan Jones guided Charlton back to the Championship via the Play-Offs
(Image credit: Getty Images)
If you donât do your own PR, nobody else will do it for you. Many a manager thinks this way, not just in football but in offices across the globe. Few, however, need self-promotion quite as much as Nathan Jones, even after an actual promotion out of League One with Charlton Athletic.
Speaking to the media at Wembley following his sideâs 1-0 win over Leyton Orient, Jones was given several opportunities to reflect on his up-and-down journey to this point. He did not pass them up.
âIâve always taken bold jobs,â the Welshman declared. âIn every job Iâve taken, the club has been in turmoil. When I first went to Luton, they were 18th in League Two. They ended up in the Premier League. When I went back to Luton, they were bottom of the table, seven points adrift with nine games to go. We stayed up. When I went to Stoke City⊠donât even get me started on that. Then when I went to Southampton, they were on a downward spiral for a long time. So, Iâve taken on some real tough jobs, and backed myself.â Call him Mr Muscle, because he loves the jobs you hate.
Jones has always been highly animated on the touchline (Image credit: Getty Images)Inserting yourself into difficult scenarios can make or break your reputation. Unfortunately and unfairly, whereas some managers are able to bend narratives to their will through force of personality, exerting a sort of gravitational pull on the media, Jonesâ magnetism seems to repel respect rather than attract it. In short, heâs seen in some quarters as⊠well⊠just a bit weird.
The parable of the ping-pong table always comes to mind. At Luton, he felt that his playersâ table tennis league was taking up too much time and brain space, so he destroyed the table and set fire to it. Well, what else could he do, apart from âalmost anythingâ? A colleague described the act as âperformative psychopathyâ, a wonderful phrase, but in Jonesâ mind it clearly made a sort of sense. For better or worse, he is the worldâs most intense human being â just observe his pitchside convulsions and prayers (heâs a devout Christian) at the end of the play-off semi-final second leg.
That intensity alone draws critics his way, but in the harsh spotlight of the Premier League, managing Southampton, he also talked himself into trouble. When Saints lost to 10-man Wolves, it was because the red card âmade it a free hit for them and added more pressure for usâ. Self-promotion was common. He became a living meme. But as Jonathan Liew put it in The Guardian, âJonesâ quips and gaffes were taken as a symbol of irrepressible self-confidence; perhaps even arrogance. In fact, like all the best sitcom characters, Jones always struck me as a man wracked with self-doubt.â
Jones says he feels accepted at Charlton where at other clubs in the past he was not (Image credit: Getty Images)Even in the warm afterglow of Charltonâs Wembley triumph, the 51-year-old was asked about his Southampton spell. âI just wasnât accepted,â he explained. âBut Iâd earned my stripes. Iâd done League Two, League One, Championship, and proved at every level that I can get results. I actually proved it at Southampton: I got five wins out of 14 games. Iâm not sure thereâs a manager since who has got that. It wasnât meteoric, but I think if I had flown in from somewhere then I wouldâve got a little more time. A young Welsh guy from thing [presumably referring either to Luton Town or Blaenrhondda, the village where Jones grew up] maybe wasnât big enough for Southampton. But Iâm big enough for Charlton, and Iâm very proud of that.â
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And so, having climbed rung by rung over six or seven years, Jones found that his next port of call after the Premier League was the bottom end of League One. No cushy Championship job with parachute payments and excellent players â he was picking up the pieces at a club occupying their lowest league position in nearly 100 years.
Jones was determined that would only be temporary. âI didnât drop to League One to become a League One manager; I dropped to League One to manage Charlton,â he explained at Wembley. Taking them up in his first full season is especially impressive when you consider the leagueâs shark-infested waters in 2024/25: not just Birmingham and Wrexham but Bolton, Huddersfield and Rotherham â all shorter odds for promotion before the campaign kicked off â as well as Stockport, Blackpool and Peterborough, among others.
Macaulay Gillesphey’s first half free kick was enough to win the tie for Charlton (Image credit: Getty Images)The final itself against Leyton Orient was largely forgettable, but thatâs how Charlton liked it all season. Including the play-offs, they kept 23 clean sheets in 49 matches and won 24 of the 25 games in which they scored the first, drawing the other. Let that statistic percolate for a moment, because itâs nuts. To go behind to Charlton is to find yourself in quicksand, fighting a slow death.
Yet it wasnât always this way. Jones has earned a reputation for attritional football, but his first Luton side were genuinely exciting. Playing an expansive 4-4-2 diamond formation with future Premier League full-backs Jack Stacey and James Justin bombing up the flanks, the Hatters won automatic promotion from League Two in 2017-18 by scoring 94 goals â some 15 more than anyone else in the division. He has shown heâs adaptable, tactically, but recognised at Charlton a need for solid foundations before, in his words, putting the roof on.
The tactics change but the intensity remains, and itâs visible in his Charlton side. Perhaps thatâs why he called the promotion his career highlight. âThis is categorically the biggest thing,â he said. âRegardless of going to the Premier League, being promoted five times as a player, play-off campaigns as a manager, as an assistant and everything, this is the biggest. I was a lot more reserved than I thought Iâd be, because I just wanted to take everything in.â
Charlton will go into the Championship next season and look to make life difficult for teams there (Image credit: Getty Images)âReservedâ isnât a word heâll often have associated with him, but Jones has seemingly come to realise that if he doesnât tell people who and what he is, theyâll do it for him in a way he might not appreciate. His opposite number at Wembley, Orientâs Richie Wellens, is also used to talking up his own impressive achievements, because clubs higher up the food chain donât seem to have noticed them. You donât get anything for free in football.
Will Nathan Jones ever return to the Premier League? Perhaps, perhaps not. But his Charlton side will make life difficult for a lot of Championship teams next term, and then the general perception of their manager might change. He said at Wembley that he has learned from difficult spells but that âsomeone whoâs very successful in life once told me: âTry not to have too many learning curvesââ. Those curves have created a potential redemption arc for Jones, and the initial excitement about his ability could yet come full circle.
Huw was on the FourFourTwo staff from 2009 to 2015, ultimately as the magazine’s Managing Editor, before becoming a freelancer and moving to Wales. As a writer, editor and tragic statto, he still contributes regularly to FFT in print and online, though as a match-going #WalesAway fan, he left a small chunk of his brain on one of many bus journeys across France in 2016.
