Wilshere has taken a patient approach to coaching, choosing to earn his badges and learn the ropes out of the spotlight. Now he says he is ready to be a manager after taking the Luton job
Jack Wilshere’s playing career was a firework that coruscated through the sky and exploded before fizzling out almost as quickly as it appeared. One moment he was 19, dribbling past Xavi and Andres Iniesta in the Nou Camp; the next he was 26 and his Arsenal days were over.
So Wilshere’s careful journey into the world of coaching is no accident but by deliberate design. After retiring aged 30, he took charge of Arsenal Under-18s and led a squad including Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri to the FA Youth Cup final, a match where he had made his own name as a teenaged talent. When Wilshere left the job in the summer of 2024, he was tipped to go into management, but instead he decided to take a backroom role as coach for Norwich City.
“I always said, I don’t want to take the step to a first team until I’m absolutely ready,” Wilshere said this week in his first interview as the new manager of Luton Town. “Norwich gave me an opportunity to be a first-team coach, get around first-team players, because the academy was amazing but everyone knows that the academy is not really about winning. So going to Norwich and feeling that, experiencing that, is probably why I’m sat here today.”
After back-to-back relegations, Luton find themselves in League One, a world away from their Premier League heights only 18 months ago. It means Wilshere is starting management on a lower rung of the ladder than many of his England peers like Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Wayne Rooney, but it is all part of what he sees as a steep learning curve.
“When I first stepped into the 18s dressing room at Arsenal and I thought about coaching and the way I wanted to do it, I quickly realised that this is something that I’m going to have to improve at, and something I’m going to have to throw myself into. And I did.”
Over the past three years, he studied for his badges to earn his Uefa Pro Licence. He honed his ideas about how the game should be played under then Norwich manager Johannes Hoff Thorup, who was full of praise for Wilshere’s approach.
“He’s calm and relaxed about his coaching career,” Hoff Thorup recently toldThe Championship Football Podcast. “He started with the youth team with Arsenal because he wanted to find his own way and develop his own ideas for the game, and those ideas were very, very similar to mine, so he was a great fit for us and he was eager to come. He was open and honest about his situation, saying that after Norwich he would prefer that his next job was a head coach.”
The chance came sooner than Wilshere might have anticipated. When Hoff Thorup was sacked near the end of the season, Wilshere took charge of Norwich’s final two games, steering the team to a win and a draw. “The two games were amazing, and if anything it gave me the belief that I can do it and I was ready to do it.”
Three and a half years after his final match as a player, Wilshere has now taken his first permanent manager’s job at Luton, a club close to his home and his heart, where he spent two years as a youth player before joining Arsenal’s academy.
It is not the culmination of some lifelong dream, he admits. Wilshere didn’t play under Arsene Wenger wishing to one day be a manager. But he was later inspired by Mikel Arteta, who he watched up close at the Emirates.
“I’d never seen someone coach that way,” Wilshere told The Independent earlier this year. “I’d never seen his passion, I’d never seen how he would try and teach the players, both in meetings and on the pitch … Coaching is not something that, as I started my career… [I’m] not thinking about that. But Mikel was the one.”
Arsenal turned Wilshere’s time as academy manager into a documentary which revealed someone intelligent, articulate and thoughtful about both the tactical side of the game and the emotional bonds that make a team greater than the sum of its parts. Central to Wilshere’s approach is that the entire club, from the fans to the support staff, must believe in the team to unlock their potential.
“I’ve got friends now in football, one that was a masseur, that was a chef, that was a nutritionist. These people are around the players every single day, the players trust them, and it’s my job to understand the people at the training ground, build relationships with them and try and add something.”
He added: “A big part of what I want to do, I want the players to enjoy everything, I want them to enjoy training. We need to make sure that when Saturday comes, it’s not a button we press on Saturday morning, it’s in the week, it’s in our behaviours, and we can compete from the start.”
It is a window into what Luton fans might expect from Wilshere. He was a freakishly talented player and he found that aspect of coaching – working with players who simply cannot do what he could with a ball – a frustration which took time to understand. Instead, his emphasis is not on the technical skill but the less heralded side of his game, the grit and the graft.
“Naturally everyone thinks I probably like playing with the ball. But before any of that we have to – it’s an old saying in football but I love it, my coaches used to say it – ‘earn the right’. We have to compete, we have to win duels, to fight, to show that togetherness. The fans have to look at us and know that we’re giving everything. Which we will be. Once we build belief, build confidence, we’ll try to create something where we have a little more control in possession, be a little more aggressive, on the front foot, especially at home. But there’s work to be done before we get there.”
Wilshere has a plan, and a destination. And this time he’s in no rush.
Category: General Sports
