What's Welsh For Gaffer?

The world’s third oldest national football team, Wales played an international match for the first time in 1876 and for the next 80 years the team competed without a manager. Since Jimmy Murphy's appointment in 1957, just thirteen men have held the position on a permanent basis. 

The first book to chronicle the fortunes of Wales’s national  managers, What’s Welsh For Gaffer? explores how the role has evolved over the decades; from the days of the team being picked by committee, to modern-day full-time managers who impose their own football philosophies on the national team.

Author Leon Barton explains how four managers – Jimmy Murphy (1958), Chris Coleman (2016), Ryan Giggs (2020) and Rob Page (2022) – led their teams to the finals of international tournaments, and Mike Smith (1976) whose team reached the quarter-finals of the European Championships when the tournament itself was restricted to the semi-finalists. 

He also investigates why, in the 1980s and ‘90s under Mike England, Terry Yorath and Mark Hughes, Welsh sides stacked with world-class talent, failed to qualify for a single tournament, and assesses the huge contributions of John Toshack and Gary Speed who laid the foundations for others to succeed.

How did Englishman Mike Smith oversee a dramatic upturn in Welsh pride under his tenure? How did Jimmy Murphy and Terry Yorath deal with the shocking tragedies that occurred during their time in the job? Why did the Manic Street Preachers sing “Bobby Gould Must Go” before the maverick manager resigned in 1999, and how did Chris Coleman turn a team that was humiliated in a 6-1 loss to Serbia into European Championship semi-finalists in less than three years? 

Discover these stories and more as the men in charge of Wales are profiled, and their legacies examined, in this fascinating new book.