In-depth exclusive with Johnnie Jackson: AFC Wimbledon challenges have made me a better manager

BY KYLE ANDREWS

“We spoke about the significance of the game and history behind it, but when they walked out there, I wanted them to have a feeling that it’s just another game. It’s not, I know that now, but I had to probably go through that to realise it’s not just another game.”

Johnnie Jackson’s time as manager of AFC Wimbledon has been a multi-faceted and intense learning experience. He’s had to learn, through brutal experience, to become a tougher, stronger and more knowledgeable manager. Of equal importance at a club like AFC Wimbledon, he’s had to learn about the significance of its history and culture.

There are few better examples than Jackson’s first fixture against Milton Keynes – a 3-1 defeat at Stadium MK in January 2024. His side were three goals down 22 minutes into the game, and had two men sent off by the 73rd minute. He had misread the occasion.

“From my point of view, I think I got it wrong,” reflected Jackson.

“I got how I played it with the group wrong. Ironically, I was worried about overhyping it, losing players and going down to 10, nine men. Everything that could go wrong on the pitch did, and you’re asking ‘why is this happening to me?’, but I think maybe I got the tone of that one wrong.

“There were big lessons learned from that first fixture that we’ve taken into the following ones.”

Reacting to managerial misjudgements, ensuring they are not repeated, and endeavouring to align himself with the club’s ethos as AFC Wimbledon’s first manager with no prior connection to the Dons are the drivers that have helped transform Jackson’s perception among supporters at Plough Lane.

He arrived in May 2022 as a wounded animal, tasked with healing a wounded animal. On holiday with his family in the aftermath of being dismissed by Charlton Athletic, the club he had called home for 12 years, an out-of-the-blue call from Wimbledon chairman Mick Buckley set the wheels in motion. Less than two weeks after departing the Addicks, and after impressing during the interview process, a young manager taking his second job was tasked with helping the Dons recover from relegation to League Two.

Though determined to make an immediate return to football, to management, the history of the club was part of what made this a particular attractive proposition that wasn’t just accepted out of necessity.

“I was well aware of the history of Wimbledon,” explained Jackson. “I knew there was loads to it, that you could get stuck into there, but it only scratches the surface of what I know now.”

A more pressing concern in his early weeks was evaluating the damage done to the club following their first relegation since reformation, and the level of transformation required to immediately bounce back to the third tier.

“When a team gets relegated, there’s going to be some trauma,” said Jackson, when asked about his first impressions.

“We had a really young and inexperienced squad, which I felt was part of the reason why the club had got relegated the previous season, and one of the first things I did was try and address that and bring in some experience. But it’s very difficult to overhaul that in one window. You need a load of windows, which has proven to be the case.”

Then there were the structural and operational deficiencies that needed addressing.

“The facilities, like the training ground, needed a lot of work. When we first went in there, there was lots that needed doing. A lot of time and money and effort had gone into the stadium, and rightly so, to get that sort of ground, and that was brilliant. The ground is unbelievable. But there were some bits and bobs facility wise that needed addressing. And the recruitment situation was up in the air, there was no real structured recruitment department before I went in.”

And Jackson himself, having spent over a decade making himself an icon at The Valley, had some personal adjustments to make.

“It was a big change to my life. You get used to it, used to the journey, used to knowing everyone’s name, everyone’s face and what everyone does. You’re just sort of part of the furniture, really. Then you’re walking into a club where everything’s new to you, everyone’s new to you, you’re sort of a stranger.”

It seemed, however, that Jackson had overcome those barriers to success in the first half of his first season in charge as he stood proudly with the November League Two Manager of the Month award. Experience added, and the squad boosted by talented young loanees. They were 11th at the end of 2022, only two points off the play-offs, and Jackson’s name was being sung around Plough Lane.

By March, that had been replaced by boos and calls for the manager’s departure. Two wins in 23 games, with a reoccurring theme of throwing away leads or conceding late goals, meant the Dons slipped to 21st. He does not absolve himself of blame, but Jackson’s identifies some aggravating factors that made stopping the rot extremely tough.

“I don’t think there were signs in the performances, I didn’t see it coming at all, but was it unavoidable? I suppose at the time it probably was unavoidable because there wasn’t enough structure in place to prevent it,” reflects Jackson.

“In January I lost a couple of loan lads (Paris Maghoma and Ryley Towler) who returned to their clubs, and Ayoub Assal. I had loads of injuries, and we just hadn’t been able to get a squad in place where that was sustainable.

“If you lose the amount of players that we lost, I would suggest any club at our level would have had the problems that we had because we just had so many. It made it really difficult and we had to rely on a lot of inexperienced young lads who weren’t ready for that challenge unfortunately, so it was obviously tough.

“It became about just surviving in the end. It was difficult to pick up points. We took the lead in lots of games and we rarely took a hiding, we were generally losing by an odd goal and conceding late ones. But when you’re looking to make changes and affect the game, we had so much inexperience and a lack of quality on the bench that it was very difficult to maintain anything.”

After a home defeat to Salford in April, in which the visitors scored in the 95th minute and 96th minute to record a 3-2 victory, Jackson gave a post-match interview in which he declared something needed to change. An almost unanimous response from supporters – the thing that needed to change was the man in charge. Not an opinion shared by Jackson or the club’s decision makers.

“No, no, no, no. Never. No. I’m not like that at all,” was Jackson’s strong response when asked if stepping away during that period was ever something that crossed his mind.

“You do question yourself. I’m my biggest critic. So I sit there after every bad result or bad performance and ask myself what could I have done better? What can I do better next time? Stuff like that. I questioned a lot of things. And I still do.

“Could I have done better? Of course I could have done better looking back. There are things that I would have done, and I’ve learned lessons. The bit that’s on me is you have to try and find different ways and we couldn’t do that so you have to accept responsibility. But I don’t question whether I’ve got the chops for it and whether I can be a success because I’m totally convinced in myself.

“There were times where I did wonder whether it would be one result too and they might go a certain way, and I suppose that would have been what happened at most clubs. But this isn’t like most clubs. They want to support their staff, they supported me, and I think they recognised the challenges that we were up against as a club. Not just me as a manager.

“I’ve got a great relationship with my chairman, we’re very open and honest with each other in a fair way. He appraises my job and gives me constant feedback, and he made me well aware that we couldn’t get relegated, that we needed to get some results. No one was sat there happy with what was going on, no one more so than me. But from the chairman and the board and the decision makers, I always felt supported.”

Nonetheless, this was Jackson’s toughest period in professional football.

“I was quite lucky when I played that I never had a serious injury. Generally speaking, I was fortunate to be fit and pretty much for a lot of my career be selected. So it was definitely the hardest time of my career.

“The highs are higher and the lows are definitely much lower as a manager. So much of it is out of your hands at times, and so much of it is just about the result when obviously there’s so much more to football. It was tough.

“All I want to do is win. I’m just desperate to do well. I’ve got the faith I can do that, and I had to keep telling myself that during those periods. There’s no one that feels worse than me on a Saturday night if we’ve lost a game. You take it home with you when do this job.”

That Jackson cared to such an extent was something supporters questioned, with the manager recalling “an infamous Q&A at the stadium where I took more than a few pelters”. Anyone associated with Charlton knew that Jackson would give everything to win a game of football, whether on the pitch or on the touchline. He hadn’t done enough to convince Dons supporters of his character, but it was an experience he tried to take positives from.

“During the Charlton days, I had a lot of people wanting to pat me on the back, and I certainly wasn’t getting any of that here at that time, and that definitely toughened me up. I think I had to get through some of the stuff that I did to get stronger. It definitely made me a better manager and a better coach.”

During that “infamous” supporter meeting, it was reaffirmed that Jackson had the support of the club and he would be the man leading the Dons going into the 2023-24 season. An opportunity for Jackson to put that learning into practice and repay the faith shown in him, but also to build some bridges with the supporters that had turned against him. However small, conscious decisions were made to attempt to connect with the club and its fans, which included taking to the dugout wearing Wimbledon-branded gear.

“I’m the first person to manage Wimbledon who’s had no previous affiliation with the club, so I don’t think they quite knew me or got me,” admits Jackson.

“Maybe when I first went in, I didn’t help myself with that. Just by something like that, having the gear on and looking like the Wimbledon manager was something that I thought about. And I like the stuff as well! It helped me connect better with the supporters and perhaps I hadn’t done that well enough at the start.”

The main way to get supporters back onside, however, was to win games of football. Jackson’s responsibility, but something that could only be achieved with significant changes to recruitment and operations. Enter the transformative head of football operations, Craig Cope, who had joined the club in January 2023, and is now director of football.

“We needed someone to do that role and we needed someone like him to come in and help,” explains Jackson.

A collaborative approach to recruitment, led by Cope and Jackson, resulted in the signing of seven players in the summer of 2023 who remain key figures in the winter of 2024. To put that into context, only academy graduates Huseyin Biler and Isaac Ogundere remain from Jackson’s first season in charge. It’s a success, and a successful relationship, that Jackson celebrates.

“The relationship between me and Craig is great. On personal level, we’ve become good friends. We spend a lot of time together, we spend a lot of time on the phone together, and we work really well together.

“We’re very open and honest with each other, and we’ve found a really good way of working. Our track record since we’ve come together has been pretty good, and there’s no doubt the ones we’ve brought in have made us better. The recruitment over the last couple of years has been really good and we’ve managed to move the club forward.”

Jackson also credits Cope for much-needed off-the-pitch developments.

“Craig’s job is more than recruitment. He’s helped with facilities at the training ground, improving stuff off the pitch. The team had been having microwave meals for their lunch after training, and now we’ve got a full-time chef who cooks proper food with a proper canteen area where the players can sit and spend time together. We didn’t have any of that when I first came in.”

The reward for the investment over the summer months, and the support given to Jackson, was a start to the season which saw the Dons second after 11 games.

A significant contributor to this success were the goals of Ali Al-Hamadi, who had been a rare bright spark in the second half of the 2022-23 season after arriving from Wycombe Wanderers in the winter transfer window. He’d struck 13 of them before Ipswich Town paid a seven-figure fee to bring him to Portman Road in January 2024, leaving with the Dons in the final play-off position. A bittersweet moment for Jackson.

“Keeping Ali Al-Hamadi would have made my team much stronger but, at the same time, to go and see him play in the Premier League knowing that I’ve helped in his career has been really rewarding.”

Al-Hamadi one of the many young players, which includes the likes of Assoul, Jack Currie and Ogundere, that Jackson has either developed or offered an opportunity to during his time at Plough Lane, something he prides himself on.

“There’s no better feeling as a coach than giving a kid their debut or seeing a lad that you’ve helped bring through and nurture go on to bigger and better things. I’ve had a lot of success so far in my career already, seeing players go on to great things. It’s really rewarding.

“The academy have done an unbelievable job and they deserve huge credit for the way they’ve brought players through over the years. It’s certainly something that we need to do. There has to be a pathway for young lads to get to the first team.”

While Jackson and Dons supporters were comforting themselves after Al-Hamadi’s loss with the large addition to the club’s bank account and pride in seeing him earn a deserved chance at a higher level, just about making his departure bearable, the simply unbearable night in Milton Keynes was on the horizon.

They needed to bounce back quickly, and needed to prevent the good work that had rebuilt strained relations from being undone, with motivation coming from an unlikely source in the immediate aftermath.

“It was Trevor Williams, one of the kit men who has been there since the start, one of the guys who helped found the club, who was the first one to say to me and the lads “unlucky, don’t forget that you’ve got an opportunity get them back at Plough Lane” and we played on that massively,” recalls Jackson.

The game at Plough Lane followed six weeks later. Jackson, taking his learnings from the evening in Milton Keynes, took a different approach with a different tone drilled into his players. It set the foundation for one of the most iconic moments in AFC Wimbledon’s history – Ronan Curtis’ stoppage-time winner.

“I felt like I’d been waiting for that Wimbledon moment,” explains Jackson.

“I think the supporters had been waiting a hell of a long time for it. And just the way that it happened as well, obviously being the last minute.

“We’ve played really well in the game. They nearly scored about 60 seconds before, we could have lost the game and that would have been incredibly harsh, but the feeling 60 seconds later was unbelievable. The euphoria around the ground, you see what it meant. What it meant to my players, to the supporters, to the staff.

“There was so much emotion, probably a lot of pent-up frustration over having not had that moment before, and it felt like a long time coming. All that coming out in one moment, it was unbelievable.

“It’s difficult to explain until you’re at the club, you work for the club, and you know the people involved and how much that game means to them. And then you see the messages that you get after, far and wide from people that have got no real skin in the game, but they’re just football supporters. I would say that 95 per cent of people, maybe more, want Wimbledon to win that game. We know the reasons why, so it’s special moment.”

For all that euphoria, Jackson’s side ultimately fell short, finishing five points behind seventh-placed Crawley Town, who would ultimately win promotion via the play-offs. A 10th-placed finish a significant improvement on the previous season’s output, with signs of improvement that meant faith was restored in Jackson and the club were applauded for supporting him. But there was a sense of ‘what if’ voiced by the manager.

“I don’t think it’s too simplistic to say we would have had a great shot of promotion if Ali hadn’t gone because he was that good in my mind,” explains Jackson.

“I understand why he had to. But it hurts you when you’re losing a player like that and a character like that. He’s a top lad as well.

“He was the best player in the league, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind. We had a Championship player playing up front for us, who is now a Premier League player, so we could have never replaced him. We’ve done our best, but at this level he’s irreplaceable.”

Injury absentees also contributed to inconsistency in the final months of the season that meant the Dons ultimately slipped away from the top seven, and addressing that was a significant priority ahead of the current campaign.

“We’ve done really good work in the summer,” explains Jackson. “We’ve got the squad to a place where I feel like we’ve got two good players for every position.

“One of the things I said to the group, and to Craig, at the end of the season when we did miss out on the playoffs was that I just felt that sometimes people knew that they were going to play. There wasn’t enough jeopardy on the shirt. It was certainly a better squad than the season before, but still we could make it even more competitive so that if you weren’t doing the business, you come out the team. And I think we’ve got that, and I think we can sustain injuries.

“We’ve also made improvements in the medical department as well to try and avoid that, so it’s not just that we’re hoping to get lucky, but we’re making improvements all the time, all over.”

Those improvements resulted in success in the opening weeks of the season, with three League Two wins out of four and a League Cup victory over Al-Hamadi’s Ipswich, setting the scene nicely for the visit of Milton Keynes.

No apologies required at full-time, no late drama, simply an emphatic 3-0 victory.

“We embraced it, we embraced the fixture, we embraced it being at our place,” recalls Jackson.

“We’re at home, it’s our supporters in a compact ground, it’s a completely different game at Plough Lane. When you go there, it’s a big ground that’s empty and a bit soulless, and they stick our fans in the top tier.

“We took a lot of confidence from the win at the back end of last season, and we were in really good form going into it. We just fancied ourselves and the supporters were so up for it. It was a completely dominating performance from start to finish. Dominating and routine. It never felt quite like routine stood on the touchline, but if there was a neutral in the stand watching, they would say there was only one winner from the first minute. The whole place was bouncing that afternoon.”

But before the Dons could record a third successive win over Milton Keynes, a 2-0 victory in the FA Cup at Stadium MK, disaster struck at Plough Lane.

“It’s not something they teach you on a course or prepare you for,” joked Jackson as he remembers his response to seeing the pitch damage following flooding at Plough Lane in September.

“It was a shocker. You’re thinking ‘why us?’. But I think you saw the best of Wimbledon there. What this club’s about, the way everyone rallied around. It’s what they’ve always done, what they’ve always had to do. That’s how the club was reformed. And the way the whole football community got behind it, I think again that’s testament to how well thought of Wimbledon is in the footballing community.”

Though relieved a speedy return to Plough Lane was possible, it’s resulted in some frustration for Jackson. Excellent form was interrupted, with the Dons somewhat inconsistent in the league since, and the opportunity to host Newcastle United in the League Cup flipped to a visit to St James’ Park. But, particularly with games in hand painting an inaccurate league position, it hasn’t dented confidence.

“I want to get Wimbledon promoted,” says Jackson.

“We want to get out of this league and we want to climb up and crack on. It’s a tough league, isn’t it? It’s not easy and we certainly haven’t got the biggest resources and budget. For us to get to where we want to, we will have to overperform. But I think on the resources that we’ve got, we’ve built a good squad, good competitive squad, with a great bunch of lads. We’ve got good staff and behind the scenes is strong – everyone’s in it together. There’s a really good feel around the club.

“We’ve given ourselves a really good chance with the work that we’ve done to get to this point. It’s never straightforward at Wimbledon, but we have to be able to get ourselves in that promotion mix because I think the club is ready for it.”

A club that Jackson has overseen change in the previous two-and-a-half years, he describes working alongside the likes of Cope to get the club on a better footing, and a time period in which Jackson has observed some change in himself.

“All my principles and fundamentals of what makes me who I am haven’t changed, I’m still the same person.

“But I understand the club, the football club that I’m at, far deeper with more understanding of what makes it tick. Having spent so much time there you grow a real affinity to the place and the people.

“I’m far more experienced as a manager and I’ve learned a lot. I feel like I’ve had a real fast track in the experiences I’ve had to go through. I’m learning more about dealing with players, styling players. You’re constantly learning lessons, about things that don’t go well and how to make sure you improve next time.

“I’m probably a little bit more ruthless. I feel like if there’s an opportunity to make us better than I’ll take it, and make some tough choices around that. I’ve had to move a lot of players on, some who have been at the club for a long time and that really well though of and are good people, but I need to take the club forward, so I think I’ve probably got better at that as well as taking the emotion out of some of that. But keeping the emotion for the coaching on the sideline, the engagement with everyone.

“I think I’ve got a much better rapport now with the Wimbledon fans who probably didn’t get to see the true me a bit earlier. But I think they’ve seen a lot more of the human side of me as well.”

Jackson has grinded through challenging moments to become a better manager, contributed to the club’s development, and increased his understanding of the club’s culture to the point where he’s become a Don.

At the very least, he won’t be downplaying a fixture against Milton Keynes again. You get the impression he quite likes winning those. He quite likes winning while wearing an AFC Wimbledon badge on his chest.

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