How Clement turned Norwich into the best team in the Championship

There are few more telling examples of how little anyone expected Philippe Clement to be the man to transform Norwich City’s fortunes than a conversation between the Belgian and his wife.

Out of work after being sacked by Rangers, and with interest from a host of clubs including Ajax, Clement received a call to ask if he’d be interested in a team second from bottom in the Championship, that had lost its first seven home games on the spin, and whose fans were protesting outside Carrow Road and lobbing tennis balls onto the pitch.

Clement, who won back-to-back-to-back Belgian titles with Genk and Club Bruges and beat Paris Saint-Germain with Monaco, turned to his wife Isabelle and said: ‘I’ll have the conversation, but we’ll never go there.’

Four months on and Clement is very much here, has hoisted Norwich out of the relegation zone (now 11 points clear of the drop) and into an FA Cup fifth-round clash against Leeds and former Norwich boss Daniel Farke on Sunday.

‘I know a lot of people thought I was crazy,’ said Clement. What’s crazier is how quickly he has turned it around.

Only Sheffield Wednesday and their 12-point deduction sat below Norwich when Liam Manning was sacked in early November. Now, only five teams have won more points since Clement, 51, took over and no one has more since the turn of the year.

The first thing Clement addressed was the elephant in the room: his unfit squad. Norwich have been so ravaged by injuries this season – for the 2-0 win at Leicester last week they had 14 senior players missing, one fit striker and a defensive midfielder on the right wing – that the club hired a firm to audit their practices and took advice from Liverpool and NBA teams on how to limit injuries.

There is a feeling that the club’s pre-season trip to the Netherlands, where the squad twice split in half to play two games on a single day – meaning the players only got about an hour of football across the 10-day trip – set them off on the wrong foot. 

Under Manning, players were given multiple days off a week. One source called it a ‘holiday camp’.

Clement gave his squad just one day off in December and it wasn’t even Christmas Day.

Such measures can backfire if a squad feel like they’ve suddenly been thrust into a Dickensian workhouse but it’s been impossible not to be seduced by Clement’s personality and work ethic. And getting results always helps.

Club insiders talk of the ‘aura’ that 6ft 3in Clement has around the place, as an ‘all-consuming perfectionist’. In the early days, Clement often worked so late at the training ground that when he returned to his nearby hotel he had to persuade staff to reopen the kitchens to rustle up some grub.

When asked if he was prepared for taking his team into a raucous Elland Road, he replied that his Bruges side were once 2-0 up at half-time in the Bernabeu.

He’s given everyone a fresh start. Players who were on the scrap heap have become key figures. Of the 10 outfielders to start Clement’s first game, a 4-1 defeat at Birmingham City, only three did so at Leicester.

Centre back Ruairi McConville signed from Brighton a year ago and barely kicked a ball under Johannes Thorup and Manning, but is now one of the first names on the teamsheet.

Anis Ben Slimane hardly got a look-in, struggled with injury, and the club were open to letting him leave last summer. Clement called him for a meeting to discuss his best position and he has been a revelation in the No 10 role – five goals and five assists including scoring the opener against Leicester six minutes after coming on.

There’s been a shift in intensity on the pitch, too. Norwich press higher and harder under Clement. They move the ball forwards quicker and hit teams on the counter instead of passing for the sake of passing.

Manning should, really, have been the safest appointment going: an experienced coach that had just taken Bristol City to the play-offs and a local lad. But he never connected with the fans. By the end things turned toxic beyond repair as supporters revolted against the players, manager and board.

Manning was, one source said, an ‘FA coaching manual’ sort of manager, giving the same dispassionate answers in every press conference, win, lose or draw. When you’re on a run as bad as Norwich’s, fans demand more than that.

Again, results help but Clement was fist-pumping Jurgen Klopp-style in front of the travelling fans at the King Power Stadium at the weekend, tricked into doing so alone by midfielder Kenny McLean.

While many of his predecessors would finish up their press conferences and make a swift exit, Clement often sticks around to chew the fat and share his many anecdotes.

He once spent 15 minutes talking about the time he left a late tackle on Zinedine Zidane while playing for Belgium, only to get one in return from Claude Makelele who warned him: ‘Don’t touch Zizou.’ The three of them went for lunch when Clement was at Bruges and all was forgiven.

Clement described how he recently went to play golf (he’s a 23-handicapper) and was unwittingly grouped with a pair of single figures, so spent the entire round apologising for his wayward ball striking.

One small irony: had Norwich sacked Manning earlier, when many were calling for him to go, they may never have landed Clement, who was still recovering from hip surgery in the summer.

His bruising spell at Rangers, where he was informed by journalists before the club that he’d been sacked after 16 months, left him seeking a more stable role.

Despite the quip to his wife, Clement was sold after conversations with Norwich’s new majority shareholder Mark Attanasio about their long-term plans. Attanasio owns the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, where he’s had great success using data to allow a team from the smallest media market in MLB to punch above their weight. He plans to do the same with Norwich, following in the mould of Brighton and Brentford.

Sporting director Ben Knapper, the former Arsenal loan manager, has expanded their analytics department to 14 data analysts. Attanasio is in the process of buying analytics company src:ftbl, founded by former Arsenal head of analytics Sarah Rudd. 

While Clement embraces the data revolution, club insiders say he feels more like an old-school manager, and he was the driving force in how the club dealt with the Josh Sargent saga.

The American, the club’s player of the season in 2024-25, sent his manager a text on the eve of Norwich’s FA Cup game against Walsall to tell him he was unavailable for selection as his mind was elsewhere, namely on a move to Toronto, who were interested in him but yet to meet Norwich’s valuation. The day after the game, Clement informed Sargent he was to train with the Under 21s, where one of the club’s top earners stayed until his move to Toronto was confirmed last week.

The easy decision would have been to sell him as soon as it became clear Sargent wanted to leave. That’s what Norwich would have to have done under the previous self-funded ownership of Delia Smith and Michael Wynn-Jones to keep the books balanced.

But Clement told staff this was a big moment for the club. How they dealt with it would send a message to the fans, squad, prospective signings and any other club who might want to unsettle their players.

It worked. Toronto ended up paying Norwich’s asking price of £17million, rising to more than £20m, after the Canaries had already snapped up his replacement – Mohamed Toure from Danish club Randers – while Sargent languished with the kids. Toure has five goals in his first five games in East Anglia.

Clement’s impact is remarkable. ‘It felt like we were a million miles away from it ever changing,’ one insider told Daily Mail Sport. ‘The hole was getting deeper and deeper and you struggled to see a way out. It’s crazy how one man can have such an impact and change the whole feeling around the place.’

It is fitting, then, that this weekend sees Clement take on Leeds, managed by the last man to lead Norwich to the Premier League in Farke. As local paper The Pink Un put it: Norwich’s new love meets its old flame.

A member of the backroom staff also remarked recently that watching Clement turn Norwich around so quickly reminded him of Paul Lambert. Former boss Lambert hauled Norwich from the lower reaches of League One to the Premier League with back-to-back promotions with a group of players more than the sum of their parts.

There is now genuine belief that Clement can do the same.