‘I told my son the fans may say bad things about me. ‘They do already’ he said!’

Steve Cooper is gazing out from his apartment on Swansea marina, savouring the view of Dylan Thomas’s “ugly, lovely town” and telling a story that explains just how mentally draining football management can be.

“I’m out by six most mornings for a run,” he says. “It’s the best run ever. Sometimes, you think, ‘What am I doing?’ but as soon as you get to that lighthouse, you think, ‘I’m alright’. Then you come back and you’re sweating, so I get a water and a coffee and if it’s not too cold, I’ll sit out here.”

Cooper, who had never managed at senior level before he took over as Swansea head coach 15 months ago, pushes open a door and steps outside. “I’m overlooking the balcony on this morning and I’ve gone, ‘It’s a fucking massive day’ and then I just looked out there and thought, ‘That is who we’re representing today’.”

Turning away from the sand and sea stretching out in front of us, Cooper is looking up to the rows and rows of tightly-packed terraced houses that watch over the Welsh city, its bay and the docks. He’ll often glance up there and think about the Swansea supporters who live in those streets. There’s a huge sense of pride that he’s managing their club but a weight of responsibility, too. All the more so on this occasion.

The match that Cooper is talking about was against Cardiff City, Swansea’s bitter rivals, last October. “It’s a massive game. Hyped up. In some ways probably too much. But it’s so important for them,” Cooper says, nodding in the direction of those houses. “You’ve just got this feeling in your stomach that you want to do well. It’s like a knot.”

By 2pm that day, it was all over. Swansea won 1-0, the Liberty Stadium was bouncing, and Cooper remembers how that knot in his stomach disappeared almost as soon as the final whistle sounded. On the outside, he was smiling and clenching his fists. On the inside, he was exhausted and craving solitude.

Swansea lead!

Summer signing Ben Wilmot flicks the hosts ahead in the South Wales derby

📺 Watch now live on Sky Sports Football pic.twitter.com/KNgKHlDcVK

— Sky Sports Football (@SkyFootball) October 27, 2019

“Everyone was at the stadium and wanted to hang about, but I just wanted to go,” Cooper says. “I said hello to my family, did what I needed to do after the game, came home, shut the blinds and sat on there.”

He points to the sofa, shakes his head and smiles.

“I fell asleep. I was fucked.”

Cooper loves his job.

Aged 40, he worked almost half his life for this opportunity, going all the way back to the days when he was taking training at Wrexham’s school of excellence in between washing the kits, marking out the pitches and driving the minibus. Cooper never made it as a professional footballer but Wrexham saw his potential as a coach. “I’ve done thousands of games, thousands of sessions, and that’s why I believe that coaching is a profession, an art, a craft,” he says.

“I still feel like I’ve got so much to learn and to understand. We were doing a session yesterday and Marshy (Mike Marsh, his assistant) made a point and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, why didn’t I know that?’, and I probably do the same to him. You’re learning all the time.”

The clues are there that football consumes Cooper. For a start, there’s a large tactics board propped up against a wall in the sitting room. “I think if I’m going to be away from my family, I’m not here to socialise, I’m just here to work,” says Cooper, whose wife and two children still live in Wrexham, at the other end of the country. “I bring my laptop home. I can link that up to the TV and I’ll watch games or training.”

The Welshman radiates positivity but it hasn’t been an easy last week or so. His captain, Matt Grimes, has been linked with a move to Watford, Newport knocked Swansea out of the Carabao Cup on Saturday and, arguably most significantly of all, Trevor Birch has departed as chairman. Birch, who has taken on a role at Tottenham Hotspur as their director of football operations, was instrumental in Cooper’s appointment last year.

“For me to get a job like this, one of the hardest parts was getting somebody to listen,” Cooper says. “Somebody who was willing to sit in an office and say, ‘Who’s this guy? He’s only ever worked with kids. OK, I’ll do somebody a favour by listening to him’. He gave me the time of the day. I presented some stuff and he bought into it.

“So him, Leon (Britton, Swansea’s then-sporting director) and Curt (Alan Curtis, the honorary club president) backed me with a decision and, probably more importantly, supported me and the coaching staff through thick and thin of last season, because it wasn’t all hunky-dory.

“OK, we got somewhere in the end but there was never once where I felt worried, threatened or anxious about what Trevor was thinking. He never interfered with the work. But he saw it. And he understood what we were doing.”

Cooper had been working for the English FA prior to taking over at Swansea. His crowning glory was the Under-17 World Cup that he won with England three years ago, when he was in charge of the team that thrashed Spain 5-2 in the final.

“My time was up at the FA. I knew that,” he says. “We did the pinnacle. And we didn’t just win a World Cup — we did it in a completely different way to how an England team has played before on the biggest stage.”

Cooper gets up to make another coffee. “I learned so much at the FA,” he adds. “It was a great experience and it definitely made me a better coach, but it was time to try and get back in (to club football). And I would have gone in… I remember going to (fourth tier) Crawley with Swansea in pre-season and thinking, ‘I would have come here’. I would have looked forward to going somewhere like that and getting an opportunity.”

Although Cooper was vastly experienced as a coach at youth level, having spent five years at Liverpool’s academy in between his spells with Wrexham and the FA, he knew that some people would frown on the fact he hadn’t worked with senior players.

That didn’t discourage Birch, though. Cooper came across so well in his first interview that he got a call from his agent as he walked back to the train station to say Birch wanted to meet him again later the same day. That second interview, which Britton and Curtis attended too, went on for the best part of three hours. Cooper ended up missing the last train home, booking an overnight stay at a hotel in London and cancelling a speed-awareness course the following morning.

“I thought, ‘I’d better get this job because it’s cost me a few quid today’,” he says, laughing.

Cooper chats with Birch, the chairman who appointed him but has now left for Spurs, last season (Photo: Athena Pictures/Getty Images)

Leaving aside his lack of managerial experience, Cooper ticked a lot of boxes.

He had a way of playing that was aligned with Swansea’s philosophy, could explain in detail how he planned to coach that style of football, and came across as incredibly hungry and driven. On top of that, Cooper brought a contacts book which had the potential to open doors when it came to attracting some of English football’s brightest young talents.

In fact, there are times over the last year when it has felt as though Cooper has been trying to get that England Under-17 band from 2017 back together. When Morgan Gibbs-White joined Swansea on a season-long loan from Wolverhampton Wanderers in August, he became the fourth member of that England squad to play for the Welsh club under Cooper, following in the footsteps of Liverpool’s Rhian Brewster, and Chelsea duo Conor Gallagher and Marc Guehi.

It has now reached a stage where clubs are contacting Swansea about placing players on loan there, rather than the other way around, because of Cooper’s reputation for improving youngsters.

“There are loads of important factors to youth development and the last stage is players being given that opportunity — playing first-team football, in front of crowds and playing for points,” Cooper says. “You’ve got to deal with the emotions of winning, the emotions of losing, poor form, good form, individual form. Mistakes. Highs. And players can only learn that through doing it.”

To illustrate his point, Cooper tells a story about Ben Cabango, Swansea’s 20-year-old central defender who broke through at club level last season and won his first senior cap for Wales in their away win over Finland on Thursday night.

“Players need to play but they know that we will play them in a certain way and stick with them,” Cooper explains. “So with Cabango last season, he was doing brilliant for us and then there were a couple of games where he felt at fault. But there was no way I was bringing him out of the team, because I knew that those things that he thought were mistakes were brilliant for him.

“The (Aleksandar) Mitrovic goal (in the 94th minute at Fulham), the Blackburn deflection (in the 95th minute three days later), it’s painful at the time and he’s dealing with it all. But I know that these are the bits that get you to the next level. It’s easy to go, ‘He’s lost Mitrovic, pull him out, he’s made a mistake’. No. For me, you’ve got to stick with him.”

“I didn’t come into this as an inexperienced coach,” says Cooper, thinking about all those training sessions he has put on over the years. “I probably came into it more experienced than most, but the context is different. The landscape is different. The scrutiny is different. People have got an opinion of me now. So that’s the difference, dealing with that.”

In a way, it is more a case of the impact that something like that has on a manager’s family, especially with children at secondary school age. “I had to have a grown-up conversation with them at the start of it — not my wife, my kids. Just to say that life might change a little bit in terms of social media and stuff like that. I don’t go on there, but I know it exists in their life.

“But the impact, in the end, has been positive because my son, Alex, puts on a Swansea shirt and sits in the away ends with his mates. He’s 12 and he knows all the songs. I said to him once, and this was for the first away game that he wanted to go to, ‘Yeah, you can go, mate. And I love the fact that you want to go, but you do know that if we lose games, there might be people saying not good things about Dad?’ And he said, ‘Well, they do anyway!’”

Cooper breaks into laughter again as he finishes that story.

I point out that in some respects, Alex is going through a similar experience to what Cooper did as a child, bearing in mind that Keith, his father, was one of the top referees in English football during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Cooper’s dad Keith sends off Coventry’s Gary Gillespie in the Premier League in 1994 (Photo: Graham Chadwick/ALLSPORT via Getty Images)

“One hundred per cent,” says Cooper, nodding. “When dad was reffing, it was when the Sky boom happened, so that’s when Monday night and Sunday afternoon football started. He would ref Liverpool and Man United, and they would have a lot of supporters’ groups in south Wales. The scrutiny of top-flight football went through the roof, so often I’d get a bit of stick.

“It was never really nasty. But it’s still about your dad, isn’t it?”

Even now, six weeks on, it is still hard for Cooper to get his head around all the twists and turns.

“I don’t think it will ever happen again. Do you? Twenty minutes to go and you need a five-goal swing to get into the play-offs. It was nuts.”

Cooper is recalling that dramatic final night of the Championship regular season, when Swansea won 4-1 at Reading to grab a place in the play-offs at the expense of Nottingham Forest, who lost at home to Stoke City by the same scoreline.

There is a photo that was taken afterwards inside a makeshift away dressing room at Reading that shows all the Swansea staff and players with their arms around one another in a big circle.

📸 One big team! 😍 pic.twitter.com/QaXZ2VXy3r

— Swansea City AFC (@SwansOfficial) July 22, 2020

“What I love about that picture is that our kitman, Mike Eames, who is Swansea through and through, and Chris, the chef — it means everything to him, too — they’re in that,” Cooper says. “And the other thing was — and it still is the case — life was shit at that moment. The pandemic was going on, supporters couldn’t come, there were people probably sat in their house who’d lost their jobs, lost loved ones. And if we’ve given them a night to have a bevvy, or to be proud to be a Swansea fan, then it means a lot.”

Not that Cooper sees any value in dwelling on that memory for any length of time now.

While it was quite an achievement to take a team that spent next to nothing on new players and lost £35 million of talent (Daniel James and Oli McBurnie were sold to Manchester United and Sheffield United respectively) to a top six finish in his first season in management, Cooper isn’t satisfied with getting to the play-offs and losing.

“We didn’t win (after beating Brentford 1-0 in the first leg, they lost 3-1 at Griffin Park). I was proud of the players and proud of our work. But if our mentality at the club is to settle for second-best, that ain’t good enough. I think that is our challenge a little bit. I’m saying to the players, ‘Lads, last year doesn’t sit on the wall at the Liberty with the promotions and the (2012-13) League Cup. Don’t be fucking settling for that’.”

As well as making signings — and Swansea have been busy on that front — Cooper is constantly trying to find ways to improve their players individually and collectively. For example, his close relationship with Gareth Southgate enabled him to set up a Zoom call between the England manager and Grimes, his captain, to talk for several hours about leadership.

On the training ground, it is about the detail, not just a playing philosophy. The season before Cooper took over, Swansea conceded a staggering 24 goals from set pieces (that excludes penalties). Last season, that figure came down to eight — the fewest in the Championship.

“That’s Marge’s work,” says Cooper, referring to Martyn Margetson, the Swansea and England goalkeeping coach. “He does the same with England — they didn’t concede a goal from a set piece in qualification for Russia (the 2018 World Cup) — but our challenge now is to better last season. We’ve been doing set pieces every single day since we’ve come back. I can see some of the new boys going, ‘Set pieces again…’ but it’s only an add-on to training.”

We’ve been talking for more than an hour and Cooper needs to get off to work. He doesn’t do many wider interviews like this, which is a shame, because he’s an engaging character.

Seven years ago, I watched him deliver a superb presentation on a UEFA A-licence course in front of Patrick Vieira and Sol Campbell, among others.

He talked about the 4-3-3 formation: specifically how to build, create and finish attacks in that system by creating diamonds all over the pitch and establishing movement patterns. It was fascinating, but I had to twist Cooper’s arm to get him to allow me to mention him in a piece that I was writing.

He smiles when I remind him of that episode. “I had loads of media requests last year but I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. I sometimes see… and I’m not criticising it whatsoever, because everybody has a way, but I don’t want to be that manager that takes every opportunity to be on Sky Sports or to do every article that he’s asked for.

“It’s just not something that sits easy with me. I get this feeling that you put yourself out there and then you lose the next game. And I’ll be sitting there thinking, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have done that. Who do you think you are?’”

Actually, that is a good question for Cooper to answer now that he has a season of Championship football under his belt.

“I’m not sitting here talking to you, thinking I am a football manager,” he says. “I’m sat here thinking, ‘I’m only a year in’. I still think I’m in the infancy. And I’d like to be clear on that.”