The football manager working at an airport: ‘Why? Because you can learn from anything'

New York Times

a day ago

It was Luke Williams' fourth day of working at Bristol Airport as a customer care assistant when his cover was blown for the first time.
'I was at the gate for an EasyJet flight, waiting to take a passenger onto the bus to take them out to the aircraft, and of course we make sure that those passengers have priority because it can be difficult getting them on and off,' Williams explains.
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'Three really nice young guys were standing just behind me and one of them came forward and showed me his phone, and it was a picture of myself. He said: 'Excuse me. Do you ever get told that you look like this guy?'.
'First of all, I don't want to lie because it's not the right thing to do. Secondly, I have a lanyard with my name on it, so I said: 'Well, I do get told that I look like that guy quite a lot. Because that guy is me'.'
It is hard to suppress a smile as Williams tells that story, which finishes with him explaining how a colleague had been standing nearby and misheard the word 'Swindon' (one of his former clubs and the team that the passenger who showed him the picture followed), prompting her to later ask him if he was a former swimmer.
'I said: 'No, I wasn't a swimmer. I used to manage the football team that one of the guys supports'.'
Williams delivered that answer in an unassuming, matter-of-fact way, and it was met with the sort of low-key response that suited him perfectly. 'She said: 'Oh. OK'.'
For the next week or so, he carried on as normal, walking from his home in South Wales to just outside The Riverfront Theatre in Newport to catch the 04:45 National Express bus to Bristol Airport for his nine-hour shifts that start at 6am.
Williams passed the time on the bus with a book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, which he says that he would have felt guilty 'putting his feet up' to read at home (you get the impression that Williams doesn't like sitting still), and then diligently went about his duties at work, which involve helping passengers with limited mobility to get around the airport.
All the while, the vast majority of people (staff included) were oblivious to the fact that the friendly face walking around in a high-vis jacket and steel toe-cap boots had been the manager of a Championship football club — Swansea City, who play in English football's second tier — up until the middle of February.
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Last weekend, though, everything changed. A picture of Williams working at the airport was posted on the social media platform X and it went viral: 1.8 million views at the last time of looking. It was picked up by a number of media organisations, including The Athletic.
Some people were critical of the reporting around Williams working at Bristol Airport and didn't understand why it was considered newsworthy. Phrases such as 'job-shaming' were also mentioned, which couldn't have been further from the truth and totally missed the point.
Luke Williams gone from managing the swans to working in Bristol airport, someone check VAR pic.twitter.com/lnCUcNPYqA
— Matthias Kenealy (@MEK230402) June 21, 2025
Williams is still being paid in full by Swansea following his sacking and, under the terms of what is a standard severance package in the Championship, will continue to be for some time yet. The salary for someone who has been managing at Williams' level puts him comfortably in the top one per cent of earners in the United Kingdom, which means that, on the face of it, there is no financial requirement or motivation for him to work right now. On top of that, he has no desire to pursue a new career — Williams wants to return to football management at the earliest opportunity. He loves coaching.
And yet here he is getting up at the crack of dawn to do shifts at a workplace that is more than an hour from his home, in an industry that is totally alien to him, for a wage that is not going to make any material difference to his quality of life, and in a public-facing job that would be way outside the comfort zone of most of his peers.
'You've got balls of steel,' read a message that Williams received from another out-of-work manager this week.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine another manager operating at Championship level or above — maybe even in the English Football League full stop — doing something similar.
Williams smiles. 'I've come to learn that, from what people have said, if they tried to put themselves in my shoes, they would find it uncomfortable. But I don't have that sensation,' he says.
'It feels very natural to find something to do and to go and work and make a positive impact. I've got two sons. They're five and six, and in the blink of an eye, they're going to be 15 and 16. The things that are happening around them, they're absorbing. It's very important for me to show them to always have a routine and an objective for the day. If you're of working age and you're capable, and you're fortunate to have your health, go and work and contribute. So that's what I'm doing.
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'It's not the type of job that is a career for me. I already have a career and I've got no intention of changing that. Why would I? I've already been successful in my own industry. I've reached a very high level and I'm going to continue, so I want to use this time for personal development, and I thought it's better for me to do it in a way where I'm actually contributing rather than just observing.'
Typically, anyone in Williams' position would take a break from football to recharge their batteries, go through a period of self-reflection about their last job, and then spend some time visiting various football clubs and talking to coaches before returning to the dugout.
Occasionally, managers have strayed from that script. Ian Holloway painted portraits, Tony Pulis studied Napoleon and Thomas Tuchel befriended an 80-year-old swimmer who encouraged him to visit art galleries. There will be other examples, too.
But filling out an application form for a job at an airport, sitting through a one-hour interview on Zoom, attending training days to learn how to deal with different scenarios with passengers at an airport — that's highly unusual for a manager to choose to do that.
Does Williams understand that?
'I do. Of course I do,' he replies. 'But you can learn a lot from anything that you do. It doesn't have to be in football. It doesn't have to be in sport.
'Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and doing something completely different, meeting new people, listening to what they say and listening to their gripes.
'I'm working with a lot of people at the moment who have line managers and it's really interesting to hear the things that they find difficult about how they're being managed.
'I'm doing an honest day's work. I'm not asking if I can just come in and sit there and observe — I'm making sure that I do every single task that all my colleagues are doing, but, at the same time, I'm getting to listen to how people prefer to be managed. What is it, in their opinion, that makes a good manager? Then I'm lucky enough to sit sometimes with people in management roles. What is it that they look for in a good employee?'
Williams answers that question by going on to talk about Sergio, an experienced member of staff at the airport who supports Napoli, the Serie A champions, and who had no inclination whatsoever that the new employee that he went out of his way to take under his wing on day one was actually a football manager.
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'Spread energy, be smart — this is why I'm really fond of my new friend Sergio,' Williams adds. 'Find a way to make the passenger experience positive, and then they give him positivity back. They love him. Then, if you go and talk to management: 'Ahhh, Sergio's the best'.
'If this guy was playing for my football team, somehow he finds himself in the team week in and week out because he has positivity. He looks at things as an opportunity, not as a threat. He's there, he's reliable.'
Generous with his time and candid with his thoughts, Williams is fantastic company, so much so that we end up talking for another hour after the tape recorder is turned off. Aged 44, he has a colourful, chaotic and complex backstory, which is uplifting at times but sad in places too.
'I couldn't read or write particularly well when I left school,' he says. 'I got no A-Cs in any subjects at all. No qualifications whatsoever. I just found school really challenging.
'I've not done a single piece of homework, ever. When I was a scholar at Bristol Rovers, I went to St Brendan's Sixth Form College in Brislington, in Bristol, to do a leisure and tourism course. At the end of the year, the teacher asked us to come up and look through the folders to see if there were any units missing. Every single unit was missing in my folder because I couldn't understand anything that was being taught.'
Williams' playing career was brief, ruined by repeated knee surgery and not helped by a night out in Edmonton, north London, when he was struck on the head and stabbed with a champagne flute as a teenager. A few years later, he suffered a fractured skull and a broken hip in a car crash.
Coaching provided a second career but not a particularly lucrative one in the early days. There was always a bag of balls in the boot of his car but often single figures in his bank account. Williams did anything and everything to make ends meet, including loading lorries on an industrial estate for the retailer British Home Stores and driving minibuses to pick up party-goers from nightclubs.
Over time, he worked his way up the coaching ladder, taking jobs at Brighton & Hove Albion, Swindon Town, Bristol City, MK Dons, Notts County, where he led the club back into the Football League playing a brand of expansive and entertaining football, and, most recently, Swansea. At the turn of the year, Swansea were ninth and four points off the play-offs. Seven weeks and as many league defeats later, Williams was out of a job — a brutal reminder of how quickly things can change in football.
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It's clear that Williams has grafted to get this far — he has more than enough stories about his early coaching days to write a book — and he has no intention of letting all that hard work go to waste. 'As soon as possible,' he replies when asked when he plans to return to football management.
Financially, he still takes nothing for granted and refuses to move away from the core values that were ingrained in him in his younger days. When Swansea sacked him, Williams got rid of his car because it was a luxury that he thought he could do without.
'I had a medical yesterday with the League Managers' Association in London,' he says. 'From Newport, you can get the train or you can get the bus, and one is significantly cheaper than the other, so you know which one I took.'
More than anything, Williams looks and sounds comfortable in his own skin, which isn't always the case with football managers.
One of the things that really strikes you when reading up on this subject is how often people in football talk about losing their identity when they are between jobs. 'Football is all I've ever known' is a well-repeated phrase, almost as if they have no concept of life outside of the sport and feel a sense of trepidation about embracing that world. Clearly, that's not been the case with Williams.
'No, that's really important,' he says. 'It's something that makes me sad that so many people in the industry feel extremely vulnerable and feel like their identity as a human being is that they're a football manager or a football player or football coach.
'I've proven myself to be a competent football coach and a football manager, but I have an identity as a person and what this has done — which was not the aim in the slightest — has highlighted my personality. I would prefer my identity to be shaped and defined by the way I apply myself rather than the industry that I work in.'
How much longer Williams will continue in employment at the airport is unclear. When he reported for his shift last Sunday morning, following the social media storm 24 hours before, it felt different — and different in a way that concerned him.
'Particularly the department I'm working in, there are many vulnerable passengers and the airport can be a chaotic place for them, and they need to be made the priority, and it should never be about me,' he says.
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'I don't want to be sidetracked from the job or bring undue attention to the job, so I need to question what's right for everybody: my colleagues and, most importantly, for the passengers.'
Williams shrugs when it's put to him that it's a shame to hear that.
'It's a shame in some ways. In other ways, it's not a shame,' he says. 'I've really enjoyed it and I feel like I contributed to the group of CCAs — the customer care assistants — that I've worked with. I've learned a lot.'
As we finish the interview, Williams turns his phone over and there is a message from one of his former players about working at the airport. Williams smiles, prompting me to ask him if I can read it.
'What a f***ing legend you are, by the way. Seen that picture going around, that is class. No sitting on your backside. Just getting out and getting it done. No ego — like you always say.'