Marc Skinner: Orlando Pride manager battling to inspire World Cup stars to NWSL success

His chances of an instant impact in Orlando were limited by the World Cup – losing key members of his squad to this summer’s tournament in France.

But even if that had not been the case, Skinner believes his way of working would have taken time to bear fruit.

“I came to a club where nine players were going to disappear for 10 games,” says the 36-year-old. “They’re your starting players. Then you have a bunch of players on the side who’ve never really experienced the game at this level so they’re going to make mistakes.

“You don’t have to beat around the bush – where we are now, how many games we’ve won – it’s not good enough. I’m not going to shirk that and I’m not going to get tetchy about it. I’ve said that from the off.

“What they’ve done is be patient and grow together. We’ve improved the foundations and then everyone else has come back in. We’re tearing it down to the ground and we’re building it right back up. I’ve got a lot of building still to do here. It’s taken time and it will take time.”

Central to that building process is implementing his own philosophy.

“I don’t see the game how everyone else sees the game, especially in England. It’s a lot of boys’ brigade stuff – this is how we do coaching. What I wanted to do was invest time in the people on the field,” he says.

“I’m very people-first. In college I was tasked with dealing with the kids who didn’t have stable backgrounds and were a little bit rogue, for want of a better word. But they were the best characters.

“They were live and they were real. You can never really plan for that because you knew you were going to be challenged every day. I loved the unpredictability of that and I took it into my coaching. I allowed for spontaneity. I allowed room for, not just planning, but the action that the person gives you, which is sometimes unpredictable.

“On the field, I see a system as a defensive strategy. If we want to defend then we’ll go into a 4-5-1 or whatever but when we attack what I see is fluidity and rotation.

“It’s always been my thinking that you control the space. There’s so much more space on the pitch than there are players so we do a lot of technical work and a lot of space-finding and decision-making work. I do very little pattern work.

“That’s why my teams always struggle more at first than they should potentially, if you were to just not ask them to think. But then once they think they start to dominate teams. We’re going through an evolution here like we did at Birmingham.”