A significant portion of Phil Neville’s first press conference as coach of the Portland Timbers was spent discussing issues that had little to do with how his team will put the ball in the back of the net.
Neville, 46, joins a Timbers organization in flux, and steps into the job facing down a fanbase still reeling from the scandals of the previous two years. His past sexist Tweets — for which he has apologized and further addressed Tuesday — led to the Timbers Army calling for the club to reconsider his hire.
The topic was front and center as Neville met the media at Providence Park.
“The big part of this city is the supporters, and the statement they put out showed that this club cares about their people,” Neville said. “In reference to the tweets I made in 2011, I addressed these in 2019 when I was named the head coach of the England women’s team. (They are) by no means a reflection of me as a person, of my character, and without a shadow of a doubt, the way I was brought up by my mother and father in terms of the values they instilled in me.
“The Tweets I put out were wrong in 2011, and they’re wrong today. I want to get to know the Timbers Army, I want to get to know everybody in the city, and I want them to get to know me as a person, as a character,” he said. “And I want to make sure there is an incredible trust between us.”
Neville said he will meet with the Timbers Army “straight away” and spoke at length about the importance the city and supporters’ group play in the club’s history and reputation. But there is no getting away from his Tweets, and the perception they create in the eyes of a Portland soccer community that is inherently skeptical of club leadership after previous failures.
Timbers general manager Ned Grabavoy sat beside Neville at the presser and defended the club’s decision to hire him.
“The decision was, do I rush to judge someone in their entirety based on a bad tweet? Or do we continue to go down the process, get to know that person better through conversations, speak to a lot of different people throughout the game at a lot of different levels,” Grabavoy said. “The most intriguing thing when we looked at Phil was how diverse his coaching background was. … The longer we went through the process, the more we got to know Phil, the more people we spoke to, it’s just not indicative of his character.”
Neville, for his part, seemed genuinely interested in engaging the community and weaving himself into the fabric of the city’s soccer culture. He remarked on how Portland reminded him of his hometown of Manchester, from the rain to the greenery to the passion for the sport.
On that subject, Neville noted the city’s unique support for the Portland Thorns, who sold out Sunday’s NWSL semifinal with 25,218 fans packed into a rain-soaked Providence Park. He compared it to Manchester United, who Neville said only draw around 3,000 fans for women’s games (note: the season average for Manchester United women in the 2022-23 season was just over 10,000).
And it is Neville’s experience as the coach of England’s women’s team from 2018 to 2021 that shaped his perspective, he said, and also proved essential to his growth as a person. Part of why, Neville said, his past social media activity is not a sign of poor character, but rather someone who had some growing to do.
“Learning about the obstacles and challenges that females have in their lives, not just in sport,” Neville said. “I was probably a little bit ignorant towards that until I worked in the women’s team. I won their trust, I developed as a person and developed as a coach more than I’ve ever done by coaching and being around those incredible, incredible athletes. If you want to speak to anybody in terms of a character reference, please speak to those people within the Lioness game. That experience changed my life, and it changed not just in terms of my coaching experience, but in terms of it developing me as a person, my character, my understanding.”
It will now be up to Neville to live up to those ideals, even as the club faces continued questions from supporters, who have their share of questions about what will happen on the pitch as well. Neville has yet to fully prove himself as a coach in MLS, and he urged fans to judge him on his performance in Portland now that — in his words — he stands on a level playing field with his compatriots across the league. Inter Miami faced massive roster sanctions from MLS right before Neville’s nearly three-year tenure there, and he was fired midway through 2023 with his team owning the worst record in the Eastern Conference.
Grabavoy added that the next few weeks and months will include several changes to Portland’s roster that the club believes will lead to better results on the field for a team that has missed the playoffs two straight years.
What both Neville and Grabavoy believe is working will stay the same, they said, including some names on the roster but also on the coaching staff. Miles Joseph, Liam Ridgewell and Guillermo “Memo” Valencia will all stay on as assistant coaches, Neville said, with possibly one more addition to what Neville described as the “best staff in MLS” — the final addition rumored to be Neville’s former Miami assistant Jason Kreis.
“We’ve got an exciting team,” Neville said. “We’re not far away, but we’ve also got a lot of work to do. Each team in this offseason will improve, will strengthen, will get better. We know we have to get better. But I see the foundations of this football club as really strong. We’ve got really, really exciting young players. There’s a couple of young players I wanted to sign in Miami that I’m really excited to get to work with. … We’re closer than what we’d think with the foundation already in place.”
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