Ryan Manning: The 10-year wait for a Premier League chance

It had been a long road for the Irishman. This was an itch he needed to scratch. He’d been a Premier League player before, a decade ago, but never played in the competition. Maybe at the time he never realised the blood, sweat and tears that would go into finally making that happen.

Manning’s first move to England took him to QPR, then managed by ex-Saints boss Harry Redknapp, in January 2015. It was quite a jump from the League of Ireland First Division, where he’d just won promotion with Galway United.

He was only 18 at the time and “not really around the first team”, but Manning was just excited to be involved in those first few weeks, even if those ahead of him were struggling to put points on the board. QPR were relegated before the teenager made his debut.

And so Manning’s Championship crusade began. He tried and tried and tried for nine seasons, but the closest he came to achieving his dream reunion with the Premier League was a play-off final defeat to Brentford at an eerily empty Wembley in 2021 when playing for Swansea, then managed by Steve Cooper.

That was until another reunion with another of his former Swansea bosses, Russell Martin, brought him to St Mary’s in the summer of 2023. Manning was Martin’s first signing.

Martin often speaks about the “culture” of the team, and the club he manages, which was uppermost in his mind at the time of inheriting a “fractured” Southampton dressing room post-relegation.

Manning, as well as being the Championship’s most productive full-back in 2022/23 with five goals and 10 assists, brought with him a vibrant personality, infectious enthusiasm and a cheeky grin that rarely leaves his side. The first building block of Martin’s cultural reset was in place.

Flynn Downes, a former Swansea teammate of Manning who soon followed him through the door, fitted the same criteria as a trusted lieutenant of the manager and perfect off-field fit. The mood lifted.

A mainstay for most of the season, Manning featured in 38 of Saints’ regular season fixtures and all three of the play-off games. His late cameo as a substitute at Wembley, helping the team get over the line against Leeds, was his 264th appearance in English football. The only thing he could possibly cherish more would be No 265: playing in the Premier League.

But it seems to happen a lot in professional sport; after the rise comes the fall. Manning, fiercely motivated, worked hard through pre-season as the competition around him intensified.

Manning celebrates promotion with fellow ex-Swan Downes

Charlie Taylor, a left-back with six years’ experience in the Premier League, arrived in his position. Yukinari Sugawara also joined Saints’ full-back union, while Kyle Walker-Peters, so adept on both flanks, stayed, and Ryan Fraser, preferred to Manning as a wing-back in the play-off final, signed a permanent deal.

“That’s just football, regardless of what league you’re in,” Manning shrugs. “It’s one of those things that people outside of football sometimes ask about: ‘what it’s like?’ And the hardest part is turning up every pre-season and having to do it all again – earn your place in teams, earn your place in squads.

“Especially with the jump to the Premier League, it’s that much harder, and you can see that with the competition that we have. Obviously we’ve got quite a big squad.

“I was under no illusions that you were just going to walk in [to the team]. No one has a place in the team or in the squad on merit – you have to earn it every week by training and performing when you get the opportunity.”

The start of the season was a tough period for Manning

Saints started the season with Sugawara and Walker-Peters as their full-backs, while James Bree and Taylor played in the early rounds of the Carabao Cup. Manning, after 10 years of trying to get there, was watching Premier League football from the stands still stuck on 264.

It wasn’t easy, but he can smile about it now. In fact, he smiled about it then – that’s just who he is, and part of the reason Martin was so keen to bring Manning with him from Swansea in the first place.

“It was difficult,” he admits. “It was a challenge that probably hadn’t come up in my career where I’ve not been involved at all on a Saturday.

“It was Saturday three o’clock and I was watching on my phone or watching on TV – it was a bit strange.”

Much like his outward persona on a Monday morning, regardless of the result or his minutes at the weekend, Manning was looking on the bright side.

“With everything, when the challenge comes you have to embrace it, try and see the positives you can get out of it,” he says. “You have to use the time to get better, train harder and do things you wouldn’t usually be able to do because of the fixture list.

Always in good spirits: Manning meets fans at Saints' open training session in the summer

“It was difficult, but I probably built a lot of resilience through it. You look at adapting your game, looking at ways you can get better, both on the pitch and off the pitch.

“All round I think it makes you a better player, a better footballer for it, because you’ve had to adapt and add another string to your bow to try and be an asset that the manager wants to use.”

That resilience was tested. With the transfer window still open, Championship clubs circled, inevitably.

“There were opportunities, but I’d spent nearly 10 years trying to get back to the Premier League. Ten years trying to get back there,” he stresses, “so for me I wasn’t just going to walk away at the first hurdle that came my way.

“I was never going to walk away. I wanted to stand up to it, I always thought I was good enough, I always thought I could – if the opportunity came, I could grasp it.

“I had belief in myself that I could somehow worm my way back in!” he quipped. Manning never stays serious for long.

In action for the Under-21s against Norwich at Staplewood

But the situation was serious, professionally speaking. His mind clear on staying put, he knuckled down, even playing for the Under-21s to keep himself ticking over. He loved it.

“It was brilliant for me. You can easily become used to not playing games and just training, and get into that rut, but when the opportunity came to play I was happy to do it. It’s minutes in the tank and you keep that match fitness that you can’t really get from training.”

Ten days later, after being denied a first Premier League victory by a cruel late twist against Ipswich, Saints produced their worst performance of the season to lose 3-1 down the coast at Bournemouth.

Manning knows Martin better than most, knew the manager was unhappy and sensed – for the first time as the season ticked into its third month – his chance.

“The gaffer wasn’t happy with it,” he says of the Bournemouth game. “I suppose for people not playing and not involved there are opportunities that can come from that. I had a chat with him and he half gave me an idea of what he was thinking – I just egged him on!”

Manning gets the better of Arsenal star Bukayo Saka on his Premier League debut

That idea, ahead of a daunting trip to Arsenal, was to use Manning and Walker-Peters together to combat the Gunners’ right side – particularly the threat of the outstanding Bukayo Saka, the early frontrunner for the Premier League Playmaker award given to the player who contributes the most assists in a season.

Manning, playing his first minutes of the season, had his long-awaited Premier League debut, 265 games into his English football career.

“Chucked in at the deep end,” he grins, looking back, but insists he wasn’t nervous at the time, describing the experience as “freeing”.

“It was a long time coming, but funnily the couple of months that I was not involved probably helped, because I had nothing to lose.

“There was no pressure in my mind – I was just grateful to get the opportunity. The worst case was I was just going to go back to where I was, as bad as that might sound, but it was freeing. You can just go out there, enjoy the experience and try and grasp it.

“Obviously the result didn’t go our way, but for a couple of minutes we were 1-0 up away and the performance was better, and I think we took a lot from it.”

Whilst Saints lost the game 3-1, the same result as Bournemouth, the post-match feeling was very different. Saka, shackled for an hour, had the final say, but Manning did himself proud on a landmark afternoon.

“If we’re going to lose, there is a way to do that,” Martin remarked after the game, adding Manning “did a brilliant job for us”.

He’s stayed in the team ever since, assisting Cameron Archer’s opener against Leicester and restricting Manchester City’s star-studded attack to a solitary goal at “the hardest place to go and play in the world”, he reckons.

Manning's form has been rewarded with a recall to the Republic of Ireland squad, leaving the defender in line for a potential Wembley return against England on Sunday.

He should have had his first Premier League goal, too. It would have been his first for Saints, last time out against Wolves, in the eyes of seemingly everybody in football except the officials at Molineux that day.

“You have to have that self-belief that you can play at this level, that you do belong,” he says. “The belief is there, it’s just a little bit of luck. Momentum in football is massive and when we do get that first win, football’s funny – you gain momentum and all of a sudden things can change really quickly, so it’s just about keeping the belief within the squad.”

Manning hasn’t lost sight of the tough times in the Championship, pointing out that even Saints’ promotion campaign had its tricky periods – experiences this family unit that Martin created must call upon now more than ever.

“We had the four games that we lost at the beginning of last season and then we played Leeds in the early kick-off on TV,” he remembers.

“We won 3-1 and went 3-0 up early, and I think that was the resilience that we have within the group. This is another time that we need to show that resilience, especially at this moment in time with the results. I think we have that in abundance within the squad.”

This interview was first published inside SAINTS, the matchday programme, for the recent home game against Everton. Be sure to pick up your copy of the club publication at future home fixtures, each containing a feature interview with a current first-team player and a batch of stickers for the 2024/25 Saints sticker album.