Richie Wellens is aiming to bring Leyton Orient to the Championship on Sunday having learnt up close from Sir Alex Ferguson when a young player at Manchester United
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Richie Wellens celebrates after Leyton Orient defeated Stockport in the play-off semi-final.
Richie Wellens celebrates after Leyton Orient defeated Stockport in the play-off semi-final.
Twenty five years have passed but Richie Wellens still wakes up regretful about the opportunity not seized.
By his own estimation Leyton Orient’s manager had all the ability to be a fixture at Manchester United during the peak of Sir Alex Ferguson ’s reign. “I was talented enough,” he says. “But I just didn’t dedicate myself.”
Rather than linger on his failure to “max out”, though, Wellens has channelled his disappointment into ensuring the young players he is developing in East London do not fall into the same trap.
It is certainly working. If he can seal promotion to the Championship in Sunday’s play-off with Charlton, the rest of English football will have their eyes opened wide to one of the country’s most impressive homegrown managers.
Wellens arrived at Brisbane Road in March 2022 with Orient staring a return to non-League in the face. They are now one win away from their first season in the second tier since 1982 and a club that has long felt it does not deserve nice things has flipped the narrative.
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“A bit like Tottenham,” Wellens says, with a sigh that reflects the hurt at seeing how far his boyhood club have slipped.
But his experience at United, featuring in underage teams alongside Wes Brown and John O’Shea before making a solitary first-team appearance, served as the foundation to his management.
Seeing the intensity of Roy Keane in training, learning from the methods and manipulations of Ferguson instilled a winning mentality.
“What I saw was a manager whose will to win filtered down no matter what it takes,” he says. “The late goals were unbelievable. People called it Fergie Time but it was a pure belief that we were going to win.
“If you wanted to play football, he’d out-football you. If you wanted to fight and scrap against him, he’d have a fighter. The mentality they had. Football ’s a bit different now, back then they could kick you, but they left an imprint on me.”
Still, he is more than aware how much has changed since those infamous days when young players at the training ground would be locked into tumble dryers and skips. “It was brutal but back then it was the norm. Would I have changed it? Not at all, not a little bit.”
Richie Wellens celebrates after Leyton Orient defeated Stockport in the play-off semi-final.
Richie Wellens celebrates with Leyton Orient fans.
That his own sons - Charlie, recently released by Reading, and Alfie, at Orient - are charting their own paths informs his thinking further. “Would I like to seem treated how I was when I was 16 or 17? No,” Wellens admits.
“But it put me in a position where I could play for 20-odd years and now I can be a manager and no matter what anybody throws at me it doesn’t affect me because I’m quite strong-minded and resilient. Maybe I built that up over a period of time.”
When he took his first job in management - at Oldham in 2017 - Wellens was afraid to call Ferguson up for advice. But when he guided Salford City to the EFL Trophy in 2021, a congratulatory text arrived.
Is he hoping for another one on Sunday afternoon? "It'd be nice," he says. "He's the best Britain has ever produced."
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