Brian Clough had retired seven years earlier, yet his influence remained embedded in the game. The Nottingham Forest manager had been charismatic, funny, cutting and occasionally explosive, but also possessed an extraordinary ability to make players better. His methods were often built around short interventions rather than endless instruction, leaving players to think for themselves.
For McVeigh, that philosophy can be traced through Martin O'Neill to Paul Lambert.
O'Neill played under Clough at Forest and later became a highly successful manager himself. Lambert, meanwhile, played under O'Neill at Celtic before taking up management.
“Paul Lambert was very much influenced by Martin O'Neill, who was influenced by Brian Clough,” McVeigh tells Football Presse. “Martin O'Neill played under Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest and then went into management himself. Paul Lambert was influenced by Martin O'Neill, and you could see that in the way that Paul managed.”
What interested McVeigh was not the imitation of a personality. It was the underlying method.
Clough's public image was of the autocrat who could reduce a player to rubble with a sentence, but his players also remember a manager who knew when to say almost nothing. Martin O'Neill has described Clough's coaching as something that could happen in short bursts, with small points that stayed with players for years.
That was the element McVeigh recognised when Lambert walked into Norwich's dressing room in 2009.
Norwich had just sacked Bryan Gunn after a disastrous start to the Championship season and were sitting in the bottom three. Lambert, the former Celtic captain, had been appointed with the club in trouble.
His first dressing-room intervention lasted barely half a minute.
“He walked into the dressing room and he didn't say anything for about 30 or 40 seconds. He just looked around the room, looking at everybody. And then he said, in his strong Glaswegian accent, ‘What are you doing at the bottom of the table with the quality within this room? We're gonna win this league.’
“And he just walked out.”
The important part came afterwards.
Lambert did not spend his time trying to convince Norwich's players that he was a great manager. He established standards and expected the players to meet them.
McVeigh remembers one training session when he was not starting regularly and went for a run around the training ground wearing headphones.
Lambert spotted him.
“What are you doing with those headphones?”
McVeigh explained that he was running.
“And he said, ‘What do you think this is, holiday park? Fifty quid on my desk before training.’”
The fine was almost incidental. Lambert was making a point about the environment he wanted to create.
“If you're not going to wear headphones on a matchday, why would you wear headphones when you're training?” McVeigh says. “It was about the standards that he set, and the standards that he expected from everybody.”
McVeigh started Lambert's first 10 matches before losing his place. Norwich then went more than 30 games unbeaten, won the Championship and followed it with promotion to the Premier League.
Lambert had inherited a team in the bottom three and transformed its expectations.
For McVeigh, that makes what happened to Lambert afterwards all the more surprising.
“I was surprised that Paul didn't go on to achieve more because I think he had all the qualities to be one of the best coaches in football,” he says.
“He had the ability to stand back, not say too much, to let the players work things out, but at the same time he had incredibly high standards. I think he had all those qualities that you need to be a really, really good coach.”
Lambert's own view of management was remarkably consistent with that philosophy. After Norwich's promotion, he spoke of the influence of O'Neill and the importance of getting players to run for him rather than drowning them in instruction.
But McVeigh's study of leadership has also changed how he views Clough.
He is critical of parts of Clough's approach in his book, *It's Not About You: The Psychology of Leadership*. That does not diminish what Clough achieved. Instead, McVeigh believes leadership has to be judged against its environment.
The football culture of Clough's era was different. The language was different. The relationship between managers and players was different. A manager could operate with a degree of authority and confrontation that would be far harder to reproduce in the modern dressing room.
“The way that Brian Clough managed was very much a product of his time,” McVeigh says. “I think if you took some of those things and tried to do them in 2025, it probably wouldn't work in the same way.”
That is where McVeigh's idea of perspective becomes important.
“Perspective fuels performance,” he says. Great leadership, in his view, is not about finding one perfect formula and applying it forever. It is about understanding the people, the culture and the circumstances around you, then adapting.
Clough's great skill was knowing how to make his players believe they could achieve more than anyone expected. O'Neill absorbed that lesson, but filtered it through his own personality. Lambert did the same again.
That may be the real Clough legacy.
Not the famous put-downs. Not the swagger. Not the manager standing above his players.
It was the understanding that leadership could be powerful without becoming constant.
Establish the standards. Give players belief. Make them responsible for meeting the standards.
Then get out of the way.
That was Clough's gift. O'Neill learned it. Lambert carried part of it into Norwich.
The personalities changed, but the principle survived.