Bradford City’s players were coming to terms with a bruising start to the week after news reached them that Graham Alexander had stepped down as manager. The decision was a sudden and unexpected blow for a club that sat top of League One and had begun to let imaginations run wild about a return to the second tier for the first time in 23 years.
Coaches Mark Trueman and Colin Doyle took interim charge and called a meeting with the squad on Monday. Trueman said some players were unsettled and did not know what was going on or who was taking the team, but he praised their response. “The players have just got on with business, and that’s the key,” he said. “It shows the mentality of the team. This could quite easily derail them, but they’ve continued to do the right things.”
Trueman is no stranger to stepping in. He has now done so temporarily five times since joining Bradford as an Under-18 coach six years ago. This occasion is different, though. Previously his task was to lift the team during low periods; now he must maintain the upward trajectory that began when Alexander arrived in 2023.
When Alexander took over, Bradford were stuck in the bottom tier of the EFL and sitting 16th. They finished ninth in his first season, then third in his second to earn automatic promotion, before a fourth-place finish back in League One ended with defeat in the play-off semi-finals last May. Bradford also twice reached the EFL Trophy semi-finals in successive seasons. At one stage they won 10 consecutive home games, breaking a club record set in 1953, and last year they had the best home record of any side in Europe’s top five leagues. Alexander won 79 of his 158 games in charge, the best win rate of any Bradford manager in charge for at least 65 matches.
Chief executive Ryan Sparks said Alexander and assistant manager Chris Lucketti, who has followed him to Preston, delivered “some of the most incredible moments in our recent history”. Bradford were still top of League One when the Preston opportunity came out of the blue. Alexander told the club he had ambitions to manage in the Championship, and ultimately the lure of a club in the tier above that he once captained — playing 400 games during an eight-year spell from 1999 to 2007 — in the city where his children were raised proved too strong.
Fans on forums and social media have shared a mixture of sadness, anger and anxiety. Most believe Alexander has left the club stronger, but frustration is shared among a sizeable minority about the timing, less than two months into a season after a summer spent recruiting specifically for his aggressive, direct, high-pressing football.
Bradford had to deal with life after Alexander in their draw at Reading on Saturday. Jake Beesley headed them into a fourth-minute lead, and the 1,118 travelling supporters who made the 400-mile round trip sang about being top of the league but did not chant for their departed manager once. Udoka Godwin-Malife scored a second-half equaliser, and Plymouth moved above Bradford on goal difference. The rapid developments leave a huge hole. Bradford are in unfamiliar territory: it is the first time in 43 years they have lost a manager mid-season, and fans are nervous about the executives’ aptitude for finding a suitable replacement, given the shaky record before landing Alexander.
In the opposition dugout at Reading’s Select Car Leasing Stadium stood one of the favourites to take over. Before the match, Leam Richardson faced questions about whether he was interested. His response — that he would be in the Reading dugout for the match — neatly sidestepped the prospect that he might not be beyond this weekend, though he insisted he had not been contacted. Sparks and sporting director David Sharpe would have been watching closely from the directors’ box to see whether Reading showed signs of a style of football that would fit the framework Alexander built.
Plenty makes Richardson a logical candidate. He previously worked with Sharpe, who was chair at Wigan when Richardson was manager, and he has also coached Callum Connolly, in the Bradford starting XI, and Nick Powell, who came on from the bench. Others are in the frame, including the Plymouth manager Tom Cleverley, the former Manchester United midfielder — a Premier League winner in 2013 — who at 37 has quietly built his managerial reputation these past two years. The next appointment is crucial. Getting Alexander so right makes getting it wrong so much more costly.