'Supreme confidence in his ability' - the rise of James Maddison (2024)

There was excitement about James Maddison’s league debut for Norwich City — and with good reason.

Maddison had signed for the then-Premier League side 14 months earlier but was loaned back to Coventry City and then spent most of the 2016-17 season with Aberdeen (a loan spell that fizzled out after a strong start, which included a last-minute winner against Rangers). In short, it took a while for Maddison to be blooded into a Norwich squad that included attack-minded, creative players such as Wes Hoolahan, Jacob Murphy, Graham Dorrans and Alex Pritchard.

The 20-year-old Maddison needed to make an impact and, in true fashion, he would do that by being bold; by standing out. Norwich were facing Preston North End at Deepdale on April 17, 2017 and, with 11 minutes remaining, Maddison came on to replace Pritchard.

In stoppage time, he latched onto a Steven Naismith pass, slid the ball under the keeper and scored.

His celebration: a sheepish smile in what was effectively a dead rubber at the end of the season? Or maybe some thanks to Naismith for the assist?

No. Maddison headed to the away end on his own, turned around so his back was facing the Norwich fans and pointed both thumbs towards the name on his shirt. He had arrived — and he wanted everyone to know his name.

It’s Maddison’s persona personified.

Confident? Yes. co*cky? Yes. Wants to be the main man at roast dinners? Yes.

Most importantly, Maddison has demonstrated the quality and the end product to back up that confidence at every stage of his career. And now, at 26, he has added what feels like a newfound maturity, an attribute that some (possibly Gareth Southgate and possibly even Pep Guardiola) believed he lacked, preventing him from being a top-level player.

The progression in his attitude as much as his footballing skill set is why he’s been entrusted with a starting spot with England — and now the vice-captaincy at Tottenham Hotspur, where he is preparing for his first north London derby on Sunday.

There are three key landmarks in Maddison’s career that have forged him as a man more than a footballer.

One was that loan at Aberdeen seven years ago.

A Coventry City lad who grew up 150 metres from the training ground and progressed through the academy to first-team level in League One, he was close to his family but having moved to Norwich, he was then sent 500 miles north (just the 11-hour drive) aged 18. It was sink or swim time.

Alan Irvine was assistant manager at Norwich to Alex Neil at the time and then became caretaker manager, giving Maddison that debut at Preston.

“It was good for his development to get him to Aberdeen,” he tells The Athletic. “It wasn’t as successful as James or Norwich would’ve liked it to have been but when he came back, it had helped him.”

Maddison later said the move was the making of him, with highlights including a League Cup final against Celtic at Hampden Park.

His confidence also began to grow. During a game at Kilmarnock, he nutmegged three players in quick succession and was then, to put it bluntly, lamped. He was warned not to take the piss… but he didn’t listen. It’s his thing.

Opposition players may have disliked him winding them up, opposition fans too, but his team-mates generally loved his brashness as long as he was backing it up on the field. In the Championship, he soon was.

Norwich team-mate Christoph Zimmermann, now in the Bundesliga with Darmstadt, says: “He was sent to Scotland to get more physicality into his body and he had to take a couple of hits — as soon as the opponents, saw how good he was, they would try to take him out of the game. He managed to cope with that incredibly well.

“What I enjoyed a lot about him was it didn’t matter at the start of the season when he didn’t know if he was going to play or be sent out on loan, or during and after that season when he was our best player. He did not change in any sort of way.

“He was always in a good mood. Always a good character to have in the group and he would always joke around with everyone.”

Irvine adds: “He had a real confidence in his own ability, and that was justified. He was an extremely talented player. He could easily play and train with the first team at that point. He was impatient because he looked and thought, ‘Why am I not getting a game here?’.”

He soon did, with 2017-18 being his breakthrough campaign.

Maddison had a reputation for being pushy to play and for his confidence, which could come across as arrogance, although that was more about how others took it rather than what Maddison was doing, like with that celebration at Preston.

Irvine says: “I had a little smile about that — ‘It’s OK, James, we know who you are!’. More people were going to know who he was too. That was going to come.

“He was supremely confident but I felt he would have to be careful he didn’t rub people up the wrong way. Perhaps one of the things on his learning curve was how to get that balance. You could imagine him upsetting a senior player or a member of the coaching staff, but I didn’t find that.

“Him pointing at his name when he scored at Preston? That could’ve annoyed one or two people, given the game was over anyway. Don’t go overboard! But that was OK — A young player, just scoring on his league debut, it doesn’t get much better than that and you’re entitled to get carried away.

“We’re really strange in this country, aren’t we? We don’t like overconfidence. We tend to find that’s not right when it’s a player here. It doesn’t always fit with the culture; yet we enjoy it when a player or coach from abroad shows it.

“The only negative regarding James was I felt he needed to do more when the team didn’t have the ball. The unseen bits. That was part of the development he needed then.”

That doubt over Maddison’s defensive duties was still the case for another manager four years later in what feels like the second ‘making of’ point of his career.

Maddison was at Leicester now. He had broken through at Norwich in the 2017-18 season when the team struggled but Maddison didn’t — he was their top scorer (14 league goals) and named in the EFL’s team of the season.

Leicester paid £22million ($27m) for him and Maddison settled in well to the Premier League, so much so that England recognition followed a year later in 2019.

It was under Brendan Rodgers — who helped add industry and energy to Maddison’s performances, as well as a big increase in his end product — that Maddison really thrived.

However, when it came to the biggest club match of Maddison’s career, the 2021 FA Cup final, Maddison was left out of the starting XI. Rodgers, like Irvine four years earlier, didn’t feel he could trust Maddison’s defensive side, so went with a midfield trio of Youri Tielemens, Wilfred Ndidi and Ayoze Perez instead.

Maddison came on for the last 23 minutes but those who worked with him at Leicester believe the fact he didn’t start the match was a wake-up call. Maddison’s response was to knuckle down and work harder, exactly what Rodgers wanted.

During the next two seasons, leading up to his move to Tottenham, Maddison racked up 39 goal involvements in 65 league matches (22 goals and 17 assists).

It was around the time of the FA Cup final that he became a father (son Leo was born a few months later), another milestone that altered his mindset.

“Maybe subconsciously,” he said last year when asked about whether his mentality had changed. “The added responsibility of becoming a father, you can’t train for that. There’s no textbook. It just changes your outlook on things.

“I want him to look up to his dad as a role model. It gives you that added incentive when you’re working, training harder every day. It’s not just for yourself, it’s for your family too.”

Rodgers was impressed with how Maddison matured around this time. He always wanted more from Maddison — privately, he thought the player was very intelligent and could learn and adapt to different formations, tactics and managerial approaches. But becoming a father added a layer of maturity overnight that wasn’t there before.

“He’s matured on and off the pitch, particularly in the last few years,” Rodgers said last season. “Off the pitch, he’s very educated, he speaks well about the game, he speaks honestly about it as well in terms of his performance, the team performance.

“That maturity over the last few seasons has really come to the fore and it’s great to see.

“You need players that are going to take on that leadership role and not just worry about themselves but worry about the team; he’s certainly one of those.”

By last season, he had become a leader, a player entrusted with the captain’s armband. He would sit with Rodgers at Leicester’s training ground restaurant in the morning before training sessions, watch Sky Sports News and chat football. He asked inquisitive questions in team meetings, he talked tactics in front of the squad. Rodgers used to say he had never seen a more dedicated individual player.

But it wasn’t a smooth ride to get to that point.

Rodgers dropped Maddison (as well as Hamza Choudhury and Perez) from the squad for a game against West Ham in April 2021 for breaching COVID-19 protocols.

Just before his Leicester move, it was publicly stated during a grievous bodily harm court case involving his friend that he had told a group they should know who he was on a night out and boasted about his £7,000 weekly wage.

Maddison said he was ‘six or seven out of 10 drunk’ on the night in question.

That was a few years earlier but concerns remained about his party lifestyle. He would hang out with Jack Grealish and Ben Chilwell who all earned “party boy” reputations, and there were question marks over his character.

Manchester City manager Guardiola was an admirer of Maddison but big clubs were reluctant to take a chance on him.

Southgate, too, had his doubts, and left him out of the England fold for three years. It’s easy to forget that even up to the naming of the World Cup squad for Qatar last autumn, there was no guarantee Maddison, who has started three of England’s last five games, would be picked. But Southgate has seen that maturity too and the eschewing of the party lifestyle.

Publicly, the line was that Maddison could only play as a No 10.

In the end, Maddison was hampered by an injury and played no minutes in Qatar despite finally earning a place in the squad.

“Every player goes out, every player has fun,” says Timm Klose, another former Norwich team-mate. “Madders had the same thing going on but for me, it was more or less an excuse. If you take Jack Grealish as an example, he did exactly the same thing.

“I felt it was just an excuse for what was a hard decision because Madders was playing well for Leicester too.”

Former goalkeeper Dean Kiely got to know Maddison through his work as Norwich’s goalkeeping coach. Now at Crystal Palace, Kiely has a recent insight into Maddison’s newfound standing within the England setup.

“I was speaking to Eberechi Eze when he got back from England duty,” Kiely tells The Athletic. “I asked, ‘How was Madders?’, and he said, ‘Oh mate, what a guy, he’s fun to be around. A real good lad in the group, contributes, makes people laugh. But on the pitch, he’s incredible’.

“If you’re a fan of Norwich, Leicester, Aberdeen, Coventry, you’ll have seen him on a Saturday rip the game up, always willing to take the ball, always manipulating it, wants to get front-facing and threaten the goal, do his thing and express himself. That’s fantastic.

“Then Monday to Friday, when the coaches are coaching, he just does all that relentlessly in training. Monday’s training is the same as Friday, all with a smile on his face.

“Whatever you do, he commits to it and does it to the best of his ability. When you have a stretch or a drink between drills, he’s mucking about with a ball, doing whatever, having some craic, interacting with his team-mates. That’s the full picture.

“If he was an amazing talent but a really quiet lad, moody or whatever, then you’d wish he was a bit more. But for me, the out-and-about social side ties in exactly with how I’d want him to be. He’d make me laugh every day in training, and then blow me away with his ability.”

At Spurs, Maddison’s impact has been unanimously positive, on and off the field.

People have enjoyed his energy, which as generated a positive knock-on effect on the other players.

Ange Postecoglou said shortly after Maddison signed: “He’s really highly motivated. He’s got to a stage of his career where he’s got a little bit of authority and maturity on the pitch, so you can see him wanting to be a presence around the players.

“He’s obviously got a lot of self-belief because of how it’s gone in his journey as a footballer.”

He certainly has been on a journey but throughout, that confidence has carried him through.

“It all comes back to having that supreme confidence in his ability,” Irvine says of Maddison’s excellent start at Spurs.

“I had a chat with Declan (Rice, whom Maddison will face this weekend in the north London derby) at West Ham two years ago about actually stepping up as far as the leadership that was required and trying to say to Declan he was no longer the younger boy. All that inner stuff.

“You now have to become the leader of this team. You’re our best player. You can’t be stepping aside and letting others do it. You have to take your game to another level. James probably didn’t need that conversation.”

Additional reporting Rob Tanner