Thierry Henry has walked away from his lucrative television punditry job in the UK in order to focus all of his time and energy on his “long-term ambition to become a football manager.”
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Henry spent the last four years in punditry after retiring as a player in 2014. He most recently took time away from the television studio to work his other professional gig: assistant manager for Belgium at the 2018 World Cup.
“Over the last 4 years I have had some extremely rewarding coaching experiences in football,” he said in a series of posts from his Twitter account. “These experiences have only made me more determined to fulfill my long term ambition to become a football manager.
“It is with sadness, therefore, that I have decided that I must leave [Sky Sports] to enable me to spend more time on the pitch and concentrate on my journey to achieving that goal.
“I would like to thank everyone at Sky for making me feel so welcome and at ease throughout my time with them, and I wish them all the best for the future. Great memories.”
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Indeed, Henry, 40, has made no attempts to conceal the fact he would like to become a top-tier manager in the future, and he has remained quite dedicated to that objective in taking on the job of assistant to Robert Martinez beginning in 2016.
It’ll be fascinating to see who give Henry his first opportunity as a first-team manager. Will he go straight into the Premier League based on name recognition alone? Perhaps the Championship, where Frank Lampard leads Derby County? Or, will he take a path similar to that of his former teammate, Patrick Vieira, whose first managerial post was in MLS — where Henry played four and a half seasons for New York Red Bulls — before making the jump to Europe, landing at Ligue 1 side Nice?
The likeliest scenario, however, is as follows: through one of his invaluable personal contacts in the game, Henry will land a job as a no. 2 at a European club and be constantly linked — similarly to Mikel Arteta at Manchester City — with a move elsewhere every time an intriguing job comes open.
