Alex Clapham was set for a job as an assistant manager at a Championship club when Borussia Dortmund came calling. He knew he had to drop everything. “The first call was to my missus to tell her it was Germany rather than England,” he tells Sky Sports.

Thankfully, she enjoyed the experience and he learned plenty from his 18 months as the set-piece coach for the club with the biggest attendances in Europe. “It was crazy working at that level,” says the 37-year-old Englishman. “And it was not always easy.”

Clapham was there for what he calls a “six turbulent months” under Nuri Sahin. There was a Champions League game against Real Madrid where they went two up and lost 5-2. “An atmosphere I have never lived before. The best I have seen outside Dortmund.”

There were games home and away to Barcelona, the rivalry with Bayern Munich. But for Clapham it is all part of a journey that has taken him to Getafe in Spain, Vasco da Gama in Brazil and Genoa in Italy. He is now eyeing the next adventure – anywhere in the world.

How has this happened to a young man with no professional playing background? It stems from a decision made to pursue a career in coaching at 23. A move that took him abroad in part due to his obsession with Spanish football and in part through necessity.

“I was playing on muddy pitches in northern England and not enjoying it so I wanted to coach but I could not get on the courses in England. I almost gave up,” he explains. “I ended up doing all my coaching badges in Spain. It was an expensive sacrifice.” But it has certainly paid off.

“I remember a coach from Levante putting on a session, the detail around adjusting the players’ body shapes, and having to do all that in a second language, you can imagine. The methodology in Spain, the emphasis on psychology, it was completely different.”

He learned Spanish in Barcelona and was working full-time teaching English before jumping on the metro to take training sessions. Eventually, having kept doing his badges in the Spanish system, he became Getafe’s U19 coach at the age of just 30.

Despite having been inspired by Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona and the work of Marcelo Bielsa in Bilbao, Jose Bordalas’ robust Getafe outfit proved influential in another respect. “What they did was stay solid, be compact, and then win off a set-piece.”

Clapham would watch the first team train on the pitch next door. “I would stick around and typically they would be doing set-pieces. I took so much from what he did and what his staff did there.” He used those ideas in his next job as a head coach in Sweden.

Brazil and beyond

“It just snowballed from there.” In Sweden, he crossed paths with Ian Burchnall and followed him to Notts County as a set-piece coach. From there, he moved to Southampton before becoming a kind of globetrotting set-piece troubleshooter for 777 Partners clubs.

He was at Vasco in 2022, coaching in Spanish. “Living in Rio de Janeiro was one of the most amazing experiences. The players were so open to ideas.” The head coach was Jorginho, a Brazilian World Cup winner in 1994. “He just gave me the freedom to work.”

Clapham was only there briefly but played a small part in the club winning promotion back to the top division. “We scored five set-pieces in my seven games there.” He still recalls the understated reaction to the promotion. “I thought we’d celebrate,” he says.

“We flew back to Rio and everyone just went their separate ways at the airport. Unfortunately, you cannot celebrate finishing fourth [in the second tier] at Vasco. That was an eye opener and I really realised this was one of the biggest clubs in Brazil.”

Straight from there, Genoa’s sporting director Johannes Spors, now at Southampton, said they needed some help. Clapham played a role in their promotion too. The next season it was more of the same. “I was just going around different clubs,” he explains.

“They all had different cultures, different ideas, structures and mentalities. Sometimes you would be at a club one week, go away and then when you came back three weeks later, they had lost a couple of games and there was a completely different atmosphere.

“That taught me a lot about dynamics. Standard Liege had beaten Anderlecht but when I came back it was all doom and gloom by that point. The coach was under pressure and the staff were nervous. It was a lesson in managing staff, coaching the coaches.”

Sometimes those coaching lessons even come from the players. It is just another reason why his time at Dortmund was such an education. When you are working with one of the best defenders in the world in Nico Schlotterbeck, you need to be up to it.

“A lot of the players now have their own personal analysts, so they would be the ones coming to me with ideas. ‘What do you think about this? This opponent leaves that space. Can we get a block in there or should we screen there? Can we hurt them here?’

“You learn more from those players than the other way around. They are the teachers. Pascal Gross, for example, he is going to be a coach at the top level. He has spent so much time with Roberto De Zerbi. There were three or four who would pick your brain.”

Learning from players

Clapham particularly enjoyed the relationship with Dortmund’s flying winger Karim Adeyemi, even if it tested him in other ways. “He is an incredible guy. What a character,” he adds.

“As a coach, he probably taught me more than anybody because I had to work with him in a different way. It probably took me until Christmas of the first season to understand that.

“Players will be fully engaged but do not want to express their feelings because there are bigger characters in the room. Maybe you have a coffee or speak to them when they are putting their boots on before they go out. It is the little chats, sometimes.”

Maybe the fact that Clapham enjoys those aspects of the job stems from his time as a teacher. “I probably took more from that than I imagined,” he admits. And it also might explain why he sees a future beyond being a set-piece coach. His interests are broader.

Clapham recalls in-depth tactical conversations with Joao Tralhao, then Dortmund’s assistant, now Jose Mourinho’s number two at Benfica, in which the Portuguese would ask why he was only a set-piece coach. He has spent the past months on study visits.

He went to Como to see Cesc Fabregas’ setup and admires Elche boss Eder Sarabia. “He is a future Barcelona head coach.” There are mentions too for Kim Hellberg at Middlesbrough and Kieran McKenna at Ipswich. “I am always looking for more detail.”

The role of assistant manager feels like the next step, he insists as we chat over a coffee in Madrid. “As a manager, you might not want to be too close to the players. An assistant needs to be close to them. That is where I want to be for the next five years,” he explains.

Where that will be is unclear because the world has opened up for him. But as reference points from Sarabia to McKenna suggest, he still has one foot in Spain and another in England. If Clapham does return home, he does so with experiences few can match.