Scott Lindsey, manager of MK Dons, has overcome unimaginable personal tragedies to achieve success in football. His story is one of resilience, positivity, and the transformative power of sport.
MK Dons' manager Scott Lindsey has been through unspeakable loss in his career and has come out the other side a relentlessly positive person. To a casual observer, a lot seems to have gone right for Scott Lindsey over the last decade. He progressed from a coaching job to his first senior managerial role at non-league Chatham Town. He left to become an assistant manager at Forest Green Rovers.
In January 2023, Lindsey decided to take the reins at Crawley Town, the club then 89th in the Football League ladder. Despite predictions of doom and relegation into non-league, Lindsey first kept Crawley up and then achieved one of the more remarkable promotions in recent history. Crawley won their three play-off matches by an aggregate scoreline of 10-1. Earlier this season, Lindsey chose to move on from Crawley, even though they and he were in League One. He took the job at Milton Keynes Dons with the remit to reshape this project and take the club up to the third tier. Lindsey is also a relentlessly positive man. At Crawley, he started talking about promotion as early as September and jokes that players probably presumed that he wasn’t being serious. He calls it his “law of attraction”, a manifestation of positive outcomes that he believes will be infectious if players and staff choose to get on board. The point is this: you would not guess what Scott Lindsey has been through, and Scott Lindsey has been through plenty. His story, of a guy with a dream to be a head coach for two decades who finally saw it realised, would be endearing anyway. In this case, it’s extraordinary. In July 2019, Lindsey was at Forest Green Rovers’ training camp in Devon when he got a call to say that his wife Hayley had collapsed in the shower. Hayley was diagnosed with cancer and, with her condition showing little sign of improvement, Scott left Forest Green to care for her. Tragically, sickbed became deathbed. Hayley died on 21 November 2019 at the age of just 44. She left behind three daughters and a husband. “It was so hard at the start,” says Lindsey. “Most of my coaching jobs were away from home, so really Hayley brought the kids up. When she died, I had no clue about any of the basics. I had to learn those things. The girls went to two different schools and I remember one day dropping one of them off at the wrong school.“I was probably a terrible Dad beforehand, but I’d like to think that I became a very good Mum and Dad very quickly because I had no choice. I got so much wrong, but I think my girls knew that I tried my hardest and, you know what, I probably got a few things right too.” Scott’s Mum Jean helped out with the girls as much as she could and was, in Scott’s own words, entirely adored by his three children. But Jean also suffered from health problems. In 2022, at the age of 73, she also passed away from cancer and Lindsey had lost his complete family network. Sadly, there’s more. In 1995, Lindsey was playing for Dover when his housemate Alan Nicholls was loaned to Stalybridge Celtic and the two teams met. To mark the occasion, Scott’s Dad Keith and brother Matthew both came to watch the game. On the way home from the game, Matthew and Nicholls were both killed in a motorbike accident. The event broke the spirit of Keith, who had been a professional footballer himself and who Scott describes as the biggest supporter of his career. Scott’s father died in 2003 of a sudden brain haemorrhage. He was just 56. I simply don’t understand how anyone processes that much grief in one lifetime, let alone how they cope with the repetition of such emotional trauma and still enjoy the progression of his career while becoming a sole parent to three children. The reality, as Scott says, is just taking it day by day and using things that you love as a support. For him, that meant football. While he was caring for Hayley, she persuaded him to take the part-time manager’s job at Chatham Town to keep his eye in. Football became a form of escape but also a dose of normality. Having been a player, an academy coach, a first-team coach, an assistant manager and a manager, what other way to clear your head than football? “Football has been amazing for me,” Scott says. “I’ve been through tough times, but football has always been there for me, as an escape and to help me grieve. It’s not for everybody, but it really did help me. My wife passed away on a Thursday and, on the Saturday, I was giving the team talk and getting organised for a game. “I walked into the dressing room and I could see that the players felt bad about me being there. I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be normal. My assistant manager told me that the players had got me a gift for the girls and I just told him not to give it to me before the game – wait until the car park after the match.” I ask Lindsey, very much with my amateur psychologist’s head on, whether there’s something about going through that grieving process that might make it easier to cope in the mania of footbal
Scott Lindsey MK Dons Football Manager Tragedy Resilience Loss Grief Family Football Promotion
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