How England U21 boss Carsley got his start in Derby

Lee Carsley guided England to European Under-21 Championship success in 2023 and 2025

When Lee Carsley made his first strides into football, he ended up on an empty doorstep in Derby.

Almost four decades later, the now 51-year-old has made it his business to open doors to England's finest emerging talent on the international stage.

He has managed England to back-to-back European Under-21 Championship titles and, for a while, was the senior team's caretaker boss in between Gareth Southgate vacating the role and Thomas Tuchel taking it on.

Less than 20 miles separates where Carsley goes to work as England Under-21 boss at St George's Park, nestled in the countryside on the outskirts of Burton-on-Trent, and where his career started as a 15-year-old on Derby County's books.

On Monday, he will be stalking the sidelines at his old ground at Pride Park as the Young Lions face Andorra in a European Championship qualifier.

It is a game that has him recalling his start in the game, being driven across the Midlands from where he grew up in Birmingham to his lodging that day.

"I was dropped off with a few pence in my pocket, and the lady was out, so I literally got left on the step for a couple of hours," Carsley told BBC Radio Derby.

"It was character building, so I don't know if they'd done it on purpose."

It was football in the 1980s, a bygone era that predates the Premier League and teenage footballing multi-millionaires.

He would go on to play for Derby in the Premier League, a competition where he spent a majority of his career as a midfielder for Blackburn Rovers, Coventry City, Everton and Birmingham City.

Carsley also went on to play for the Republic of Ireland 39 times and featured for them at the 2002 World Cup.

From each of those teams and the managers he played under - be it Jim Smith at the Rams or David Moyes at Everton - Carsley said he learned career-shaping lessons.

But it was those early years as a youth player at Derby, a grounding in the "old school" - which included knowing how to deal with the notoriously bad pitch at its former Baseball Ground home - which stuck with Carsley the person as much as anything.

"It's a different game when you consider part of our job was cleaning the Baseball Ground, the boardroom and the terraces and helping out with the pitch and painting the sides and the stands and all those kinds of things," he reflected.

"It gave you a real understanding of how the club works, which meant that you got to know absolutely everyone in the club.

"It's very different to now. Is it better or worse? I'm not sure, but it was definitely different."

Doing things differently is part of Carsley everyday job with England Under-21s now.

Two crops of players have come through and lifted silverware in the past two years.

Now, the latest of the next generation are preparing to qualify for the 2027 European Championships.

They face Moldova at Stadionul Zimbru, in Chisinau, on Friday before hosting Andorra.

"It's definitely not a one-size-fits-all kind of situation," Carsley said.

"Players are different, and when they're coming in, they come in with different experiences, and they're at different stages of their careers, so we have to adjust and adapt to where this group is, rather than where the last group was.

"The next generation and cohort come through, so we move on quite quickly which is how I like to do it."