Stephen and the Media

10 Questions With... Stephen Constantine

www.ussoccerplayers.com, September 2010

By Clemente Lisi - NEW YORK, NY (Sep 30, 2010) US Soccer Players -- Stephen Constantine is a soccer nomad. Former US National Team coach Bora Milutinovic has nothing on this guy. And when it comes to getting results from teams you least expect, Constantine is able to somehow find the cure for what ails them.

Though he may have been born in England, his career got its start in the United States. By age 26, Constantine abandoned his playing career following a knee injury for a shot at coaching. A master motivator, expert tactician and strict disciplinarian, Constantine began what would become a decade-long, globetrotting career that would take him to remote outposts in Africa such as Sudan and Malawi and exotic Asian countries like Nepal and India.

Constantine, 47, played for the Pennsylvania Stoners in the ASL and the New York Pancyprian-Freedoms of the Cosmopolitan Soccer League before becoming a coach. After coaching in Cyprus, the English FA recommended him for the head coaching job of Nepal in 1999. It would be the first stop in a series of stops across Asia and Africa.

In 2002, he began a three-year stint as coach of India, winning the LG Cup in the process. After a brief stay at Millwall FC in England during the 2005-06 season (which resulted in his writing of a coaching manual called A Year in the Championship), Constantine was named manager of Malawi in 2007, but resigned after the team reached the final round of World Cup Qualifying.

He was appointed Sudan coach in February 2009, a stint that lasted 11 months after the team failed to qualify for the 2010 African Cup of Nations and World Cup. He joined Apep FC in Cyprus (where his wife and three daughters reside), but quit this summer before the start of the 2010-11 season after the club's president resigned. I caught up with Constantine, where he discussed his time in the United States, what it takes to be a coach and his dream of someday managing an MLS team. You are hard to keep track of since you're always coaching somewhere in the world.

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