As the photographer readies the camera, Shaun Goater stands at the edge of Ilkeston FC’s pitch, the New Manor Ground, and declares: “OK, total football, Pep Guardiola-style!” Then he laughs. There will be no football today because the pitch is so waterlogged that when the nearby groundsman sticks a fork in it, there’s a little splash. Time to enact Plan B: today the training session devised by Goater, the modest team’s new manager, will consist of a series of aerobic exercises on a patch behind one of the goals. “Adapt or die,” says Goater. “That’s my motto.”

The 47-year-old tells an amusing story about how, nearly two decades ago, he learned to adapt to life at Manchester City with so much success that he became the team’s top scorer for five seasons in a row and remains one of the most popular players in the club’s recent history, the hero of the terrace anthem Feed the Goat and He Will Score.

His impact at City may be everlasting but it was not immediate and in his first full season, when City were in the third tier, he took fearful stick. “You might say you don’t hear it but, believe me, when you make a tackle and 30,000 of your own fans start shouting: ‘Off! Off! Off!’, you hear it!” he recalls.

“I had said when I signed for them that I was going to score 25 goals in my first season because that’s what I had done at the same level for Bristol City and Rotherham, so I thought it was normal but it came across as arrogant and they really didn’t take to me. It began to affect me but I knew City was a club that could make your career and I wasn’t prepared to let that opportunity go. So I went to see a sports psychologist named Paul Connolly. He was funny – and he was a City fan. I walked in and he said: ‘Shaun, how are you?’. I said: ‘I’m really lacking in confidence’ and I heard him saying back: ‘Yes, you are rubbish’.

“But he was absolutely brilliant. I had a really open, frank conversation with him and never looked back. I then started to see him twice a week, just having conversations. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

But it was not the only thing he did. He also studied his fellow forward, Paul Dickov, who was adored while Goater was maligned. “I only told Paul this about a year ago because he hadn’t realised that whenever the manager said: ‘Get in twos’ I was always standing right beside him. I wanted to observe him as closely as possible because I was thinking” ‘OK, they love Paul, why do they love him?’ It was because of his aggression and tenacity, the way he got in people’s faces and chased lost causes.

“Before I’d think: ‘What’s the point in chasing a ball I know I can’t get’ but it wasn’t about that, it was about the one ball that I did manage to keep in play and maybe started a move that led to a chance or triggered a change in the game’s attitude. So I started to do that, while still scoring my goals.”

So Goater has always been a willing learner and never afraid of a challenge. Which still does not quite explain why, following his appointment last month, he finds himself adapting to life as the manager of Ilkeston FC in the Evo-Stik Northern League Premier Division, the seventh tier of English football. He could, after all, be back home in Bermuda, where after hanging up his boots the former Manchester City star thrived in a second career as a business tycoon.

“When I was a player I thought I wouldn’t be a manager because the game is so fickle that managers aren’t given time and what is the point in investing in something if you’re going to be sacked as soon as anything goes wrong?” he explains. “So I invested in three businesses. They were very successful.

“One was asphalt – we were the No1 asphalt company in Bermuda. Then we had East End Telecommunications, which provided the radio systems to ambulances and the police. If ever an officer was in trouble and made a call saying: ‘Hey, I need back up!’, it was our system so it needed to work. Then we also started up a third company, Renaissance Aviation, where we provided basically 90% of the operational resources in Bermuda. Customer service, cleaners, engineers, we provided all of that. If you ask me what I knew about any of that, the answer is absolutely nothing. But I invested in it and I learned about it.”

In 2006 he co-founded a club, Bermuda Hogges, that was later entered as an expansion team in the third tier of the United States soccer pyramid. He served both as a player and a director before leaving in 2008 to rejoin the club where he had started as a child, North Village Rams. “I was just giving something back but I ended up coaching the first team,” he says. “They were second from bottom when I took over around Christmas and we finished second in the league. I discovered a real passion for coaching. I’d be at my businesses sitting there thinking about training sessions, the opposition, tactics and so on.”

Over the next five years he won seven trophies with the Rams. Then, both for professional and family reasons, he decided to return to England. “It was the right time,” he says. “We were bringing our kids back to do the GCSEs and I also had a desire to pursue my coaching. I could have kept the businesses in Bermuda while I was in England but that would have been half-stepping it and my mind and body weren’t into that. I was moving fully back into football. But I didn’t just take it for granted that because I had played at the highest level I knew everything and nothing had changed.”

He continued acquiring his qualifications – he now has a Uefa A licence – and had stints studying and working at various clubs. “I spent a couple of years shadowing at Man City. I’ve watched Manuel Pellegrini sessions, also Patrick Vieira and City’s under-21s with Simon Davies. I also spent a weekend watching Alan Pardew when he was at Crystal Palace and watched Roberto Martínez when he was at Everton. I’m a student of the game.”

He also had short spells as forwards coach at Doncaster Rovers and St Johnstone and an unhappy nine-match spell at non-league New Mills. He applied for various other coaching and managerial vacancies higher up but none led to job offers. “That just gives me the energy and desire to prove that I know what I’m right for,” he says. “I spent over three years just gathering information and getting the qualifications, now I need to get my teeth stuck into something that suits me. And this project suits me.”

At first Goater was not convinced. He became aware of Ilkeston when a fellow Bermudian, Rai Simmons, signed for them in 2014. “I just kept an eye on him to see how he was doing, like I always did with [Huddersfield Town’s] Nahki Wells,“ he says. Simmons has since been sold to Chesterfield but there are still five other Bermudian players at Ilkeston, who have a bond with the country where their Derbyshire-born owner, Nigel Harrop, used to do business. “He actually played for a local team while working over there and says he played against me when I was 15 or 16 but I don’t recall that,” says Goater.

Harrop has been involved with Ilkeston for years but only bought the club in 2015, since when he has sought to reduce costs and ensure sustainability by developing and selling on young players. Goater says that policy encouraged him to take the job last month despite being well aware of the likelihood of relegation, the club being eight points from safety when he took over.

“At one point last season I looked at their results and just saw loss, loss, loss, loss; it was frightening. But when I went along to watch one of their games, when Rai was still here, I thought, even though they lost again, they’re actually really good,” he says. “Just looking at the model, I thought: ‘That’s something I’d love to get involved in’.

“It’s about developing young players, all aged between 18 and 24, sometimes ones who’ve fallen by the wayside at other clubs and are looking for second chances. Kids are sponges and these ones have the motivation to prove people wrong for letting them go. They see this as the first rung on the professional ladder and they want to learn.”

Shaun Goater beats his team-mate Nicolas Anelka to the ball to head in Manchester City’s equaliser against Manchester United at Old Trafford in 2003. Photograph: Gary M. Prior/Getty Images

And Goater is a committed teacher. All his players are full-time, although not paid so much that they do not feel the need to hold down part-time jobs elsewhere, too, ones that allow them to train five days a week. On the day of this interview, last Thursday, Goater left home at 6am to make the two-hour drive to Ilkeston and see what state the ground was in before preparing for training. He envisages staying at Ilkeston beyond this season even if the club goes down.

The players are thrilled to be guided by a man who had the sort of career that they hope to sample but Goater knows his renown will not earn him lasting respect. “There is a honeymoon period of a couple of weeks when the players are like: ‘This is who our gaffer is’ and they’re asking questions about this and that but what keeps the respect going beyond the honeymoon is the quality of the information you’re giving and the belief in what you’re asking them to do. You cannot fool players.

“I’m very satisfied with how things have gone so far, the players’ attitude is exactly what I expected,” he says. “They’re young players with a thirst for knowledge and information because they want to go on to better things. And I want them to do that, too. Success this season could even be just missing out on survival but developing two players to the point where they can move on. We cannot learn over a long stretch, we have to learn quickly.”

“I say to them: ‘You’re at Ilkeston’. It may be the right place for you at this point but how many people know Ilkeston and how many people know you? I’m challenging you to say ’I need to move on, I need to develop my game as soon as possible.’ Yes, you’re young, but you’re the same age as [Raheem] Sterling. He might have more talent than you but he shouldn’t be able to learn quicker or work harder than you.

“You have to speed up your education, knowledge, decision-making, game management. What that should do is improve the individuals’ performance and if every individual improves by, say, 3%, that changes our game from the consecutive losses that the club has had into draws and wins. And then we’ll go from there.”

And what about the manager, how far can he go? “No one ever says they want to stay where they are unless they’re already at the top,” says Goater, who for now is concentrating on his immediate task.

“I like to play different ways. It’s all right having a philosophy of playing through thirds but it’s March and the pitch is boggy so you have to simplify the game and try to get the ball to players who can create in those conditions. So my philosophy is adapt or die.”