Shortly before Uwe Rösler accepted an offer on the eve of this season to become the Fleetwood Town manager, the German signed up for a masters degree in sporting directorship at Manchester Metropolitan University, eager to learn more about leadership and the role that he believes can help to solve English football’s “dark side”.

An affable and intelligent man, Rösler has a huge amount of affection for the English game and talks with a mixture of pride and excitement about scoring goals for Manchester City at Maine Road, the special atmosphere at grounds up and down the country, and the part that everyone at Fleetwood is playing in their record-breaking season in League One. Yet the 48-year-old also sounds dismayed at the way so many clubs operate, in particular in the Championship, where he has personal experience of the managerial merry-go-round that has been in full swing once again this season.

Uwe Rösler empowered by long journey from Berlin Wall to Brentford Read more

“I think stability in English football is key and that comes with [having] people between the owners and the coaches,” Rösler says. “I’m a big fan of the role of the sporting director or the director of football, whatever you want to call it, as long as he has a major influence – he needs to suggest the coach to the board, because he has to work with the coach 24/7. For example, I speak to Gretar Steinsson, the technical director at Fleetwood, more than I speak to my wife, and that was the same when I worked with Mark Warburton at Brentford.

“There must be absolute chemistry between those two positions, to build the short-, medium- and long-term future for the club. When you don’t have that person in between, the coach is just firefighting. So in England, in the Championship, you see good people, good coaches, losing their jobs. And that happens in other countries nowhere near as much. When you look at, say, Serie B or the second Bundesliga, before the season there are three or four clubs who have realistic things in place to go up. In the Championship, apart from six clubs, everyone says: ‘We want to go into the play-offs, we want to win promotion.’ And it’s completely unrealistic. So English football is fantastic – wow. But you also have a dark side.”

Rösler was sacked by Wigan in November 2014, only six months after leading the club to the Championship play-offs and the FA Cup semi-finals, where they lost on penalties to Arsenal. He was dismissed by Leeds United last season after only 11 league matches in charge, losing four of them.

Those two experiences clearly hurt, so much so that it is tempting to wonder whether Rösler considered turning his back on management, especially as he could get by in life comfortably enough without pacing up and down in front of a dugout.

“No, because I know I’m good,” he replies matter-of-factly rather than arrogantly. “The stats show that every club I’ve been at apart from Leeds, I’ve won more than 40% of my games. And all of those clubs I’ve taken over – Lillestrom, Viking and Molde in Norway, Brentford, Wigan and Fleetwood in England – were either mid-table or fighting relegation when I came in. I can help clubs achieve what they want to achieve. But I’m not taking any job on any more. I’m in a position where I don’t need to, and you learn. Without football I’m not the same person. I need to be involved. I love football and I love my work. But not to an extent where I go and take another suicide mission.”

Fleetwood, who were playing in the North West Counties league as recently as 2005, “didn’t seem like a gamble” in Rösler’s eyes. He looked at the new £8m training ground, listened to what Andy Pilley, the club’s wealthy and ambitious chairman, expected from him – “A man who understands football,” Rösler says – spoke with Steinsson and the other staff, and recognised that Fleetwood “had a structure in place behind the scenes that a lot of Championship clubs don’t have”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uwe Rösler is fully immersed in his job. ‘I speak to Gretar Steinsson, the technical director at Fleetwood, more than I speak to my wife,’ he says. Photograph: ProSports/Rex/Shutterstock

Rösler weighed up everything and saw it as an “opportunity to work myself back up again”. Working closely with Rob Kelly, his assistant, Rösler has grasped that chance, turning a club that avoided relegation on the final day of last season into promotion challengers. Fleetwood, whose average attendance is the lowest in the league at just over 3,000, sit third in the table, behind Sheffield United and Bolton, two former Premier League clubs. They have lost once in 21 matches.

“When I came in, a week before the season started, I talked about how we needed to work to get a top-six mentality, not only the players but anyone connected with the football club,” Rösler explains. “It’s about details, because details can make a big difference. We have team sessions, one-to-one sessions, recovery protocols, coming in on days when other teams have a day off. Everyone has to make sacrifices and that’s why we’re where we are – it’s a result of teamwork throughout the whole club.”

The only downside to management for Rösler is that he has so little opportunity to watch Colin, his youngest son, play for Manchester City’s under-18 team. Colin, who turns 17 next month and is developing into a fine central defender, has signed a three-year professional contract and hopes to follow in the footsteps of his father, who made more than 150 appearances for City in the 1990s and was inducted into the club’s hall of fame in 2009.

“Colin is not an unbelievable talent – there are bigger – but the focus he has for his profession already is unbelievable,” Rösler says. “I wasn’t like that. I was very committed. But he is a level above. And that comes from himself. It’s not my wife or myself pushing him. He trains every day, even when it’s his day off. His ball-wall in the garden – it can be pissing down for hours and he’ll stay there: pass, pass, pass on the wall. He does things to extreme.”

Rösler’s other son, Tony, is also doing well for himself, studying finance at New York University. Both boys were named after City legends – Colin Bell and Tony Book – and a wry smile comes across Rösler’s face when he is asked whether his Norwegian wife went along with that idea straight away. “Yes, there was no option,” he says. “I said if we have a girl, you can decide. She said she would call her Chelsea. I said: ‘I don’t think so.’”

City are in Rösler’s blood and he will always be “a blue”. He mentions how the club helped him when he was battling cancer in 2003 and the way that some City fans turned up to watch Brentford games when he took the job at Griffin Park in 2011. There is a good chance that some will rock up at Gigg Lane on Saturday to see Rösler’s team take on Bury. “I didn’t win the Premier League, I didn’t win the FA Cup, but I am very happy that I won a lot of hearts of the supporters,” Rösler says. “City never forgot me and I never forgot them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uwe Rösler, pictured here playing for Manchester City in 1995, named his sons after two of the club’s legends. One of them, Colin, plays for City’s under-18s. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Rösler is excited about City’s future under Pep Guardiola and marvels at the way the club has become a global player, yet he still pines for the past in one respect. “You can’t compare the Etihad to Maine Road. You ask me where I want to play and a hundred times out of a hundred I would say Maine Road,” he says. “I think I was very fortunate to play in front of the old Kippax and in a stadium that had 35,000 people singing from every corner. That has disappeared, unfortunately. So I feel really privileged to have had that time.”

Now, however, his sole focus is on Fleetwood and when he speaks about the club’s supporters he is keen to stress that he is “one of them”. They have already ticked off their three main targets – securing their League One status for another season, reaching the FA Cup third round and surpassing 63 points, the club’s highest return. The next objective, which Rösler and the players decided on together, is to reach 74 points. Thereafter it will be hard to ignore talk of trying to win promotion to the Championship, which would be some story.

“I think with Fleetwood that’s definitely possible,” Rösler says. “What I say to the players often counts identically for me: ‘I don’t know where this takes us, me, you in your careers in general. What I do know is that what we’re doing now at Fleetwood is unbelievable, and for all of us it’s very hard to get that back. So can we sacrifice even more? Can we push it even more?’”

The interview is drawing to a close and, with the rain teeming down on the street outside the Manchester restaurant where we are talking, Rösler chuckles at a question about whether the city where he has lived since returning to England in 2010 will always be his home. “I don’t think so because at some point I’d like a little bit more sunshine,” he says, laughing. “But now I am very happy where we are as a family, where we are with life, and I’m also enjoying myself at Fleetwood and enjoying who I’m working with. Hopefully I can give Andy, the owner, something to be really proud of because I’d really like to do that.”