Phil Neville Had to Win Over England. Can England Now Win for Him?

Neville, though, has not allowed those restrictions to become excuses. At some points, he has actively confronted areas that might have proved awkward. He asked his players whether they minded being referred to as “girls,” for example, in the same way that managers of male English teams would talk about “boys” and “lads.” He ran a variety of other options past them — some serious, some less so — just to make sure he knew they were comfortable, and vice versa.

He has taken every measure possible to build personal relationships with his players. There is the obligatory squad WhatsApp group, of course, enabling Neville to “check in” on his players while they are with their clubs. He texts individuals regularly after club games. He is happy, and actively seeks, to “have conversations about your family,” midfielder Jill Scott said.

“He cares,” said Houghton, who has found that he is interested in “you as a person, and what makes you tick.” A lifelong, unreconstructed Manchester United fan, he jokes with the likes of Manchester City’s Keira Walsh on the rare occasions that the club’s men’s team loses. “He’s very funny,” Walsh said. “He has a very dry sense of humor.”

All of that helps. “That kind of thing is in your mind when you walk out on the pitch,” Scott said in an interview with the magazine FourFourTwo last month. “You want to do a good job for that manager.”

He has shared with them the disappointments of his playing days, going into detail around a desert campfire at a training camp in Qatar about his sorrow at missing out on three World Cups as a player. He told Houghton, whose husband has a motor neuron disease, that he would make whatever allowances for absence that she felt she required.

That is not to say Neville is a soft touch. As Emma Hayes, the Chelsea coach, put it: “He does not treat his players like glass.” He takes part in training games, and his players have been struck by how much he wants to win. He grew up under Alex Ferguson’s unforgiving tutelage; in his first presentation to the players, he told them that he would expect the same standards — both of effort and behavior — that he had experienced.