John Mousinho: 'It's gone so quickly'
- Published16 minutes ago
John Mousinho says he will not put a timescale on taking Portsmouth back to the Premier League, on the day he became the club's longest-serving manager - by continuous length of tenure - since the late 1980s.
Mousinho has moved past Kenny Jackett's 1,382 days in charge. In fact, over the last 40 years, you have to go back to Alan Ball's first spell in charge - 1984-1989 - to find a warmer seat in the Fratton Park dugout.
Mousinho is 10th on the current list of longest-serving bosses in the top four tiers of English football - and, aged just 40 and still in his first managerial job, he is without question the youngest and least experienced of those 10.
But he guided Portsmouth to the League One title in his first full season in charge and has kept them in the Championship for two years.
"I don't know if it's a sort of reflection on where football has been over the past 40-odd years where managers come and go really quickly," Mousinhotold BBC Radio Solentwhen reflecting on the landmark.
"It still feels like I'm at the infancy of my managerial career, but hopefully we can continue in the same vein.
"If you look at where we are now, compared to where we were when I first took the job, and in particular when the club decided to go through that change of structure with the sporting director coming in, I think it's been a good progression over the past four years."
The words "length of continuous tenure" are relevant when discussing Mousinho's reign.
Jackett (211) and Smith (200) both oversaw more matches than Mousinho's current 186, and both Ball and Harry Redknapp racked up more time and matches in charge over two different spells.
Mousinho has guided Pompey to 11th in the opening months of the 2026-27 season. So where might they be if he stays in the job for another 1,383 days?
"To answer that I would look back at what we've done over the past four years," he added.
"If you said to me at that stage, 'in four years' time, where do you need to be?', we'd have said we needed to be in the Championship at some stage, and I think we got there slightly quicker than we'd anticipated.
"So in four years' time, I'm not necessarily saying we need to be in the Premier League or challenging at the top of the Championship - that would be nice [and] I think eventually we have to do that, but I don't know what the timescale looks like."
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