FORMER LEINSTER, WALLABIES and Argentina boss Michael Cheika will take charge of English Premiership club Leicester Tigers ahead of the 2024/25 season.
Australian Cheika, who is the only man in world rugby to have won both a European Cup and a Super Rugby title as a head coach, succeeds compatriot Dan McKellar who departed Tigers last week.
Cheika joins Leicester after a two-year stint in charge of Argentina, with whom he achieved a fourth-placed finish at last year’s World Cup.
“Honestly, I wasn’t looking at the Premiership and didn’t have the desire to coach in it until Leicester Tigers came to me,” Cheika said. “But, the opportunity to coach at Tigers and lead this group of players turned my head.
“Everybody can see that it is a top-quality roster the club has. I am not going to lie and say I know every single one of them down to their bones but that’s what I will do over the next few months, to learn how to get the best out of them.
“But the roster is only paper,” Cheika added. “It’s now about how the team gels, how to put these really good players and characters together and get them playing in a way that they love it and a way they love going out there, together, and representing Leicester Tigers.”
The 57-year-old, who also previously coached his parental homeland Lebanon at a Rugby League World Cup, sought a return to Australia’s NRL after stepping down from his role as Pumas boss last autumn.
His head was turned by Tigers, however, who had initially sounded him out last year.
Cheika has coached at three World Cups in rugby union, two of them with his native Autralia with whom he reached the final in 2015. An additional Rugby Championship success with the Wallabies that year saw him crowned World Rugby Coach of the Year.
A year earlier, Cheika had become the only head coach ever to win the major continental competition in each hemisphere, steering the Waratahs to a Super Rugby title having previously guided Leinster to their first European Cup success in 2009.
Speaking of Cheika’s appointment, Leicester Tigers CEO Andrea Pinchen said: “We are very pleased to be able to appoint someone of Michael’s experience and history with success to the role of head coach.
“He has, over more than two decades, achieved great success in winning trophies but also developing players, developing coaches and galvanising groups to be the best they can be.
“We want that, we need that and believe Michael is the right person to take this team, this club back to where we know we should be.
“I also accept that the past week is not what fans expected, and nor did we, but the decisions we have made are for the long-term benefit of Leicester Tigers and after lengthy, detailed and very honest conversations with Michael in recent days, we are on the same page about what is now necessary to see this club back on top.”
