By Craig Easton

“EASTY!” I hear my name reverberating down the corridor just as I put my hand on the players’ entrance door. I pause for a couple of seconds before stepping through into the bowels of the old corner stand at Tannadice Park — this is the last thing I need. I pass Steven Fallon, one of my teammates, on his way to the kit room. “Easty, the chairman’s looking for you,” he says, with a pat on the shoulder and a look that says: All the best, mate. All I can do is nod as I make my way to the foot of the stairs that lead to Jim McLean’s office.

It’s not even been 12 hours since I endured the full force of a ‘hairdryer’ from the manager and Jim’s younger brother, Tommy, after our “disappointing” Scottish Youth Cup victory against Ayr United the previous night. Merely progressing to the next round of a competition isn’t always enough when you wear the tangerine and black. Most of the team felt some heat from the gaffer for contributing to an average performance; however he turned the dial up to maximum power for me. I had been playing consistently well for the reserves, had recently broken through into the first team, and was pushing for a permanent place in the side so, obviously, more was expected from me when turning out for the youth team. I understood that. It comes with the territory and I had been relishing the extra responsibility when playing with my own age group.

I had actually thought I had a pretty good game, and so did my dad, who certainly doesn’t do false praise. However, putting across any opinions on my performance at that particular moment would’ve been a very bad idea. I would keep that to myself. Just accept the heat. Most of it was a blur and consisted of me attempting to look the manager in the eye without being disrespectful. At one point, I recall him screaming that I could “shove my music up my arse!” as he strode over to the dressing-room ghetto blaster to eject and throw my Oasis mixtape in my general direction. As I half flinched, I noticed that it bounced off the bench and didn’t shatter so I took that as a win and suppressed a small smile as the pelters continued. That tape had some killer B-sides.

Now my brain’s going into overdrive as I make my way along the narrow corridor. I’m thinking that the chairman’s going to double down on last night’s bollocking after conversing with his younger sibling. Or is it something else? I’ve not really missed curfew. There was that time a couple of weeks ago when I fell asleep at my girlfriend’s/future wife’s parents’ house. But surely I wouldn’t have been stuck in for randomly being a couple of hours late back to my digs? Nah, Tony and Marie were pretty cool about that. And they also didn’t mind us going on the occasional youth-team night out after a win. On the other hand, Jim McLean has eyes all over the city. As Maurice Malpas — player coach and United legend who survived The McLean Years™ — likes to say: “Dundee’s a village.”

“Eeeastaay!” the second shout breaks off my chain of thought four steps into my climb, and I look up to see the chairman leaning over the bannister at the top of the stairs. He’s dressed in his usual attire: white shirt, navy and silver tie, grey dress trousers and loafers. Immaculate as always. Our eyes meet just as he finishes his second summons and he says, “Hurry up, I need to see you in my office for a minute.” Here we go. Just take it on the chin, Craig, I tell myself, you’ve heard the stories — bigger and better players than you have had the Wee Jim treatment and survived to tell the tale. In fact, you should be honoured.

“Come in. Hurry up, close the door behind you,” he says, as he walks about 15ft to his leather chair behind his large wooden desk in front of the window that overlooked the main entrance to the stadium. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in his office. If his door was open, and it often was — sometimes strategically now that I think about it, then the chairman would often shout you in when he’d notice you passing by. Sometimes it would be just to have a bit of banter, check how you were settling into your digs, but often there would be questions. Where you were staying; who you were sharing a room with; if you had a girlfriend; if you were working hard in training. All questions he already knew the answers to but he asked them in a way that you knew he knew, and he was making sure you knew he knew!

On other occasions, it was after a game in which you knew you’d played well and while there would be an acknowledgement of that, the main reason would be to remind you that you were still nowhere near the first team. He’d ask what you thought of players that played in your position, what they did well, and if you thought you could either play alongside them or eventually take their place. Did you have what it took to be a Dundee United player? Tough questions for a 17-year-old to answer, but I had a mantra of sorts that I recited to myself during each of those early forays into Jim McLean’s office.

It was something that the first-team goalkeeper, Ally Maxwell, had said to a group of us youth players during a lunch break not long after we had signed as apprentices. Maxy had just finished his fish and beans and was holding court with four or five of us. He was telling stories from his time at Rangers, imparting football wisdom and basically shooting the shit with kids who hang on every word a first-team player says, when the chairman burst out of his office to put his plate in the dishrack.

“Thank you, Maureen, that was lovely,” he said to the cook. Then Maxy shouted over: “Is that you chairman, are you not having seconds today?” There were a few nervous looks around our table. We were all wondering what Maxy was thinking. When the chairman’s about, surely you keep your head down. The whole point is not to attract his attention, isn’t it? “Aye well, you’d know Maxwell. How many cups of coffee and slices of toast have you had the’day?” the chairman shot back. “I’m just talking to these young pups, chairman, giving them some advice. Sydney said he saw you with a plate of biscuits earlier,” Maxy replied.

Cue more nervous looks and everyone turning to stare at Syd. “Is that right?” The chairman stopped and his eyes settled on Chris Devine, aka Syd, our youth team’s top goalscorer who was “blessed” not only with a surname that warranted the obvious nickname but also with a rear-end similar in scale to King Kenny’s. Syd laughed nervously and held up both hands. “You’d know eh, Syd?” the chairman chuckled. “By the size of your arse, you’ve been eating them as well!” and then he disappeared through the adjoining door between his office and the kitchen.

When the laughter died down, Syd slumped in his chair and turned to Maxy. “Cheers for that, you absolutely killed me there.” We were all thinking the same thing: you can’t be having banter with Jim McLean! Maxy’s reply was simple. “Why not?” he smiled. “He’s only a man. He actually likes it when you have a laugh with him. Look him in the eye and talk to him, and he’ll respect you more for it.” Those words didn’t only resonate with me then but I have utilised Maxy’s piece of advice on almost every occasion when I’ve had to converse with anyone in a position of status above my own: “He’s only a man.”

However, on this occasion, the chairman asked the one question I dreaded over them all: “How do you think you played last night?” Oh no. Where do I go here? Do I sit with the fence right up my backside and stammer, “Erm, I wasn’t great chairman… alright… I mean, I suppose I could’ve done better, but… alright.” That’s a cop out, the answer I think he wants to hear, especially if he’s of the same opinion about my performance as the manager. Even though Tommy isn’t my favourite person right at this moment, he’s shown he has belief in me to play in his first team and, of course, he has my total respect. If I say I thought I played well, am I undermining his opinion? This is a minefield… I take a deep breath. He’s only a man. Shit. Here I go, Maxy. “I thought I played well, chairman…” He cuts me off before I can embarrass myself with embellishing that comment. “So did I,” he says with a smile. “But you need to work on your body position when you receive the ball from one side and you want to switch it out quickly to the other.” What? Did he just agree with me there? And was that a smile? Before I can process his response any further, he’s on his feet rolling a Mitre out from under his desk. I remember stupidly focusing on the ball and thinking, “Does Jim McLean always keep a football under his desk?”

He’s standing with a tasselled loafer-shod foot on top of the ball, pointing to an imaginary player. “See when the right back has the ball and you start to angle off to receive, you already need to have a picture in your head about everything else on the opposite side of the pitch. At the moment, you’re sometimes getting the pass with your body too square on and it’s taking you three or more touches to get it out your feet to switch the play,” and he demonstrates the somewhat laboured technique that I’ve been utilising thus far. I was a wiry, tenacious player such that I didn’t mind contact. So when I received the ball under pressure, more often than not I could manipulate it and my opponent while maintaining possession and usually complete my intended pass, but admittedly somewhat less economically than it could’ve been done.

“If you have the picture in your head and time your movement, you can take the pass with your left foot, then you can switch the ball with your right in two touches, every time,” he says, beckoning me to the far wall, then passing me the ball as he tucked the bottom half of his tie into his shirt. He gets me to play it in to him to demonstrate what he was talking about. I didn’t pass the ball in hard enough on the first occasion. “PLAY IT IN TO ME WITH PACE!” he demands, and then after a couple of demos we swapped places.

I took in every detail of what he was saying and I remember thinking: Wow. Actual Jim McLean has just taken time out of his day to give me a personal coaching session. In his office. It was surreal. All of a sudden, he says, “You’ve got to keep working on that,” rolls the ball back under his desk and sits down. “I heard oor Tom gave you a hard time last night, is that right?” he asks with a knowing grin. I answer with a shrug of my shoulders. “Yeah, but it’s alright, I know I’m in and about the first team now, so I should be better.” “You can fucking handle that,” he says. “He wants you in that first team and he wants you to stay in it. You’re doing okay, keep working hard. And by the way, if Tom asks, don’t tell him you were in here.” “Eh… okay, thanks chairman.”

There were many more visits to Jim McLean’s office over the following five years of his tenure and I wasn’t the only young player who felt the butterflies every time I was summoned. We didn’t know it, because we didn’t discuss it at the time, but he was having these little pep talks with almost every one of us. Often there was the fear that the experience may not be one you were going to enjoy, however it invariably consisted of being given a combination of advice, coaching points, motivation or a kick up the arse, the latter two of those being very similar. There was always a bit of banter or a question that had you scrambling or laughing nervously. Something that would test you. However, myself and the other young players of the time almost always left his office feeling like he cared. Yes, whisper it, Jim McLean cared about us. But he didn’t want that to become common knowledge. He would give us praise, with the caveat: “Don’t let on to anyone I told you that, I’ve got a reputation to live up to.”

I’m not naive enough to misapprehend that the version of Jim McLean we experienced was a chairman who, while still intent on controlling the culture and impacting the future talent of the football club he built, was a few years removed from the tough, exacting, innovative manager who players equally feared and respected. And there were enough glimpses that added meat to the bones of the tales told by United legends at awards dinners to keep us all on edge. The way he would sit menacingly in the front row of his glass-fronted executive box, positioned directly behind the dugout, before blowing the door wide open like a tornado and rushing halfway down the outside steps to berate an official for a bad decision. Or when he hid behind a tree while “out for a walk” in Camperdown Park to catch Steven Fallon attempting to take a short-cut on the dreaded “Hamburger Hill” run through the forest.

Compared to Dave Bowman, Paul Hegarty, Gary Bollan, Richard Gough et al, myself and the players I came through the ranks with definitely experienced Wee Jim Lite. However, reading and listening to his former charges pay tribute to him, regardless of their position on whether they liked him or not, there is one constant. Every one of them credits him with having a desire to improve them. I was extremely privileged to be among that fortunate fold, and to have one of the greatest football minds of all time take an interest in me when I was attempting to make my mark.

I only realise now how much of a subconscious influence he was and writing this piece has helped me to recognise the way in which he’s shaped many of my personal and footballing values and standards. Ultimately, his legacy lives on not only with Dundee United Football Club, but in all those players who are now coaches and managers in their own right. Ally Maxwell’s piece of advice helped allay my fears and somewhat busted the myth surrounding the great man, which allowed me to form a relationship of sorts. He was only a man. But what a man.

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No Scotsman, no party?

That is the current fear for fans of IK Sirius — the surprise package of this season in Sweden’s top division.

By Monday August 10, Sirius had played 16 matches in the 2026 Allsvenskan, winning 13 and drawing three, to be the only team in the 12 leagues of Europe who play calendar-year seasons to remain unbeaten.

The standout performer in the team — and the league — to that point was Scottish striker Robbie Ure, 22 (below), a product of the Rangers academy, where he was attached from the age of six until 19.

He moved from Rangers to Belgium to join Anderlecht’s reserves, playing one senior game before joining Sirius in March 2025 on a four-year deal.

He scored 11 goals in 30 league matches last year. Then — boom! — he scored 15 goals in his first 15 games this season before being sold to Sevilla in Spain for a Sirius club-record fee of €6.5million (£5.6m).

That was on August 11. At the time of his sale, Sirius had a double-digit points lead at the top of the table. Since then, they have lost three from four.

The first of those defeats was especially painful, against last season’s shock Swedish title winners Mjällby, who hail from what is effectively a village of 1500 people. Sirius were 3-0 up after 34 minutes but lost 4-3 via four second-half goals. The fans started getting restless.

Was this the first sign that with no Scotsman, there will be no Sirius title party after all? That remains to be seen.

Sirius then lost 3-0 at home to mid-table Häcken, and on Monday of last week, August 31, they lost 1-0 at home to Malmo. However, a single-goal victory at Västerås at the weekend established an eight-point gap over second-placed Hammarby.

There is still everything to play for, and still much to admire. In this first instalment of a series that hopes to highlight lessons that can be learned from smaller clubs punching above their weight in Europe, we will consider:

• Sirius’s recruitment policy, which has consistently led to identifying bright young talents that can be bought low and sold (relatively) high. This is partly driven by data.

• The football philosophy of the Sirius manager, Andreas Engelmark, 42, born in Pakistan and adopted by a Swedish couple, and now ploughing a successful furrow developing talent. Aged 26, he became a youth coach at Brommapojkarna, where he worked with players including Viktor Gyökeres and Dejan Kulusevski, before years in MLS with Columbus Crew before going back to Brommapojkarna, then Sirius last year.

• The core principles of Engelmark’s approach, and how in practical terms he implements them.

• The age profile of Sirius’s starting XIs, which are among the youngest in Sweden and indeed across top-flight teams in Europe.

We’ll consider all this with the help of Olof Lundh, a long-time friend of Sporting Intelligence who has spent decades reporting on football, at home and abroad, and is best known these days for this work on TV4.

Sirius’s recruitment policy

The recruitment policy in recent years at Sirius has attempted to focus on buying talented young players relatively cheaply, developing them as quickly as possible and selling at a profit to generate funds to do that again and again.

As Olof explains, one of the tools that Sirius uses is data product Goal Unit. Within that software is GoalUnit Fair Price, which is “a valuation model that estimates what a specific player would realistically sell for — based on performance data, club context, and financial specifics, not just transfer history.”

To stress: Sirius are a small Swedish club with a small budget and zero major trophies in their 119-year history. Sweden’s top league has traditionally been dominated by a few local giants, not least Malmö (24 top-flight titles), IFK Göteborg (18), IFK Norrköping (13), AIK (12) and Djurgårdens (12).

If we are to consider a comparison point in the Scottish Professional Football League, their average attendance of 9387 is closest to Dundee United’s (10,373) for season 2025-26 (source: transfermarkt). While the two clubs’ turnovers are also broadly similar (£11.6m to £10.5m for their last set of accounts), the efficacy of Sirius’ player trading model has allowed them to generate a profit of £2m for the year ending March 2026. Next year’s accounts is likely to be healthier still after the sale of Ure — and could also include a first league title in their history.

Considering the club’s five most profitable sales gives an idea of how their recent trading strategy has helped them.

1. Robbie Ure (Scottish striker). Bought in March 2025, age 21, for €750k from Anderlecht. Sold in August 2026 to Sevilla for €6.50m. Profit: €5.75m. This deal alone highlights how a young man rejected in Scotland was developed by an enlightened club in Sweden, who gave him his chance and then made a lot of money from him.

2. Yousef Salech (Danish forward). Bought in February 2024, age 22, for €500k from Brøndby. Sold in January 2025 to Cardiff for €4m. Profit: €3.50m.

3. Leo Walta (Finnish midfielder). Bought in March 2024, age 20, for €400k from Nordsjælland. Sold in July 2026 for €3.4m to Swansea. Profit: €3m.

4. Malcolm Jeng (Swedish defender). With Sirius since 2021, when he was 16. Sold for €2.5m to Stade Reims in 2025. Profit: €2.5m.

5. Tashreeq Matthews (South African winger). Hired in 2022, age 21, for nothing from Varbergs. Sold in 2024 to for €1.5m to Mamelodi Sundowns. Profit €1.5m.

Other players who have made Sirius profits of €1m+ in recent times include Kingsley Sarfo, Wessam Abou Ali and Jamie Roche.

The football philosophy of Andreas Engelmark

The football philosophy of Andreas Engelmark (below) centres on a clear “spelidé” (playing identity), based around a strong collective culture, player development, scenario-specific training, and an entertaining, proactive style rather than pure survival football.

Engelmark has spoken about a “shared culture as the foundation” of success, with everyone in the squad and on the staff fully buying into the common vision and environment. He has touched upon this in a podcast with Olof Lundh, who also points out that it hasn’t all been plain sailing. As recently as a year ago, Sirius were struggling near the bottom of the table and Engelmark’s job was briefly under threat.

But his methods paid dividends and he retains the view that if any player doesn’t buy into his ideas then “they don’t need to be here”.

Results are necessarily important but Engelmark wants Sirius to be entertaining as a matter of course, and focuses on that above survival.

Sirius’s youthful age profile

IK Sirius’s starting line-ups this season (Allsvenskan 2026) have typically had an average age of around 24, making them one of the youngest sides in the league. Starting XIs have variously been aged 23.4, 23.5, 23.8, 23.9 (multiple times), 24 (multiple times), 24.1, 24.2, 24.3 (multiple times), 24.4, and maxing out at 24.6.

The one other side with a clear age profile younger that Sirius is Engelmark’s former club, Brommapojkarna (aka BP, at circa 23.3). The Allsvenskan overall squad average age is around 25.2 years.

Engelmark’s practical application

Player development is a constant for Engelmark, rooted in his long background as a youth and academy coach at BP. He focuses on technical details, not least positioning and finishing in the box, as well as mental conditioning.

He advocates “purposeful training” in “play-to-win” sessions that aim to rehearse upcoming match scenarios at high intensity.

He also talks about “principles over systems”, not least consistent patterns of movement, positioning and collective behaviour that remain consistent even as the squad, by its nature, evolves all the time.

He has used 4-2-3-1 and an attacking 4-3-3, and analysis of Sirius under him shows dynamic, high-intensity play with quick transitions.

Tactical continuity is key, based on free-flowing attacks; on “system longevity” that can endure via heavy squad rotation; and on a controlled backline, anchored by captain Henrik Castegren and Tobias Anker, allowing a young offence to push forward.

Success? It’s academic

Olof Lundh says: “There are similarities between Mjällby and Sirius but also big differences. Sirius develops players and there is now continuity in this.

“They were away (from the top division) for more than 40 years before getting back to Allsvenskan in 2017 and are now in their 10th season.”

Olof highlights the scouting and data work that Sirius applies in countries across Europe, not least Scandinavia, citing Leo Walta’s acquisition as a prime example — hired from Nordsjælland in Denmark for €400k before being sold to Swansea for €3.4m this year. Olof was not surprised that Sirius sold Robbie Ure, because it was “a price that could be re-invested”.

As for Sirius’s medium and long-term future, Olof describes Uppsala as primarily a city (Sweden’s fourth largest, with a population of around 170,000) known for its educational establishments, especially Uppsala University, founded in 1477. The university is inherent to Uppsala’s culture, and the city does not have sport ingrained in it. While the club’s growing fanbase has been thrilled by this season as unlikely events have unfolded at the stadium Studenternas IP, Olof thinks it’s probably good that the football club can be left to do its own thing and develop in its own way.

And, maybe even win a title this season, Scotsman or not.

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By Stephen McGowan

By the end of tomorrow’s youth development summit in St Andrews, St Mirren chief executive Keith Lasley hopes to witness something as rare and unusual as a full eclipse of the sun. A unanimous show of hands among Scottish football clubs.

Between 9.30am and 3.30pm club owners, chairmen and chief executives will hear SFA chief football officer Craig Mulholland address the nation’s failure in the field of player production, before pitching their own views and ideas. Finger wagging, lectures or browbeating will be discouraged.

Recently promoted from the role of chief operating officer, Lasley has covered every base in Scottish football. He played over 400 games as a midfielder for Motherwell over two spells. Before he became a fixture in Premiership boardrooms, he did some coaching and, at the age of 46, he has been around the block often enough to know that persuading all 42 clubs to agree on anything at all is notoriously difficult.

The interests of Celtic and Rangers are not the same as those of St Mirren or Motherwell, just as the interests of St Mirren and Motherwell are not the same as Stenhousemuir’s or Stirling Albion’s. When club officials gather around the same table the question to the fore of most minds will be: ‘What’s in this for us?’

While a rule compelling clubs to field three under-21 players in every game might enhance Scotland’s hopes of reaching the knock-out stages of a World Cup finals, managers under pressure to reach the group stages of UEFA competitions might see less benefit to them.

In the Champions League play-off defeat to LASK Linz, only three Scots started for champions Celtic in a team filled with expensive Danes, Colombians, South Koreans, Germans, American internationals and Canadians. In their Conference League qualifiers, Motherwell started two, while Hibs started one. Unusually, Hearts won their play-off against Rapid Vienna with six Scots in Wouter Vrancken’s starting XI.

While most seem to agree that players between the age of 16 and 21 see nowhere near enough first-team minutes, doing something about it is fraught with difficulty.

“I feel — and maybe I am kidding myself on — that on the back of recent SFA reports and the new Scotland manager and European results there is a bit of momentum there to maybe find a consensus,” says Lasley, espousing an air of cautious optimism. “We need more of our own young players coming through for a number of reasons.

“So I want to come out that room and feel, firstly, that there is a general agreement that we need to do something here. And, secondly, that we have an action plan. A plan to say, ‘What are we going to do about it?’

“For me, that needs to be systematic. Whether that means mandating so many players in your matchday squad or incentivising clubs in monetary terms, we need one or two things that get all the clubs nodding around the table.

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“One of the problems in Scottish football is the different interests which exist within it. You can have loads of good ideas, loads of reports and then it comes to the crunch and it doesn’t really work.

“Look at most of the leagues around and most have mandated national player involvement rules or incentivisation or rules around how many non-national players are allowed in.

“I don’t want to say specifically what might happen, but I think there is an acknowledgement from everybody, whatever the size of the club, that we are not producing enough of our own players.

“The question is one of how do we get to something that helps with that?”

From the Ernie Walker group of 1995 to the Henry McLeish review of 2010, Scottish football has hosted more think tanks than the Adam Smith Institute.

Lasley sees all the problems first-hand in his working life. Scottish players in the crucial 16-21 transition phase see nothing like enough first-team minutes. Brexit has persuaded English teams, prohibited from signing 16-year-old players from Europe, to fish in Scottish waters instead. Paying minimal development fees, they offer young players and their families life-changing sums, longer contracts and more competitive games than they might get in Scotland.

Visas are another issue. Where England employs a points system to judge whether a player qualifies for a permit, the perception is that it’s harder to be knocked back for a governing body exemption in Scotland than it is to be waved through. Between 1998 and 2013, the old SPL mandated clubs to include at least three outfield players under the age of 21 in their 18-man matchday squad. Many treated the teenagers as ‘shirt fillers’ and the policy was quietly dropped.

Supporters working themselves into a frenzy over new foreign signings on deadline day have no tolerance for lectures on the need for their teams to blood young players. Neither, you suspect, do managers under pressure to win games in a 12-club Premiership.

“We can’t say, ‘Let’s do another report’ because we have the reports, we know the problems,” says Lasley. “What we need is a timescale from, maybe, the start of next season to get something implemented.

“I don’t think we need to go straight to go. And, with the best will in the world, I don’t think we will. But I want to come out of that room this week with something. An idea. If it’s incentivisation, let’s go and study how we do it, what do we do and what are the options that we can implement from the start of next season.”

Incentives might see central grassroots funding handed down with specific provisos. The money might be allocated on the basis of first-team minutes for young players. Whether that would really make any difference to clubs with multi-million-pound turnovers like Celtic (£143million) and Rangers (£94m) is a tough question to answer.

“I am convinced now that it needs to be systematic,” says Lasley. “If it’s optional measures and you leave them to the players or the managers or the boards at each club then, personally, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere fast. There needs to be more than a new Scotland manager appointment to fix things.

“Having spoken to Craig (McLeish) about this I think that is there among managers. And I do feel it within the clubs as well. It’s the strongest feeling I have certainly felt and while I am not the longest-serving CEO by any means, I do feel as if it’s the greatest consensus there has been.

“I wouldn’t promise anyone that anything will change for sure — I have learned enough to know that. But I definitely feel as if there is at least the recognition that we need to do something.

“What that looks like I don’t know and I don’t want to speculate. But from a St Mirren perspective, we would be fully supportive of exploring that.”

Last year, the 503^rd CIES Football Observatory post ranked teams from 65 leagues around the world according to the percentage of domestic league minutes played by footballers aged 21 or under in season 2024-25.

Owned by the City Group, Lommel SK in Belgium gave 69.4% of their first-team minutes to players under 21. The top-three teams in Europe’s big-five leagues were Strasbourg, Barcelona and Stade de Reims.

The picture in Scotland was less rosy. Top of the table were Dundee, a club who rewarded manager Tony Docherty’s willingness to giving 24.8% of his first-team minutes to under-21 players with a P45. Motherwell were second in the table, with 20.6%, while St Mirren were rock-bottom of the 12 teams with 0.8%.

The Paisley club recently published a new strategy document called ‘Our Progression’, laying out their targets and goals for the future. Intent on being the best community-centred development club in Scotland, giving kids a chance is central to that aim.

“There are two ways of doing it,” explains Lasley. “You either have a system which is incentivised and makes it happen. Or alternatively, it happens thanks to a crisis. That’s what happened to me. It was a Motherwell administration, essentially, that gave the likes of me and Steven Hammell and Stephen Pearson and James McFadden and David Clarkson a chance.

“Some of those guys had half-decent careers and when I look back it was administration that really accelerated that. There is always the chance that we would have made it through anyway. But I think it definitely accelerated the number of us who came through around the same time.

“So sometimes it can be an event like that which forces the issue and then, suddenly, you’re saying, ‘Oh, we do have some good young players.’ Or, in a more positive sense, it’s part of a strategic plan. History shows you that, generally, it is one of the two.”

In contrast with 2002, Motherwell are now one of the clubs St Mirren want to emulate. Selling Lennon Miller to Udinese for a record fee, the Steelmen also made decent money on Elijah Just, Elliot Watt, Callum Ward and Theo Bair. Utilising data, the Fir Park club have made equally impressive managerial appointments and are now using the fruits of that strategy to build new training facilities at Dalziel Park.

“Motherwell have been a shining example in the last couple of years,” says the St Mirren CEO. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but they have raked in substantial sums in the last couple of years. And you have to ask yourself: ‘What other way is there?’”

While St Mirren have nudged season ticket sales up over 4000 and increased commercial revenue, Lasley sees player production as the next step.

“Motherwell have set a really good example for all of the clubs of what best practice looks like and kudos to everyone there. From boardroom to dressing room there does seem to be clear alignment in how they are going about things.

“We are maybe not quite at that stage yet but that is our plan — to try and execute what they do on a similar level.”

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Today’s Part I is free, but most of our content is paid.

By Stephen McGowan

On a whitewashed wall facing the entrance to St Mirren’s Marbill Coaches Stadium is a black plaque. Inscribed in large letters is the date 27 July 2021, a significant landmark in the club’s history. As the lines underneath make clear, that was the day Buddies fans took ownership of the club and set about safeguarding its future.

A recent study by Off The Pitch, the football intelligence platform which publishes data on club finances, player values and salaries, declared the Paisley outfit the eighth-most financially sustainable club in Europe.

While Celtic’s fixation with sustainability drives their supporters to distraction, the Scottish champions led a top 10 also featuring Brann, Silkeborg, Napoli, Manchester City, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. St Mirren managed to nudge ninth-placed Serie A club Atalanta and French giants Lille down the list.

“It’s pleasing when you see that,” admits chief operating officer Keith Lasley. “I would be lying if I said it wasn’t. It’s not patting-yourself-on-the-back time, nothing like it, but it is good to see us mentioned in that sort of company. Some of those football clubs are very well established and mature in the way they are run. So for us to be mentioned in that company is pleasing.”

St Mirren’s place in the Off The Pitch top 10 is no accident. Like so many clubs up and down Britain, the Paisley outfit confront rising player salaries, increased operating costs and inflationary pressures on a daily basis. In a never-ending cost-of-living crisis items relentlessly rise in price and, to make supporters aware of the problems the club face, St Mirren recently published a strategy document called ‘Our Progression’.

Their goal is to become ‘the best community-centred development club in Scotland’ after St Mirren Independent Supporters Association (SMiSA) worked in conjunction with Paisley-based social enterprise Kibble to purchase a majority stake in the club from former owner Gordon Scott.

Answerable to the 1624 members of SMiSA, the club subsequently released the strategy document building upon the progress which saw them beat Celtic for their first major trophy in 12 years in last season’s Premier Sports Cup Final.

“Sustainability has to be one of the realities of being a fan-owned club,” explains Lasley. “What we have done in the last three or four years has been success for this football club. Top-six finishes, winning a national trophy and doing that while not losing money.

“The norm in this industry has now become that you lose a significant amount of money operationally. But a fan-owned club that doesn’t have a benefactor to underwrite that loss can’t operate like that. We need to compete on a break-even basis and that, in itself, in this day and age is actually an achievement in itself…

“So, yeah, hopefully on and off the park we have shown discipline and a plan which has borne some fruit.”

From time to time, the harvest has been less fruitful. The price of winning the League Cup was the loss of their previous manager Stephen Robinson to Aberdeen after three consecutive top-six finishes. By the time he left, the club were already battling to steady the ship after a choppy run of results in the SPFL Premiership.

Interim boss Craig McLeish survived a two-legged relegation play-off against Partick Thistle to preserve the club’s top-flight status, securing the job on a permanent basis. The club’s former academy chief has since overseen a significant turnover of staff and a change to the style of play. The robust, direct football of before has been softened and, after three games, Saints sit second in the Premiership with seven points from a possible nine. Only an added-time equaliser from Motherwell stripped them of a 100% record.

“Listen, there have been some tricky times in there,” adds Lasley. “You don’t need to look too far back to the play-off last season and the tricky times we had around then.

“But as St Mirren we are going to have some bumps along the way. It’s never going to be a linear journey. It’s just not, given the clubs we are up against.

“But there is a plan there, there is a real alignment around the plan and the latest document was almost an update on the core strategy.

“I am into my fifth season now and one of the things I identified when I came in was that it was very disparate. It was very silo in nature from the boardroom to the fan ownership to SMiSA to first-team operations to academy operations — and it all felt as if someone had to say, ‘Listen, we need joined-up thinking.’

“A plan, essentially, and a bit of strategy which asked: Who are we? What are we doing? How are we trying to do it and why? And that’s when we launched our first strategy three years ago now called ‘Our Purpose’. We then fast forward into ‘Our Progression’, which is the latest document.

“When everything is going well, a plan is great. The hard part comes when the pressure hits and you lose three games in a row. You need to be strong. And it’s in those moments that a plan is most important.”

Key to the delivery of the plan is keeping supporters informed, a basic trick some clubs find inexplicably difficult to get right. A few miles up the M8 from Paisley, Celtic continue to draw flak for the lack of a two-way conversation with their own paying customers. When an information vacuum develops, people are quick to fill it with scuttlebutt and inaccuracies, and Lasley would prefer to let supporters hear what’s going on from the club themselves via fan engagement events and strategic reports.

“Football is essentially a game of incomings and outgoings. And those outgoings have progressively crept up and up and up. Whether it’s wage inflation driven by English clubs going for the same players as us and making them cost more; or some of the things we can’t control like national insurance rises, utilities, stewarding, police costs.

“You go through all of the costs you need to run a football club and they have all significantly increased. The job at the club then is to commercially keep up. And keep up on the football side of things. Outwith your core operation, things like player trading become so important.

“We want to be ambitious. We are not putting a document out just to say, ‘Aw things are tough.’ We don’t have the backstop of a benefactor, whereas some of the clubs we are competing with in the league do. That’s allowed and it happens but we just don’t have that.

“So, yeah, we need to update the fans on how tough it is getting. But we also want to retain that ambition and fire to keep pushing forward.

“Hopefully that is what the document does. And maybe you do set yourself up for a kick in the you-know-whats by setting out your targets but you have to believe. You have to believe that it’s the right thing to do, and over the medium to long term it will bear fruit.”

Lasley meets Nutmeg in the midst of a transfer window where the club have made nine new signings. As he speaks, speculation continues to surround the future of midfielder Killian Phillips after a strong start to the season and an unsuccessful approach from Aberdeen. For a football CEO, the end of a window can be a busy, unsettling and potentially frustrating few days.

“Every club has their own goals. We had a change of manager with Craig taking over in the summer,” says Lasley. “We knew there would be a big turnover with a change of style, a change of shape and a change of player profile with a lot of comings and goings.

“So we have had a pretty busy summer. We have brought a number in to date and expect to do a little bit more, both ins and outs. Gavin Miller has come in as head of recruitment from Motherwell and has really hit the ground running. Every day it’s about communication with a football board involving me, Gavin, the manager and others — and communication and alignment are key in a window.

“Any decision we make has gone through the same process. We want to make the club as systematic and as process-driven as possible. You need to be ready to react because someone can come in for a player tomorrow. Killian Phillips, for example, has had a great start to the season and we were never rushing him out of the door. He’s a character as well and I think you see that on the pitch.

“We are a development club and we know that our best players are going to get interest and you just need to be ready to deal with that when it comes along.

“But it’s always a balance between the value of the asset and their value to the team and what that might bring you in terms of a higher finish in the league.

“We want St Mirren to be a club which has a plan in place for any eventuality.”

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Nutmeg Issue 41 is out now. Click on the cover image to buy or…

A new issue of Nutmeg magazine is here - 196 beautiful print pages featuring the very best writing and photography on our game.

This is the Captains Issue - hear from the men and women who wear the armband, and from those who follow them across the white line. Leadership. Example. Integrity. Karaoke. These are stories to make you stand on your desk and exclaim: O Captain, My Captain!

Find out more and buy your copy here. Or…

By Alison McConnell

“You think he’s mad now? Wait until we win him over… He’ll. Be. Furious.”

This line from Ted Lasso, from all the way back in the opening episode of the first series, could well apply to anyone paying attention to the latest instalment of the critically acclaimed television drama. Those invested in any passing way in the women’s game and taking note of the daily, accumulative inequities can only be aggrieved.

After a three-year pause, coach Lasso has been enticed to return from his Kansas supermarket checkout to take charge of the fictional Lady Greyhounds, AFC Richmond’s second division women’s team. What isn’t fictional is the serious imbalance that impacts the women’s game and its growth, and the challenges that players are faced with on a daily basis.

Indeed, the very first interaction between Lasso and his team takes place in their crappy dressing room, a cramped space with one shower and one toilet that they share on some days — “but on Tuesdays and Thursdays we get to keep our toiletries overnight” — with the club’s youth academy side.

By the end of the second episode, the women have been upgraded. A successful pitch for the away men’s team changing room means they are left delighted with a place that feels positively luxurious in comparison. Any sugary-sweet intonations, though, are rebuffed with an immediate scene questioning the “long-term viability” of the women’s team. That will resonate loudly on these shores.

For those who baulk at the subject matter, knee-jerking to denounce this fourth season as ‘woke’, the Ted Lasso tone remains; it is light, quirky and fully on-brand. It always was an antidote to toxic masculinity.

For Stef McLoughlin, head of commercial at Glasgow City, bringing these issues into living rooms up and down the country is also notable.

“Making these issues mainstream and making people think about things in a different way is always going to be helpful,” she said. “I have always felt that women’s football has a very values-driven audience which is why I think that showing the inequities is so good.

“That whole conversation about where to play, fundraising for kits and scouring constantly for resources is something that I don’t think too many people really grasp.

“Whenever the Euros is on or in the aftermath of a big tournament like that there can be a flux of activity but the reality is that women’s football attracts quite a cult following. Clubs need to work super-hard to get investment and bring people to the table.

“In episode 3 of this season, there is a conversation about a game being ‘just a friendly.’ It is never just a friendly for women. Failure is never an option for women. There is this constant, desperate need for growth. And this exhausting fight over why it matters.

“The fact that it is the top-performing Apple TV show at the minute brings these conversations to a very mainstream audience. It gives the women’s game the chance to push to be part of mainstream culture. It is a golden opportunity to educate people on the realities involved in the women’s game. Anything that pushes the profile can only be of benefit.”

Most tellingly, it is not just the lack of investment that the show portrays but the lack of belief in the women’s game. There is disparity in the tangibles — the kit, the money, the pitches, the resources — but in the narratives, too. The tentative nature of investors and the constant, draining fight for visibility.

There is also, inevitably, a nod to what any woman who plays football, is involved in football or is an advocate of football absorbs daily. “Welcome back, coach,” a passer-by says to Lasso on his return to the club. “Too bad you’re coaching a bunch of girls. You wanker.”

For those with preconceived ideas about what women’s football is, its relevance and its right to exist, a TV show is unlikely to significantly change their point of view. But cultural changes are slow. And bringing these conversations to an audience that isn’t just a niche female football audience but a discerning mainstream crowd is a golden opportunity.

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Parading with altogether less ceremony, locals later followed the same route in great strides, their heads raised as if magnetised towards the stadium’s blazing floodlights. There was purpose in their movements, a form of matchday deportment that said: “This one matters.” Here was not some humdrum league game against a side they would meet at least twice more this season; Freiburg were something else, Europe was something richer. This was a silk fixture in a world of sackcloth.

At the ground they queued on Fir Park Street and around the Davie Cooper Stand, a hungry army awaiting the sustenance kick-off would bring. Sunshine visited at last and predictions were swapped, from “I’ve got a sneaky feeling” to “Gubbed.” Old pals greeted one another, glints and grins restored because they were here and it mattered. Kids yanked mums towards turnstiles and teenagers felt a million miles from double maths first thing tomorrow. Community in its sparky difference is alive and well beneath our pylons.

All climbed their steps and found Fir Park resplendent and tuneful, a rowdy sanctuary. In the East Stand, Motherwell’s Block E ultras group had turned set designers and contrived a terrific drop scene worthy of any great theatre. Giant pennants marking past European ties were hoisted from the rafters, and a long banner greeted the players as they strolled onto the pitch. ‘Write your name in history’, it said, ‘go further than those before you’. It and the gorgeous racket which crescendoed at kick-off sprinkled goosebumps upon the terminally numb.

Motherwell started as if they had taken the banner to be an instruction. After one minute, Emmanuel Longelo acquired possession on the touchline just shy of halfway and pushed the ball inside to Joe Hodge. Longelo then sprinted through the claret and amber tickertape now littered on the pitch, a boy running among autumn leaves. Hodge relocated Longelo deliciously and the wandering left-back scooted towards the penalty area. The crowd roared him on, first with parental encouragement and then feverish belief. Surely tonight couldn’t be this easy? Longelo proceeded without interruption, pushed the ball into the box and then — somehow, as if a wand had been tapped — Regan Charles-Cook rolled it into the net.

What noise the goal unleashed. What primal, evangelical glee. The earth seemed to move. It was enough to restoke the furnaces of Ravenscraig. In the Main Stand, guttural acclamations seemed to rebound from the rafters. Men who never kissed their wives in public embraced each other and didn’t care who noticed. Kids danced and then stared agog as their dads climbed on seats. Over in Block E, human dodgems made happy bedlam and pies flew. This fans’ club — this town’s club — had a moment to smile about forevermore.

Bewildered, the players of Freiburg staggered back towards the halfway line. Many looked as though they had just seen something they shouldn’t have. “We’re all going on a European tour” chorused the delirious of Fir Park. Yet the Germans composed themselves rapidly, snow settling after an avalanche. Moving rhythmically, they passed the ball around Motherwell and connived half-chances.

The Steelmen did not wilt. Home goalkeeper Alex Paulsen caught, parried and commanded. His outfield teammates hunted down opponents ravenously and blocked vehemently. Freiburg, though, were swarming. Only a quarter of the game had passed and it felt as though Motherwell were defending their lead during the final minutes of the second-leg. Meanwhile on the electronic hoardings, an advert for Well’s Christmas party offering flashed gaudily. It was enjoyable to imagine a drinker watching in a Freiburg bierkeller, wiping away his frothy moustache and asking: “‘Barry Chisholm singer and entertainer.’ Was ist das?”

Increasingly, the articulate feet of Yuito Suzuki flummoxed Motherwell. The Japan international seemed to skate across the turf. Left-winger Derry Scherhant was similarly masterly. After 25 minutes, he lulled from Motherwell’s Tawanda Maswanhise a galumphing challenge just outside the area. Scherhant coiled the resulting free-kick into the box where centre-half Matthias Ginter waited. Ginter, sporting the haircut of a freshly unboxed Action Man, hopped and headed in. There came from the stands sighs at this inevitable equaliser, but they were soon trounced by defiant song. All evening, just as the Motherwell players clung to passing principles where brutish stuff would have been understandable, their supporters kept their hymnbooks close by and applauded with flamenco levels of enthusiasm.

Any negativity was reserved for referee Radu Petrescu. Although the lengthy VAR delay which followed the opening goal could not be blamed on him, Petrescu was the public embodiment of this pox on football. At other times, he awarded fussy free-kicks and seemed to be attempting to speak through his whistle, blowing in piercing syllables like some Pingu dressed in sanitary blue. Petrescu was not helped by his heavy running style, which resembled that of a man dashing for a bus while carrying four bags of Lidl shopping. In truth, even if he was favouring the German side as many at Fir Park alleged, they did not need his help. For the rest of the half they settled into dominance, their supremacy matched by home stubbornness.

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As the sun fell at the start of the second half, it daubed a pale orange colour upon the top tier of the Tommy McLean Stand and the highest windows of the tower blocks beyond the stadium — ghostly flames of the old Motherwell reawakened. Stirring too were the home side, now dashing forward and harrying with renewed vigour. While they could not reward their followers with a goal, there was some compensation when Niklas Beste received a booking. From the stands they jeered with shameful joy (someone should invent a word for it) as Beste — wearing the scraggly demeanour of an outdoor pursuits instructor into The Levellers — received his telling off.

The booking proved to be a rare moment of second-half levity. On the hour mark, Croatia’s Igor Matanović — gliding around with menace — nudged the ball to Suzuki. He dummied deftly and slotted Yannik Engelhardt through on goal. Centre-half Martin Moorman missed with a left-handed grab at Engelhardt’s back but connected with a second, right-handed swipe. Engelhardt then seemed to clip his own ankle. Whatever the true cause of his descent, he was soon sprawled on the turf like a cat on a newspaper. There followed another VAR adjournment at the end of which Moorman’s yellow card was upgraded to a red. Ginter planted the penalty beyond Paulsen and everyone knew in the way that supporters do that the game was already over.

For half an hour Freiburg pushed the ball around, their football controlled rather than concerted. A hooter blown by a child that in the first half added to the atmosphere now sounded like a forlorn horn belonging to a street busker with no coins in his hat. Everything drifted and the players became flotsam. The match they now served hit a Morse Code pattern: Pass. Pass pass pass. Shot. Block. Whistle. Whistle whistle. Corner. Header. Goal. Whistle whistle whistle.

Those final dots and dashes were cruel on Motherwell. Yet Keisuke Gotō’s goal to make it 1-3 was instantly forgotten by those who dream in claret and amber. What they will remember are those first minutes, when it felt like they could reach up and touch the sky.

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This week, it was announced that the Tennent’s Sixes will return to Scottish football in October after a 33-year absence. The last team to win the tournament was Partick Thistle. Here, their former striker Gerry Britton takes us inside the Jags’ improbable trophy lift.

By Gerry Britton

In 2023, when I was still working at Partick Thistle as chief executive, somebody mentioned that it had been 30 years since we won the Tennent’s Sixes. So, we had a wee night at Firhill. Gerry Collins came along and we got four or five of the players too. We were jokingly saying: “This is the last national trophy Thistle won. It was the League Cup final in 1971… and this!”

We got about 100 fans and it was a Q&A with the players. Everybody talked about their recollections of the night, but more about their Thistle careers. The guys that turned up were all good theatre… big Davie Irons, Paul Kinnaird telling great Jim McLean stories. It was a top night. We even tracked down the Tennent’s Lager ladies (from the above photo). One of them, June (centre left), is Derek Johnstone’s other half — she came along with her daughter. I actually got in touch with the other girl, but she couldn’t make it.

As part of the pre-event publicity, me, Davie Irons and Andy Murdoch went to the Tennent’s brewery and got our pictures taken with the trophy. The fact that we had a reunion for winning a sixes competition is so Partick Thistle, you know?

The hero of the tournament was big Paul McLaughlin. I don’t know how many goals he scored, but you would just give the ball to him and he would shoot from anywhere. Paul wasn’t the most mobile player but he had a great strike on his left foot and getting him in front of goal was far easier in a tight environment like the Tennent’s Sixes. We had other guys like Kinnaird, George Shaw, Ian Cameron and big Irons — who was so fit and could run all day. We were set up for a six-a-side team.

I loved it because you got so many shots at goal. You had to leave two players up in the opposition half, so you knew you were going to get five or six shots during every game. And because of the rules, you couldn’t even track back. So I was shouting, “Sorry, I cannae mark him, I’ve got to stay up here!” Brilliant.

I think the tournament was on a Sunday and Monday. Imagine saying that to players now: “Monday night, lads, we’re playing six-a-side. Indoors.” Not a chance! I remember John Lambie saying: “I’m not fucking going.” He was trying to make out that it was because it was on a Sunday and he was God-fearing. A lot of shite. He just couldn’t be arsed going, and he sent big Gerry Collins. It was only when we won it and went back in that Lambie tried to take credit for it even though he wasn’t there.

I had played for Celtic in the tournament a couple of years before that, and I remember Nottingham Forest came up. Brian Rice told me that they were staying in the old Albany, which is the Hilton now. He said that Brian Clough was walking them along to the SECC and took them into the Montrose Bar on the Broomielaw, where they all had three or four pints before the tournament! Other English teams came up for it too — it was box office.

It was a great atmosphere and the games were fast and furious. It was brilliant for families — all the Celtic and Rangers fans sat together. Keeping possession was important. If you went a goal up, it was vital that you got the ball into the opposition half and kept it, otherwise it would become like a basketball game.

The pitch? It was more painted concrete than 3G! I remember a couple of times tiles would come up, and they said, “Ah, right, okay, hold on a minute guys. We’ll just try and fix this tile.”

The other thing I remember was the night out after it. We went to the Savoy nightclub in Glasgow city centre. On a Monday night. I wouldn’t recommend it. We all ended up in there getting our Tennent’s tankards filled up behind the bar!

I’m glad to see it back, although it’s a shame that Thistle aren’t part of it. There’s a few of the boys who would still be more than capable of playing… but I’m not one of them!

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Partick Thistle legend Gerry Britton is now COO of the incredible charity Street Soccer Scotland. Their free Women’s Festival, next week in Glasgow, is open to people of all ages, backgrounds and fitness levels. Join them for a day of Zumba, football, ice cream, a live DJ and the chance to meet new people!

Hello!

We’ve just sent Issue 41 off to the printers and we’re incredibly excited to get it into the hands of our subscribers.

This time, the theme of the issue is captaincy and we have some incredible stories across our 196 elegant pages.

analyses Scotland’s World Cup deficiencies and ponders what comes next.

goes deep into the woodlands of the Scottish Borders to re-discover a pitch built for just a single day’s tournament.

goes inside the Tartan Army takeover of Fenway Park.

explains why Villa captain John McGinn’s European exploits prove he’s much more than a backside.

Mark Wilson interviews five players who pay tribute to their instrumental skippers, including Willie Miller, Paul Hegarty, Norrie McCathie, Richard Gough and Klaus Augenthaler.

If you’re already a subscriber, Issue 41 will be with you around September 7.

If you’re not a subscriber, it’s never been easier to join.

Grab an ‘annual’ Nutmeg season ticket via the button below.

With Glaswegian Robbie Ure making his multi-million Euro transfer to Sevilla, we reissue an article from Nutmeg Issue 35 about Rangers cult hero Ted McMinn’s trailblazing but doomed switch to the same club in 1987.

The latest edition of Nutmeg Magazine has just been sent to the printers. To subscribe, choose ‘Annual’ below — and it will be dropping through your letterbox in early September.

By Stephen Walsh

The publishers of Ted McMinn’s autobiography came up with a wizard marketing wheeze — a reversible cover that allows it to be displayed from either side. Pick up the book — titled The Tin Man — in Argyle Street Waterstones and Ted will be on the front in the CR Smith Rangers shirt. In WH Smith in Derby, however, the other side will be on display. The Tin Man has turned Tin Ram, and is in Autowindscreens white.

It does mean that shorter stop-offs in McMinn’s journeyman career are not referenced. Not his beginnings at his near-enough hometown club, Queen of the South. Not Burnley (where, from my uncle’s seat in the Bob Lord Stand, I once saw him score when visiting my East Lancs cousins). And certainly not his exotic stay with the rojiblancos of Sevilla, where for a season and a half in the 1980s he was a pioneering Scottish football export.

McMinn went to Sevilla primarily because his former manager Jock Wallace did. By then, Wallace had had his two spells as Rangers manager — the successful 1970s version, when he dragged Rangers out of the nine-in-a-row shadow of the Lisbon Lions, and the 1980s edition, when he managed McMinn. That second coming turned out to be the archetypal never-go-back scenario. He dragged them back into the shadow, this time of Aberdeen, and got the sack.

Booted out of his spiritual home, this Scottish manager of a dinosaur school hardly known for its cosmopolitan tendencies somehow landed the managerial gig at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán. When McMinn was unceremoniously booted out of Ibrox a few months later, Wallace signed him for the peseta equivalent of £200,000. And so begins the story of a season or two in the sun for two of the unlikeliest tourists ever to put their footballing handbags in the middle of the dance-floor and give it the full Y Viva España.

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Wallace died in 1996, aged just 60, and one suspects he might have struggled with the arm-around-the shoulder requirements of modern football management. Ally McCoist calls him “the hardest man I ever met” (Wallace once decked him with a right hook during a pre-season training camp in Switzerland). Gary Lineker “encountered” him at Leicester City. At half-time in a reserve match, Wallace made a beeline for the rookie striker, raising him up the dressing-room wall by the throat and calling him “a lazy wee English c**t”. Leicester were two up, by the way, and Lineker had scored both goals.

Wallace kept goal for the Wee Rangers when they beat the Big Ones at Shielfield in the 1967 Scottish Cup, but his coaching aura originated not in his playing career but in his military service in what the papers invariably called “the jungles of Malaya”. His trademark training sessions were endless shuttle-runs on Murder Hill, the sand-dunes at Gullane. These were famously punishing, with the salt-smell of the sea slowly supplanted by the saltier whiff of young men’s vomit. “I’ve got the battle fever on,” was his favourite slogan, and the military metaphors played well with the Ibrox faithful.

So did the results, which were spectacular. Having coached the Willie Waddell team that won the Cup Winners’ Cup, he took over as manager in his own right. He won the Cup in Rangers’ centenary season, the League (their first flag for 11 years) in ’74/75, and the treble twice. He then suddenly resigned, refusing until he died to divulge why. His reasons remain an enduring 1970s sporting mystery, up there with what happened to Shergar and the true identity of the masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki.

After Leicester, and a short period at Fir Park, Wallace was lured back to Ibrox in 1983. He was not the first choice. In time-honoured Old Firm fashion, Rangers had tried to sign the opposition’s best talent, but neither Alex Ferguson nor Jim McLean was willing to play ball with a club still loaded with debt from the post-Disaster stadium remodel. In desperation they turned to Wallace, hoping to wind the clock back. Performances in Wallace’s second term proved feeble.

On the odd occasion when things were going right, such as the 1984 League Cup final, Wallace carried himself as if they weren’t. That day he harassed the on-field reporter, making the hapless shortie-raincoat boy chase him across Hampden in search of the post-match platitudes. Every time the boy caught up with him, Wallace bawled him out on live TV. “COME ON!” As the boy waited for a signal, Wallace harumphed. “HURRY UP, MAN!” “Were you confident when it went to extra-time?” “I WIZ CONFIDENT BEFORE IT STARTED, SON,” Wallace says, and strides off.

Only 40,000-odd turned up for that final (an Old Firm clash which Rangers won 3-2) and that was widely regarded as a better-than-expected turnout. The next season there was further dwindling. Between October and April Rangers won only a handful of times. They finished fourth in the purgatorial ten-team league that was the first iteration of the SPL, and Wallace was sacked in April 1986.

*

McMinn was one of the headline acquisitions of Wallace’s second stay. Not a marquee signing, perhaps, but at least a family-sized tent. Rangers got him from Queen of the South, who had nabbed him from the junior side Glenafton for £325 and 1,000 half-time lottery tickets for the next match at Palmerston. The Queens board had dispensed with the manager and the chairman was picking the team; not surprisingly, McMinn’s transfer to Rangers was presented to him rather than discussed with him.

As a part-time sawmill worker on £20 a week, McMinn had turned down various other clubs to stay near home and to combine work and football. But Rangers’ offer was good (the tyrannical chairman got £100,000 for his new stand, and McMinn got £250 a week) for a player who had not convinced everyone of his genius. When he announced he’d signed for Rangers at the sawmill, the foreman asked him what the f*** he’d want to go to Berwick for.

McMinn tin-manned his way around Ibrox reasonably successfully for 18 months or so until his mentor Wallace was replaced by Graeme Souness in the summer of 1986. His stiff-legged running became a metaphor for the dead wood Souness was trying to clear out. “How can I tell Ted McMinn what to do when he doesn’t know what he’s going to do himself?” was his exasperated cry. Rangers won the league in 1986/87, but McMinn didn’t play enough games to qualify for a medal.

McMinn helpfully directed himself towards the revolving door with a series of “incidents”. A fight in a nightclub in East Kilbride was followed by a ruckus in Shawlands, shoulder to shoulder with McCoist and Ian Durrant. Durrant’s role was unspecified, but McCoist showed what he’d learned from Wallace by knocking a dentist’s front teeth out, while McMinn chased the victim down the road and up the stairs into a police station.

It was not his finest moment, as he says himself in the Rangers half of his choose-your-own-adventure autobiography. Pished, they hadn’t noticed that the dentist’s teeth were false and that McCoist’s punch was not the slam-dunk he had imagined. The rope McMinn had given Souness to string him up with was real enough, however, and, after one last curfew-break, his days at Ibrox came to an end in a foul-mouthed showdown with the manager.

*

Bring on Spaniards by the score... So went a chunk of a popular song we would all sing at Hampden in the 1970s and 1980s. It never occurred to us for a moment that the Spaniards might want to bring on even one Jock Wallace.

Wallace, after all, was almost in the Jim McLean class in terms of inexpressive dourness, while Sevilla was a glamour destination of sorts. A World Cup venue in 1982 (and the city where David Narey toe-poked Jimmy Hill into a different Tartan Army song), it was host city for the 1986 Steaua-Barcelona European Cup final, when the Romanian goalie’s performance in the penalty shootout hastened the fall of Communism.

Add to that the strangeness of someone so rooted in the Rangers “tradition” going overseas, especially to Catholic Spain. Wallace’s mantra (“It’s never been sectarian as far as I’m concerned”) was typical of the time, and covered a multitude of signing policies. Wallace was blue to the tip of his nose, and the joke that did the rounds was that Sevilla was the one place in the world where he would find more Orangemen than on the Copland Road.

Spanish football in the era of President Felipe González was an odd beast too. According to Antonio González, in the late 1980s it was 80 per cent politics and 20 per cent sport. The Franco era’s deep oppositions and regional imbalances were not so long dead, and the Galactico era at Real (which in González’s view reversed those percentages) was not yet a twinkle in Florentino Pèrez’s eye.

And compared with the declining tedium of the Scottish club set-up in the 1980s, the Spanish liga was sometimes properly loca. La Liga was the league in which Johan Neeskens was sold by Barcelona because he didn’t pass the toilet paper to the club president; where Real’s Santillana, named after a seaside resort, was kicked around the Bernabéu so hard his doctors thought he had lost a kidney; and where El Carnicero, the Butcher of Bilbao, broke Maradona’s leg with a single kick of which Tam Forsyth would have been proud.

Sevilla were regarded as southern softies compared with such Basque hard cases. Founded by two Scots “after the consumption of some small beer” on Burns Night 1905, the club has a Scottish connection, but the impetus for the appointment originated further south. Terry ‘El Tel’ Venables had just tickled the sleeping giant Barcelona awake, while John Toshack had dressed up the Cinderellas of Sociedad. Doing things the British way was in vogue down La Liga way.

The Sevilla fans had no idea who ‘Jock’ was, however. Its popularity as a character name in B Westerns meant that ‘Jock’ was perceived as cowboy rather than Scottish, so Wallace’s first nickname was El Sheriff de Sevilla, come to clean up a team that had been flatlining for several years. The fans’ lack of knowledge was echoed by Wallace’s own ignorance of his squad. At his first training session he “robustly” chastised one of the squad for a lack of effort, only to be told that the player in question was actually the club masseur.

He started poorly. He lost his first derby to Betis, lost a lifetime’s worth of tactics notebooks in a theft from his car, and lost some of the fans for his perceived neglect of their rising stars. His board was encouraging him to “Buy British”, as if it was a Mini Metro he was shopping for. He wanted Robert Fleck and ended up making an offer for Ted McMinn. McMinn was not sure, but Chick Young made up his mind by buying him a ticket to Andalucia in exchange for an exclusive.

Wallace clearly wasn’t that sure either. When he met McMinn at the airport he shoved him into the back of his Opel and told him to put a blanket over his head. The Sevilla chairman thought £200,000 was a lot of money to spend on someone the Spanish media were calling a thug, but Wallace defended his player. “He’s an honest lad. He’s told me he’d no involvement with the boy losing his teeth and I’m happy with that.”

*

Ted McMinn was not a name you’d have particularly associated with an international outlook either. In his era, most Scots’ experience of Spain was two weeks on the lash in Benidorm and flying back into Abbotsinch with a sombrero on and a stuffed donkey under an arm. Discounting John Fox Watson’s one game at the Bernabeu in the 1940s, Steve Archibald, a very much more complex kettle of fish, was the only Scot who’d made a living from football in Spain.

McMinn’s move seemed almost impossibly exotic. Or possibly just impossible. In his first match, against Cádiz, he remembers being penalised every time he touched the ball. That was just the start. The day after it, he broke his foot playing squash with his interpreter. Plastered up, and feeling a fool, he decided not to lie low, went to an away match with Atletico on a supporters’ bus and was persuaded to join the commentary team. He had no knowledge of his own team, let alone the opposition, and didn’t possess a word of workable Spanish.

Exclusively Spanish apart from McMinn and a couple of Uruguyans, the Sevilla side should have been doing better than it was. It featured Francisco López Alforo, on a ten-year contract after appearing for Spain at the 1982 World Cup; the current national coach Luis de la Fuente; and the future manager Manolo Jiménez, with whom McMinn bonded over their upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks to the extent that the squad nicknamed him ‘Manolin’, or Little Manolo.

Wallace, already under pressure, had a vested interest in McMinn’s recovery, and so took him to his holiday flat in Torremolinos. He had watched a documentary about Ginger McCain healing the Grand National winner Red Rum by getting him to trot in the sea off Southport, so got McMinn to do the same thing in the wintry Mediterranean. Whether it shortened his rehab is not clear; he was out for eight weeks.

When he got fit Wallace made a tactical error that affected both of them — he gave Alforo’s No.6 shirt to McMinn, apparently on the basis that the Spaniard didn’t track back enough. The Sevilla Ultras, the Biriris, were unhappy, and cushions were thrown. No one came to wave Manolin off when he had to fly home to face the legal music for Denturegate. The verdict was “Not Proven”, but his association with the general class of los hooliganos británicos was established.

All might have been forgiven with a derby win against the verde blanco caca of Betis (how at home both Wallace and McMinn must have felt to be facing up to “green and white sh*te” again) but training for the match was fiasco-ridden. At the camp, on the Mediterranean coast, the players went out to eat. In an attempt to integrate, McMinn took on the challenge of a Full Spanish, a giant seafood paella. An hour later, like a first-time tourist, he was throwing it all up at the water’s edge. He played next day while still debilitated and was booed off.

*

Meanwhile it was clear that Wallace was not bringing about the renaissance Sevilla’s board had demanded. Two wins from their last three games would have seen them into the European places, but they ended up ninth, just three points clear of relegation. El Sheriff had acquired a new fan nickname based on the local phonetic pronunciation of Wallace — they called him Señor Vayasé. ‘Señor Go Away’, in other words or, more idiomatically — ‘Mr GTF’.

In response Wallace tried to impose a Gullane regime, complete with beach runs and dietary restrictions, ahead of 87/88. McMinn might have been able to let Wallace know of the rumblings in the camp and rumours of revolt, but he couldn’t understand what the players were saying. When the axe fell, the Sevilla board ducked Wallace’s poor stats, holding the official line that they sacked him because he had reneged on an agreement to learn Spanish.

McMinn stayed until the following February. He reckons he played about 25 games in all, but the new manager, from Valladolid, repeatedly named him as a sub and he was often unused. Finally, with his team 5-0 down at half-time against Real Zaragoza, McMinn refused to get up from the bench. He was back in England and playing at the Baseball Ground by the time the Hillsborough season was underway.

Though not without a little swansong. “We beat Betis in their stadium in my last game,” said McMinn. “Everybody knew I was leaving, and I got presented with a lovely plaque. It was strange. I never thought the players liked me much. I couldn’t speak their language so I couldn’t really communicate. Turns out they did. But because I didn’t learn the language, I was just looking at four walls every night. The days were getting longer. I was lonely. And I missed the big man.”

*

Two poor travellers clinging together for warmth. It doesn’t say much for the Scots of that era. To this day it is only Archibald, of the handful of Scottish players who have played in the top league in Spain, who has made it to two seasons or more. It’s hard to imagine him doing what McMinn and Wallace did — living in each other’s pockets, sharing lunch, dinner, pints and hours of chat. “It wasn’t really a manager-player thing,” said Ted. “It was a father-son thing.”

When Wallace was sacked, McMinn met him for a beer in the bar beneath his flat. With Wallace off the scene, he could see no future at Sevilla. Wallace told him to stay, that he had to keep going, that if he walked away he’d be seen as a failure. They had a few beers and Wallace sent McMinn upstairs to get an early night to be ready for the next day’s training. He himself stayed in the bar for a few more.

McMinn went to bed and dozed. A couple of hours later, through the windows of his apartment, he could hear Wallace’s distinctive footsteps echoing down the street and off into the night. Wallace was whistling. McMinn tried to make out the tune. Was it Una Paloma Blanca? La Bamba? Despacito? Or even La Macarena? Of course not. It was Follow, Follow. McMinn lay in the dark listening to what sounded like the Lone Piper. Or perhaps a Pied Piper, whose flute-tune was calling him home again.

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Paul O’Neill has something to get off his chest, a statement he would have found it harder to make when he was part of Scotland’s refereeing fraternity.

“I grew up supporting Celtic,” he says candidly. “I’ve never denied that in my background, I think that it would be really silly to do that.”

Now 44, O’Neill combined a career as a senior manager in the NHS with serving as one of the SFA’s specialist assistant referees for 18 years. After 835 fixtures, refereeing has been a huge part of his life. He has been part of the team of officials for a Scottish Cup semi-final, an Edinburgh derby and a Scottish Junior Cup final. He has travelled across Europe handling youth games for UEFA, absorbed the constant rule changes from IFAB, endured the verbal grief and abuse, and lived with the frustrations of VAR.

A head of Community Health in South Lanarkshire, the fitness tests were becoming more gruelling with every passing year and in May he walked onto the pitch for his final game of Inverness against Hamilton carrying his four-year-old daughter. Erin O’Neill was born with Trimosy 21 Down Syndrome and her father now plans to use his free weekends to head up a drive to recruit officials for Scottish Para Football.

Like the decisions he made as a qualified referee, he felt retirement was the right thing to do. And this time, for once, there was no dissent.

“I can say that I never once in my career made a decision in favour of any team that was based on anything other than the laws of the game and what I believed was the correct decision,” he says in measured tones. “My sole focus was always to do better and to progress my career.

“I didn’t do the hours and hours of training, reading the laws of the game, to favour one team. I was never going to put any of that at risk for one club.”

The subject is topical because, when we meet, an online row is raging over his former colleague Sean Murdoch.

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Eighteen years since his first match as a football referee, it’s the loneliness Paul O’Neill remembers most.

His first game was an under-13s fixture between Hamilton and Dundee at Laigh Bent Sports Ground watched by a posse of coaches, parents and dog walkers. For a 28-year-old man working as a nurse in a prison, the experience should have been as daunting and intimidating as dipping a toe in the shallow end at Blantyre baths. Yet the isolation was something he had never experienced before or since.

“It was the most nervous I was for any game,” says O’Neill after stepping down from his role as a specialist assistant referee in May.

“Years later, I ran the line at Ibrox in front of over 40,000 fans when Rangers won League Two. But there was nowhere near the nerves I felt for that first under-13s game. You are basically given a whistle and after that it’s only you.

“I just felt really vulnerable. You desperately want to do a good job and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. There was an experienced referee watching me and I remember thinking, ‘I wish he wasn’t here….’”

He still has the first observer’s report tucked away in a drawer somewhere, containing the remarks that his whistle tone was off and that his positioning left a bit to be desired.

The early years, at grassroots level, were the hardest. In a BBC Radio Five Live survey launched in 2023, hundreds of grassroots referees told of fearing for their safety, reporting physical abuse by spectators, players, coaches or managers. Some described being punched, headbutted and spat at. Almost all of them had experienced some form of verbal abuse.

Last summer, the Scottish FA launched a ‘Let Them Ref’ campaign in a quest to tackle behaviour on the sidelines and abuse of referees. Despite calling a halt to his career after 835 games, O’Neill plans to keep his hand in by leading a new drive to recruit officials for Scottish Para Football and helping out with new entrant training courses.

In March, the National Referee Introductory Course was launched allowing people from any part of the country to take part in live tuition on the laws of the game, delivered by the country’s top match officials. While new courses run every six-eight weeks, the task of persuading young referees to come forward becomes more challenging when parents, coaches and players are screaming foulmouthed abuse from the sidelines.

“I have a suspicion that at grassroots level we have a real problem in Scotland and beyond,” O’Neill observes. “I have been a new entrants coach in Lanarkshire and we take 20 or 30 people through the referees’ course twice a year. But we are losing more than that.

“Sometimes at these kids’ games the level of abuse from parents, spectators, coaches and the players themselves is beyond acceptable.”

To encourage new entrants, the SFA Referees’ Department are launching the Youth Referee Introductory Course, with an initial 25 young people signed up to become officials. The entry age will be lowered to 14 to encourage teenage officials to develop confidence, leadership and communication skills.

In partnership with Qualifications Scotland, those undertaking the Level 7 Refereeing Course at school are now being encouraged to make the leap into active refereeing. Currently 120 schools have signed up, with over 1200 16-18-year-olds scheduled to sit the course in the next academic year.

“If I was sitting as a 16-year-old aspiring referee, would I be able to take the level of abuse I have heard?” ponders O’Neill. “I don’t think I would have at that age.

“I was a nurse in a prison and my bar was probably set quite high. Did I take abuse during my refereeing career? Yes I did. Was that abuse sometimes unacceptable? Yes it was. I was always lucky that the level of respect I got from guys in the game was reasonably high. But I had horrible things said to me at games. Mainly in the junior game.”

For the aspiring Scottish referee, ‘the juniors’ has always been a notorious testing ground. A footballing bearpit where nerve ends are pushed and pulled for signs of weakness or fragility.

Last season, the senior game managed to match the bowel-loosening attributes of a clash between Auchinleck Talbot and Cumnock when the SFA were forced to condemn the online leak of personal details belonging to referee John Beaton. A lengthy statement condemned the ‘hysterical media narrative’ around refereeing decisions and warned of an environment of intimidation and fear. Scotland’s governing body also confirmed plans to strengthen rules aimed at protecting match officials and their families.

Grassroots clubs are now expected to appoint a designated referee Liaison Officer as a ‘safe person’ to offer support. As in the senior game, head of referees Willie Collum has warned that only the team captain can approach officials to communicate during a match. All teams must introduce a technical area open only to team officials to discourage encroachments onto the pitch. Spectators should also be positioned at two metres back from the sidelines in a quest to foster a ‘culture of respect’.

At grassroots games, O’Neill always found the shouts and the noise more difficult to block out than they ever were at Ibrox or Parkhead.

“You would hear the voices of a small number whereas, in the senior game, a lot of noise is in the background. It’s very rare that you hear individuals. But there is something about people going into a football environment which makes them behave in a way they would never do somewhere else.

“I have had colleagues who have received horrendous abuse in regards to religion, sexuality, appearance and it’s not acceptable in society. I don’t know why it’s acceptable at football. There were grounds you would go to that were really intimidating. But there was never a ground where I actively feared for my safety in my career.”

The presence of his late father at games probably helped. Before Brian O’Neill passed away last March, he became his son’s personal refereeing observer for the best part of 18 years.

A late starter, O’Neill went on to take the decision to become a specialist assistant referee rather than push for the category one status earned by the likes of Nick Walsh, Don Robertson and John Beaton. He was never short of free advice on that score.

“When I became an assistant referee, my dad came and watched me officiate at every senior ground in Scotland, except Bonnyrigg Rose. That was the only ground he never got to see me in. That was massive for me. That ability for my dad to come out to games and to talk in the car.

“My dad wasn’t a referee, he was an armchair football fan and a lot of the times going back in the car he would be telling me what I did wrong and I nearly dropped him off the Forth Road Bridge a few times.

“But there was so much time talking about more important things and when he passed away people were reaching out to me making sure I was alright. Other referees like Callum Spence and Lloyd Wilson got in touch because they had met my dad at games. I think back to a picture I have of me and my dad at the Scotland-England Leigh Griffiths game in 2017 and days like that were an opportunity to spend time you never get back. Refereeing gave me that.”

Refereeing could also be a demanding mistress. Retirement will mean more time with his wife Danielle and daughters Abbie (15) and Erin (four). His other half now welcomes the chance to arrange nights out three weeks in advance with no fretting over the possibility of a Championship game in Dingwall and a return home at 10pm.

“It’s incredibly difficult when you are juggling two careers,” says O’Neill, a senior manager with the NHS in South Lanarkshire. “There’s what you do in the day job and then there is refereeing.”

English football runs a pool of 20 to 21 full-time referees, but O’Neill remains unconvinced by the notion of a similar system in Scotland, describing it as a ‘double-edged sword’.

“If you decide to make refereeing full-time you are going to lose some of your top officials. My career is with the NHS. Others will be lawyers or police officers and they would be walking away from a career they had spent years building up as well as a pension and the security that comes with it. They would also have to ask, ‘How many years am I going to be a referee?’

“There is also that risk because, like being a footballer, it’s performance-based and injuries can creep in. It’s an easier decision to make for young referees to embark on a career.”

O’Neill still asks himself if he should have taken up refereeing before the age of 27. For all the hassle and abuse and grief he took at grassroots level he has no regrets over the choice to attend a training course run by former referees Brian Winter and George Drummond at the Bellshill Hilton hotel around 2008.

“I never did an Old Firm game. I never did a Scottish Cup final or a League Cup final, but I’m not bitter about that in any way. I back myself and I think I was a good assistant referee. I take pride in the fact that I did do a Scottish Cup semi-final, I did an Edinburgh derby, I did the Junior Cup final and I was trusted by the SFA to take on appointments that were important.

“Some people finish their career and look through a glass half empty at what could have been. I’ve never been that kind of person, I look on my glass as being half full. I look at what refereeing gave me. It’s easy to look when you are leaving and point at the SFA and say, ‘Here’s what they could have done.’

“I don’t have that approach. I think those 18 years allowed me to develop myself as both a referee and as a person. And for that I will be forever thankful. All those hours I spent with my dad. The chance I have now to help para football.

“And what I would say to any young person looking at refereeing as a possible career or hobby is that they should grab it with both hands. They might do two games and decide it’s not for them or they might travel the world for the next 30 years.”

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Bannan made 477 appearances for the club after joining in 2015. He moved to Millwall in January when the club entered administration, but re-signed this summer — and will be awarded a heroes welcome when he walks out Hillsborough again this season.

Barry Bannan smiles as we bring up his daughter, Elsie, who burst into tears when he told her he was moving back to Sheffield Wednesday.

The 36-year-old is a ‘new’ signing for the Owls this summer. But it’s also a move that will almost certainly see him break the 500-appearance mark for one of the oldest clubs in English football. Only a handful of others have achieved it, and even fewer who weren’t locals.

He doesn’t sound it, but ‘Baz’ is one of us now. His departure to Millwall was short-lived, and never one that anyone at Wednesday — including the Scot himself — ever really wanted, but none of that matters now. In a pre-season run-out in Austria earlier this month, he looked like he’d never left.

Chat to the man, and it becomes apparent that all he wanted in football was to find a home — one where he was appreciated. He left home young, leaving behind Scotland and his beloved Celtic for Aston Villa, where he was continuously sent out on loan. To Blackpool, to Bolton, to Leeds.

Then came Wednesday. He didn’t know it at first, but it didn’t take long for him to realise that they were the perfect match. And it wasn’t just his quality that got fans on board — although it certainly helped. It was his vociferousness, his tenacity, his energy. It became pretty clear, pretty quickly that Barry Bannan got Sheffield Wednesday… and they got him.

Don’t get me wrong, the left-footed rockets into the top corner, the mazy dribbles and crunching tackles all played their part, but just as memorable are the 50-yard dashes to make a last-ditch block and the fist-pumps towards the fans after a hard-fought victory.

He arrived in a summer that saw then-owner Dejphon Chansiri splashing cash all over the place, but none was spent better than what was paid to get free agent Bannan on board. A decade later, he’s the only one still left in blue and white.

Reading about his ‘tanner ba’ roots only serves to further explain why he fitted in so well. Wednesdayites have been starved of top-flight football for over a quarter of a century, and many players have come and gone without ever leaning into Sheffield’s proud footballing history. Not Bannan, his love for this sport is pure.

And it’s mutual. He describes defeat in the 2016 play-off final as the “best worst day” of his life, and victory — as captain — at Wembley seven years later went some way to putting things right. His name filled the air under the arch after the Owls beat local rivals Barnsley in the most dramatic of fashion...

“We’ve got Bannan,” they sang, to the tune of the Billy Ray Cyrus classic Achy Breaky Heart. “Barry Bannan. I just don’t think you’d understand. A wee Scottish man, better than Zidane, we’ve got Barry Bannan.”

There have been tears, in good times and in bad, and there could be more to come.

“When I left, I didn’t think I was ever going to come back as a player,” he said, speaking to The Wednesday Word for Nutmeg. “I’m 36, so it might have never happened. That’s why there was all that emotion — it felt like it could be the end. I didn’t want it to be, but that’s why it came out the way that it did.

“But I think it might be just as bad going back out there — I don’t know how I’m going to take it, because I didn’t think I’d react the way I did when I left!

“My wife is on to me, because she’s adamant that I never cried when she walked down the aisle — which I did! — but she says I never. So she was surprised I was crying, and it could be the same again. It’ll be a different emotion completely though, and I’ll see my kids and wife in the stand again.

“I’m excited about it, though, I can’t wait to get back playing in front of those fans. Deja vu all over again.”

Owls of generations gone by had their Chris Waddles and David Hirsts and Mel Sterlands. They saw trophy wins and cup runs, they saw international footballers on a weekly basis. Those born after the 1990s have had none of that, and if you ask most of them, they won’t even have to think about who the best player they’ve ever seen in a Wednesday shirt is.

It baffles us how he’s only got 27 caps for Scotland. How a man with 112 goals and assists for our club never found the back of the net for his nation. How a man so beloved in a Steel City south of the border barely got a kick in front of the Tartan Army despite being Football League royalty.

Pep Guardiola once called him an “incredible player”, not too long after Bannan had outrageously stuck the ball through Bernardo Silva’s legs. He’s singled out by opposition managers before practically every game, and for a long while it was a case of ‘Stop Bannan, stop Wednesday…’

Now, after his brief southern sojourn, the diminutive Scot is back where he belongs. And just wait for the noise when he saunters back out at Hillsborough once again.

Watch Bannan on his daughter’s reaction to his return to Wednesday

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The maths behind swap deals, that rare and interesting sub-genre of the football transfer, don’t always add up. In an extract from the new issue of Nutmeg Magazine, Gordon Waddell spoke to Billy Dodds about one of the most memorable examples.

By Gordon Waddell

Necessity is the mother of invention – a phrase widely attributed to the philosopher Plato around 2,400 years ago. Probably right around the time the Greeks first introduced the transfer window.

Roughly translated, it means if your need for something outstrips your current ability to get it, you’ll find a way. In a football sense, that usually means you buy your way out of trouble but if all you have are your wits rather than an oligarch’s chequebook; if all you have are players you think aren’t going to get you where you’ve promised everyone you’ll be, then it becomes a whole lot harder. If you’re in the doldrums, what you have no one wants, and what you need no one wants to give you. Which is why, in Scottish football certainly, these deals are the outliers.

The swap. The trade. The exchange.

In American sports, between franchises? They’re inured in the culture, where GMs and agents and coaches wheel and deal players and future draft picks like Wall Street commodities. Here? They’re a rarity because balancing the scales to keep everyone happy is nigh-on impossible.

So in this Nutmeg transfer special, we’ve spoken firstly to both the traded and the trader to get a handle on why they’re so hard to execute, and why so few of them happen. Then comes a Top Ten of some of the more interesting ones that did make it over the line. Because in an exchange of equals, some always end up more equal than others…

Dodds and Winters

In September 1998, Aberdeen traded their popular striker, Billy Dodds, a Scotland cap who’d hit 64 goals in 160 games and scored to win them their first trophy in six seasons (the 1995/96 League Cup) for Dundee United’s Robbie Winters, plus an eye-watering £700,000.

Winters was 23 and full of potential and, more importantly for Dons manager Alex Miller, pace. Dodds was 29 and, although an established favourite, not getting any younger or quicker.

There was logic in there somewhere but Aberdeen fans struggled to see it, and even Miller’s successor Ebbe Skovdahl publicly questioned its wisdom long into the aftermath. Nearly 28 years later, Dodds, now Neil McCann’s No.2 at Kilmarnock, remembers every detail like it was yesterday because it had such a profound effect on him and his career.

“The first thing to say is there are no hard feelings. It’s football. And I didn’t feel I was forced into it – because in the end I made sure it was on my terms. But at the time? It made me the most determined player ever.

“I got wind of what was happening the night before the first game of the season when a friend called while we were on the bus on our way to Inverness. It was a League Cup game, and Alex Miller was sitting about four rows in front of me. I got the sense something was off. He kept turning round and looking at me a bit oddly.

“I was determined to dig in like mad. We won 3-0 the following day – and I scored a hat-trick!

“Alex always had a meeting on the Monday to debrief our games and he was pointing at me, saying ‘See if you all played like him…’ when I knew he was wanting rid of me. It was embarrassing, me sitting there being made to feel like the class sook, knowing what I knew.

“Sadly, I couldn’t hit a barn door for the next six weeks, but I dug my heels in and made sure if it was going to happen, it would be the deal I wanted it to be – and it was in the end.

“I understood why Alex wanted it – Aberdeen had no pace in the team and that was something Robbie had in abundance. He wanted something different and needed to use me to make it happen. If we met today, we’d shake hands, have a chat and it would be fine.

“It also helped that it was Paul Sturrock on the other end of the deal. Luggy was like a father figure for me and always brought the best out in me, even if it was just for short spells. He’d signed me for St Johnstone from Dundee, then sold me to Aberdeen when Saints went down after about six months, then he signed me for Dundee United.

“I scored 26 goals in 45 league games and ended up with Rangers paying another £1m-plus fee for me after I’d only been there 13 months. So it all worked out in the end – but I’d like to think that’s because I got my head down to make it work.

“The penny dropped for me about how fickle the business could be and I really dug in. I turned 30 while I was at Dundee United, but I won 22 of my 26 Scotland caps after that, scored all my international goals after that, won a league and Scottish Cup double and another League Cup. All from what looked like me being on the receiving end of a raw deal.

“I loved it at Aberdeen, lived in the city, kept living there after I signed for United and the physio there, John Sharp, was one of my best mates.

“I remember bumping into Robbie and him going ‘You’re killing me, man!’ because I’d hit the ground running and he’d taken a wee while to get going. But he did eventually and turned out to be an excellent player for Aberdeen.

“One of the great ironies, though, was me scoring in the Scottish Cup final for Rangers, the only one I won – and I scored it past Robbie! It was the game in 2000 when Jim Leighton went off injured in the first few minutes. It was before we had goalies on the bench, so he had to pull the gloves on. One of those wee quirks of fate, I suppose.”

The Transfer Issue - get the latest issue of Nutmeg Magazine today to read the full version of this feature and many more brilliant football stories, made in Scotland

My earliest memories of watching England are pretty vivid considering I was only five or six years of age.

The unforgettable 5-1 demolition of Germany, redemption for ‘Goldenballs’ versus Greece and the bitter disappointment of World Cup heartache in Shizuoka. I danced around the front room laughing at Oliver Kahn’s pathetic attempt to keep out Michael Owen’s second in that rout in Munich, celebrated wildly David Beckham’s free-kick against the Greeks that sent us to the 2002 World Cup at my pal’s birthday party, and cried with my classmates as David Seaman flapped helplessly at Ronaldhino’s free-kick as Brazil eliminated England in the quarter-finals. Three of the most iconic moments in England’s post-millennium history, all within the space of ten short months — nothing if not entertaining. Surely I’d be hooked for life?

As I got a bit older and the World Cups rolled around, I began to notice the hysteria that would sweep the nation but often found myself struggling to fully invest. Perhaps it was my devotion to my hometown club that made the international scene pale into insignificance or was it the ever-growing list of turgid friendlies that interrupted domestic action? I’d collect and swap the Panini stickers, enthuse over the latest kits and attempt to emulate the world-class goals — but the feeling for ‘England’ somewhat evaded me.

I grew up in Burnley, and many of my closest pals would go on to follow England all over the world — taking in obscure cities, ticking off decrepit stadia and sampling the local brews. For supporters of a club whose forays into European football have been all too fleeting, following the national side over land and sea has given many the opportunity to travel, with their love of country equal to, if not surpassing that of club — a notion I’ve always struggled with.

Even having the honour of being capped twice at under-18 level truly failed to ignite the fires within, though being informed of my selection by Manchester United youth team manager Paul McGuiness was a very special moment for myself and those close to me. For a lad from a ordinary family in a small northern town to represent a country of 50+ million people was quite an achievement. In retrospect, the two games against Italy and Belgium are arguably the proudest moments of my career but they didn’t bring me any closer to finding that sense of belonging or attachment to the national team.

Recent years have only seen my indifference towards international football grow. When playing, you’d be in a rich vein of form only for an international break to put a halt to proceedings (Sorry, Scotland have got a match against the Faroes — you’ll have to pack it in for a week). Records that stood for decades are now being smashed with strikers making hay against vastly inferior opposition while caps are handed out like confetti. This, coupled with the English media’s propensity to overhype successive squads before tearing them to pieces after the inevitable failure, continues to leave me severely disinterested. That being said, there was one stand-out occasion in the last few years that did manage to spark the passion — finally rousing the dormant lion.

Euro 2020 (played in summer 2021) saw England and old rivals Germany face off at Wembley for the chance to take on Ukraine in a very winnable quarter-final. It was a red-hot day and I was somewhat foolishly persuaded by my wife Courtney to watch the game at one of our local boozers in the Lanarkshire town of Uddingston. The pub was packed both inside and out, and we just about managed to squeeze in beside an outdoor table. Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that there’s a certain amount of historic ill will between England and Scotland but even I was shocked at the vitriol spat forth by 99% of the patrons (many of whom had donned Germany tops). Each German attack was cheered with bitter enthusiasm while English misses prompted aggressive slurs.

As the game went on, I found myself thinking how strange it was to spend your weekend watching a team that you quite evidently detested. Having survived numerous scares, England eventually took the lead through Raheem Sterling. When Harry Kane sealed the victory, it prompted a colourful outburst from the author (think of the video of that Killie fan laying into a pub full of Celtic fans) and silence from those in Deutschland kits.

Who’d have thought that the secret to English nationalism would be uncovered during an afternoon in a beer garden in Uddingston?

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Steve Clarke has gone — and Adam identifies a fundamental flaw in how Scotland have been coached at major tournaments.

For Ian Lindsay and his 17-year-old son Cillian, the journey from Falkirk to Fenway proved an expensive business.

A couple of tickets for the 1-0 win over Haiti cost $1000 (£745). To save money, they flew to Toronto via Dublin with travelling companion Alex Strathie and packed their luggage onto a recreational vehicle motorhome, meandering through New England before parking up in a campsite in Salem, 50 miles from Boston.

All the ticket and travel costs, all the visa stress and social media anxiety surrounding Gianni Infantino’s Rip Off World Cup were justified by one moment of baseball brilliance during a Boston Red Sox defeat to Texas Rangers on Sunday.

Joining 5000 Tartan Army conscripts, the trio had purchased tickets for ‘Scotland Day’, a smart piece of marketing dreamed up by the Red Sox to attract football fans in Boston to their iconic Fenway Park, the oldest active ballpark in Major League Baseball.

Opened in 1912, the old place had never witnessed anything like it. In a variation on the half-and-half scarf, Red Sox offered tickets with blue shirts bearing both a Saltire and the club logo.

Scots sung along to Mr Brightside by the Killers and eulogised ‘Super John McGinn’, and while most of those present had no idea how this baseball lark worked, they were hellbent on enjoying themselves anyway. Interviewed in the locker room after the game, Texas Rangers players praised a truly unique atmosphere while one Fenway bartender told of generating over £700 in tips from the game.

Willson Contreras, Boston’s Venezuelan first baseman, is having quite a season for home runs. In the second inning, he sent his second of the 6-4 loss soaring 337 feet over what they call the Green Monster. The Green Monster is the famous 37-foot-2-inch-tall left-field wall at Fenway. Standing just 310 feet from the home plate, the wall is a towering barrier that turns potential home runs into doubles and features a rare, manually operated scoreboard at its base.

And, just as Contreras knocked the ball out of the park, the Lindsays were leaving the arena to begin the journey back to their campsite in Salem.

“We left Fenway quite early, probably around 9.15,” recalls 17-year-old Cillian. “And just as we were leaving the game to catch a train back to where we are staying, we came out of Gate C and there was a big roar from the crowd.

“The roar was pretty loud and the ball came flying over the big green stand, hit some scaffolding close to me and bounced. There was no one there so I think, ‘I’d better catch it.’ I still have the ball and we are trying to go back to Fenway now to see if we can get it signed by the player who hit it.”

Dad Ian managed to get a picture of his teenage son clutching the ball in amazement. Neither of them had any real idea of how big a deal it was in American sporting culture to catch a home run ball.

Major League Baseball allows lucky fans to keep the spoils of war, creating chaotic, unseemly scrambles to bag one. While the ball might not be worth much, those lucky enough to catch one at a historic venue like Fenway have a story to tell the grandkids.

“A couple of passersby told us who hit the strike,” says Ian. “We were staying in Salem and had to leave to get the train back.

“My wife posted the picture on Facebook and it seems to have gone all over the place from then on. One of my mates in Falkirk follows baseball. And as soon as he saw it he said, ‘For Americans, that’s a really big thing to catch the ball belted out the park.’”

The experience completed an eventful 24 hours. A convoy of yellow public school buses had transported the Tartan Army to the Boston Stadium, the remote arena in Foxborough, to see Scotland secure a gritty, rather than pretty, win over Haiti.

Celebrating the national team’s first win at the World Cup finals since Italia 90, supporters had marched from Evans Way Park to Fenway the following evening to the sound of bagpipes. One of America’s cosmopolitan hubs, Bostonians looked on and felt like their city had been invaded.

“There was a pipe band there and Fenway was amazing,” adds Ian. “For a stadium of its age it was fantastic. I’m not sure that the Scots fans followed baseball etiquette terribly well but we were in the bleachers section of the stadium and it was just a brilliant party atmosphere.”

The Lindsays had read all the negative headlines regarding FIFA’s shameless cash grab and exploitation of supporters. The cost and travel had been justified by the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience at Fenway that captured local hearts and headlines.

“I was at France 98 and we thoroughly enjoyed that,” adds Ian. “We didn’t buy tickets then because we thought we would be in a better position next time. We didn’t realise it would take 28 years to come back.

“We have tried to make it the trip of a lifetime because the chances are that I don’t have another 20 years to wait for the next one. Cillian will, but this was an opportunity to just go and do it.

“Ticket prices were heavy. We bought tickets for the Haiti game first and got them directly from FIFA’s first issue and they were $500 each. We were in the Club Lounge for that and the seats and the view were brilliant.

“We bought tickets for the Morocco game through a friend in America and it was about $700 each for them. When we saw the price of travelling direct from Glasgow and Edinburgh and we looked to travel via a country that had not qualified to bring the price down.

“My wife is from Ireland and they still had not qualified at that point. So that was a good option, to fly via Ireland and Toronto. We then picked up a big RV (recreational vehicle) and New England and Boston has a European feel to it. The heritage and stuff.

“Organisers get a lot of criticism for the travel prices of the trains to the stadium and so on, but when you think of the scale of that and the number of people trying to marshal it at both ends you almost understand why it cost a lot of money. All in it has been a major expense but it really has been worth it.

“We didn’t expect to see Scots in so many numbers and as always everybody is pretty well behaved and even if it rained every day and we got hammered it would still be worth it.”

The Lindsays will travel back — via the Niagara Falls — next week. For most supporters paying and staying for all three games is simply too expensive. Others can’t spare the annual leave from work — even if Scotland go on to secure a precious, coveted place in the last 32 for the first time in national team history.

“It’s my first World Cup,” said Cillian, checking for the home run baseball in his pocket. “And it really has been completely overwhelming to be honest. Just brilliant.”

Twenty-one iconic yellow school buses set off from Providence, Rhode Island, fuelled by beer, wine, and hope. Each bearing the name and squad number of men charged with bringing decades of hurt to a close.

Squashed into seats designed for kids, hundreds of hot and sweaty Tartan Army footsoldiers, who had paraded through the streets from the unofficial G-Pub HQ to the assembly point, marching behind the Rhode Island Highlanders Pipe Band, were decked out in uniforms of tartan, and navy, and salmon, and more boisterous than even the most excitable weans on a long-anticipated field trip.

Songs were bellowed out as busloads indulged in some friendly rivalry, hanging out the open windows to goad those alongside, in front, or behind to crank up the volume in a good-natured sing off.

Even those alighting for some last-minute relief behind what became well-watered trees were serenaded with renditions of ‘We can see you pishing there’.

On buses more used to packed lunches of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the play pieces were crates of beer, cider, wine, and a few soft drinks (although, to the chagrin of several occupants, it was Coca-Cola rather than Irn-Bru).

Like the nation’s appearance at the biggest global footballing event, the delivery arrived later than anticipated, but it arrived, and it was welcomed as warmly and with as much relief as Scott McTominay’s opener against Denmark. As the buses idled, waiting, a truck slowly inched its way along the convoy, as rear doors opened to receive the packs, like some insane reverse drive-thru.

Passed up the aisle to be piled on a vacant seat, the resulting alcoholic jenga became the responsibility of the man beside it. He served as bartender and the unofficial seat belt, protecting it around the faster corners and preventing disaster as the driver jolted and jerked his way through tailbacks nearer the ground.

This was party planning, Providence Tartan Army style and it was a sensational F*** You to those who had tried to profiteer from their presence.

The school buses were never supposed to be part of the equation. Regular coaches had been booked, but when greedy owners made the mistake of thinking they had Scots over a barrel and inflated their prices, smart-thinking organisers found a cheaper alternative. A little crazy, a lot more colourful, and definitely more memorable.

One behind the other, to the skirl of the pipes, the buses snaked through Providence. Locals took photos and waved the convoy off like it was a gala day parade. Opposition fans joined in, although to the amusement of all, one pretty Brazilian supporter, who had obviously been raised on stories of Dave Narey’s audacity, and John Collins’ spot kick prowess, refused to be won over and steadfastly offered a single-finger salute.

‘Is that you predicting how many goals we’ll beat you by in Miami’, someone shouted in response. ‘Nah, it’s the position we’ll finish in the group’ countered another. It would take more than one gesture to dampen Scottish spirits.

‘We’ve got McGinn, super John McGinn…’ As the buses began to speed up, swapping the built-up streets for the open interstate 95, neither the wind gushing through the buses, or the loud flapping of the flags hanging out of every second window could drown out the singing.

On paper it was a busload of strangers, in reality it was a gathering of kindred spirits all giddy to be going to see Scotland at a World Cup for the first time since 1998.

Some seasoned campaigners had been lucky enough to witness that in person and regaled new friends with tales of Paris and Toulouse. Others had watched at home, promising themselves they would go to the next one. That wait had been too long. For another generation, this was all completey new.

As cars passed by tooting their horns in approval, inside, people began to settle. There was wit and perceived wisdom as the debate about who should start against Haiti began. Many agreed but no-one was sure Steve Clarke would.

There were stories of past campaigns, and thoughts of what might have been as some recounted schoolboy memories of playing against former Scotland greats such as Paul McStay. Some were born to serve in the dark blue, others were born to toast them.

Nearing the parking lot, which had been secured for some American-style tailgating, the pace slowed. Those walking now overtook the buses, and fans, of both Scotland and Haiti, who had taken another huge financial hit, some paying up to $100 for a car park space along the route, were adopted by the sympathetic yellow bus brigade, and drinks were passed out the windows to partially deaden the blow.

Filing off the buses, they must have looked like hundreds of tartan ants to the drones and helicopters hovering above. A support used to lifting more than its proverbial body weight. That seemed about right.

Locals used to New England Patriot games had set up barbeque stalls and lugged in massive coolers to feed and hydrate hundreds of fans for free. Grateful punters swapped pin badges for a hotdog, others traded in bonhomie. But no-one would accept financial payment. Some hosts claimed to be 2.2% Scottish or a member of clan x, y, or z; they just wanted to be part of the scene. Some even hooked up giant tvs to generators so everyone could keep up with the afternoon matches.

But minds were on only one game. Two hours before kick-off, the pipes signalled a shift towards the Gilette Stadium. It would have been straightforward if event organisers had opened enough gates. Instead, as thousands of fans baked in the heat and young kids were hoisted onto shoulders to escape the crush, there were fears that such a magical night might take an ominous turn.

Caught up in it all were Billy Gilmour’s family and friends. Earlier they had been comforted by fans who understood their angst at their injured laddie missing out. Now they were being squashed along with everyone else.

Boos started to ring out as kick-off time drew closer and progress completely stalled. Police eventually decided enough was enough and entrances were opened up. The surge was frightening. ‘Just no-one fall or you’re f*cked’, hollered someone as thousands of bodies involuntarily swayed and stumbled as one, bypassing the now redundant security stands.

Onto another bottleneck then, finally, the ticket scanners. As everyone passed through there were sighs of relief - they could find space to breathe again and the ticket had worked and they were definitely going to be part of Scottish football history.

In the end, it was all worth it. Unlike the Euros in Germany, there was a goal to celebrate - and a win.

Not everyone made the bus back. Some had become disorientated and had to be picked up en route; one or two completely missed departure and had to fork out for costly Ubers. For those on board, though, the debrief began.

‘It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable experience but they did the job’.

He was talking about the yellow school buses, but it kind of summed up the match as well.

—

Scotland’s first win at a World Cup since 1990 wasn’t pretty, but it was effective.
🎣 Intelligent press-baiting
🔄️ McGinn and Robertson rotating on the left
🧱 Withstood 30+ 2nd half crosses
💪 Competed physically