Diary of a (football) CEO: 'It takes over your life... you can't even carve the turkey' 📞🎅

Brian Caldwell, Motherwell. Part One

Award-winning sportswriter Stephen McGowan writes monthly investigations for Nutmeg FC. This week, for the first time he considers the life of a football club chief executive officer — Brian Caldwell of Motherwell. Today Brian tells us about the particular challenges associated with a fan-owned club — and the impact on his domestic life.

🗣️ Tomorrow: Part II — Brian lifts the lid on the hiring of Jens Berthel Askou and the smart recruitment which turned the team into one of the stories of the Scottish season.

This article is free, but part II, like most of our content, is paid. Don’t miss out… get a Nutmeg season ticket. Sign up and get 12 months of access PLUS a year’s subscription to the beautiful, 200-page print quarterly — delivered straight to your door.

Veteran: Brian Caldwell has three decades of football experience, and has served as chief executive of Ayr, St Mirren and Shrewsbury Town

By Stephen McGowan

“My wife told me one year that enough was enough,” says Brian Caldwell, ahead of another month of wheeling and dealing in the January transfer market. “I was helping her with the turkey when an agent called me about a player on Christmas Day...”

For the chief executive of a top-flight football club, peace and goodwill over the festive period are hard to find. Time to rest their feet in a snazzy new pair of M&S slippers is precious.

One of the grizzled survivors of the Scottish game, Caldwell ran Ayr United for a decade. There were nine years at St Mirren and eight in English football with Shrewsbury Town.

For the last 18 months his working days have been spent in a modest upstairs office in the administration block of Motherwell’s Fir Park.

In a short space of time he has worked with three different managers, withstood an aborted investment in the club from former Netflix producer Eric Barmack, sold Lennon Miller to Udinese for a club record transfer fee of £5million, played a key role in the appointment of Jens Berthel Askou, and helped enable Motherwell’s emergence as one of the most attractive football teams in the country.

Over the festive period, Askou’s headline-grabbing side will play three games in seven days against Rangers, Celtic and St Mirren, while the prospect of another transfer window poses a threat to the domestic harmony of the Caldwell household over Christmas.

“When that agent called I said to my wife, ‘I need to take this call…’ It was a player we were trying to get to Shrewsbury.

“We were desperate to get him in for January 1. I was on the call for half an hour and came off to be told in no uncertain terms that unless I got rid of my phone on Christmas Day I’d be wearing a turkey instead of eating it.”

A turkey last Thursday

While the head coach manages the team on the pitch, the chief executive is charged with managing the business functions of the club off it. The front-of-house success of the manager and his team hinges on the unseen work done in the boiler room by the board of directors, executives and staff doing unpaid overtime over the festive period to meet the whims and needs of the football department.

“When most people are winding down for Christmas, the football industry does the complete opposite,” Caldwell tells Nutmeg FC.

“We play more games. The transfer window opens on January 1, so I am never off my phone. I go on holiday and people say, ‘Why do you not turn your phone off on holiday?’ If I turned my phone off, I wouldn’t relax because I’d be thinking, ‘Does somebody need me for something?’

“My wife is actually very understanding because I’ve been doing this job for 30-odd years and she knows that when we’re on holiday and sitting by the pool I will take calls and answer emails because I have never put an ‘out of office’ message on an email in my life.”

While supporters of Celtic and Rangers spend much of this season carping over outstanding ownership issues, Motherwell’s fate resides in the hands of their own fans. The Well Society became the majority shareholder in Motherwell in 2016 and retains two seats on the club’s board of directors.

Like Premiership leaders Hearts and Premier Sports Cup winners St Mirren, the Steelmen present a glowing, positive advert for the virtues of community ownership. Striving to be a genuine community asset in a town buffeted by economic headwinds, the Lanarkshire side sit third in the SPFL Premiership, a point clear of Rangers. Caldwell spends most of his waking hours keeping the owners happy and he’s the first to acknowledge that a winning team helps no end.

“Some say fan ownership is difficult, but I have embraced it because I think a lot of good things can come of it. I worked in England for a long time and when you look at some of the ownership issues down there with the likes of Sheffield Wednesday and Oldham you realise that fans are always going to be there. They don’t get fed up and leave.

“They are emotional sometimes, no question. I got a lot of stick after Stuart (Kettlewell) left and his successor Michael Wimmer was in the country. But we didn’t have a work permit arranged, so we couldn’t announce his appointment.

“We lost 3-0 to Ross County and when they scored the third goal in the 75^th minute I knew I was in for a long 15 minutes. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up.

“I was the focal point and I get it. In this job you’re the focal point for so many things. You are involved in so many different issues in this job. There is a lot going on.”

Stuart Kettlewell, Michael Wimmer and Jens Berthel Askou

Along with Aberdeen and Hibernian, Motherwell have been spoken to by the SPFL over the use of pyrotechnics at recent games. While Celtic have suspended the Green Brigade, the need to work with ultras groups to try to minimise the risks and dangers to other fans is now a part of a chief executive’s job description.

“I’m in a group chat with the ultra Bois because we have tried to build up a relationship with them and work with them,” explains Caldwell. “I also go to all the disabled supporters association meetings to give them support from the club and I was actively involved in their celebration of the International Day of Disability. That was intense.

“But at clubs of our size you have to be cross-functional. You are doing everything from talking to architects on the phone about training facilities to having the plumber knocking the door asking if there was anything else we needed fixed…

“At this time of year we have Christmas party nights on, we have matches, we have ticket issues, we have retail and I am a trustee of the community trust as well.

“We are doing a lot with the schools and working closely with our charity partner, which is important to us as a club within the local community.”

Laughing, he adds: “Nothing I do is sexy. I have a ‘to-do’ list here which never actually seems to be ticked off. It’s a very diverse role and that’s purely down to the nature of the football business.”

His flow is broken by a rap on the office door. Caldwell looks up to find ‘Steelman’, the club’s matchday mascot, peering through the glass. Ostensibly a superhero with ‘MFC’ on the front of his outfit, the mascot was restyled before embarking on a tour of the local schools to hand out adult and child vouchers to families struggling with the financial burden caused by Christmas and a congested fixture schedule.

“Steelman would go in and nobody actually knew that it was about our club outwith the colours he was wearing,” explains Caldwell. “So I went on to the shop the other day for a strip he could wear and we had a bit of a debate over what number should be on his back. Because we were formed in 1886 we went for ‘Steelmen 86’ and everyone now knows he is the Motherwell mascot. Mind you, he could do with the next size up...”

While Steelman heads down the stairs to save the world, the Commissioner Gordon of Fir Park turns to some of the other matters in his in-tray. Players and management recently doled out meals to 60 elderly members of the local community as part of the club’s Festive Friends initiative. Plans for pitch renovations are also being put in place for the summer while the groundsman needs a new boiler for the undersoil heating system.

Does my bum look big in this? ‘Steelman’ goes through his mascot paces

While supporters think May, June and July are when players and management head for Tenerife and Dubai and rest weary limbs, Caldwell regards the summer months as “the busiest time of the year”.

Seven months ago, manager Wimmer traipsed up the same stairs as Steelman to announce that he was quitting as manager after 12 games in charge to join German third-tier outfit Jahn Regensburg. There is no secret to what Caldwell calls football’s “magic formula”. A good manager signing good players brings results every time and, by losing just two of their 18 league games under the impressive Dane Askou, who replaced Wimmer, Motherwell have captured the imagination of the locals.

On December 20 last year, a team managed by Kettlewell played out a 1-1 draw against Kilmarnock on a freezing Friday night before a crowd of just 4966. Fast forward 12 months and Calum Slattery’s late header clinched a 1-0 win over Dundee before 6649 as the Steelmen reclaimed third spot in the league.

“The numbers are definitely up,” says Caldwell. “We are getting a lot of positive stuff coming back. We are a community club, a fan-owned club. And we are giving out tickets to local schools, because this is the ideal time.

“We need to capitalise on the good form we are enjoying and the entertaining way in which we play football. We see more people coming to games. And if I can get one more fan every game I will be delighted.

“Our proximity to Glasgow and Celtic and Rangers makes that a challenge. I worked at Ayr United and when the club got to the cup final in 2002 more buses left Ayr to support Rangers than left Ayr to support the local team in their first ever national cup final.

“The only way you change that is the community work we do. If we can help wee Johnny with an education issue or a health issue because the community trust are in his school then, yes, the mum or dad might support Celtic or Rangers. But they will appreciate the free ticket and the chance to come along and try it, and we might just change mindsets.

“It definitely helps that the football we are playing this season has supporters talking about it being the best football they have watched at Fir Park. In that respect, I think we have made massive strides at Motherwell in the last year.

“This is a club pulling in the same direction. Working as hard as we can to make this the best possible club we can be.”