THE SCOTTISH CUP DIVIDEND #1: The lowdown from football director Gunn
Hampden glory has had tangible benefits for Aberdeen: record shirt and season ticket sales plus a pull factor for this summer's recruitment drive
Award-winning sportswriter Stephen McGowan writes monthly investigations for Nutmeg FC. This week, he examines the impact on and off the pitch of Aberdeen’s first Scottish Cup win in 35 years.
🗣️ Tomorrow: Part II — A superfan and a business leader quantify the impact of the Scottish Cup win for the city and supporters of its football club.
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By Stephen McGowan
Steven Gunn was nine years old when he left his home in Invergordon to make the journey to Glasgow for the 105th Scottish Cup final.
Facing holders Celtic at Hampden, Aberdeen entered the finale to the 1989/90 season as bookmakers’ favourites. It was a sign of the times.
Before leaving for Manchester United in 1986, Sir Alex Ferguson had won the old trophy four times. Ten days before the 1990 final, the Pittodrie side had won 3-1 at Parkhead to secure second place in the Scottish Premier League. While Rangers ended the campaign as champions, a Celtic team in a state of decline had trailed in fifth. Gunn, now Aberdeen’s director of football, had begun the three-and-a-half-hour journey down to Glasgow in a state of raised expectation and optimism.
“My grandfather had taken me to the semi-final at Tynecastle against Dundee United,” he tells Nutmeg. “So I was at that game to see the team win comfortably then travelled down in a bus from the Highlands for the cup final to see Aberdeen lift the trophy.”
When Brian Irvine scored the decisive penalty kick in a sudden-death shoot-out, the notion of Aberdeen needing 35 years to win another Scottish Cup would have seemed outlandish. Yet the wait had been so long that, when they finally crossed the line, grown men wept with joy.
Most had travelled to the national stadium for the 140th edition of the Scottish Cup final in May with little or no expectation. A hollowed-out, emaciated opponent in 1990, Celtic were now a different animal. Pursuing a sixth domestic trophy clean sweep in nine years, the Parkhead club had wrapped themselves around the national game like a boa constrictor and squeezed tight.
Since 2016/17, Scotland’s wealthiest club had lifted 83% of the domestic trophies up for grabs. Meanwhile, market research conducted by Aberdeen showed that the age of the average supporter buying tickets for games at Pittodrie had come down from 47 to 35. The last time they’d lifted the Scottish Cup, many of their most loyal customers were in nappies.
In its early days, at least, last season promised a pleasing finale. A 16-match unbeaten run under new coach Jimmy Thelin prompted a surge in average home attendances (excluding away fans) to 16,786, exceeding the previous best-ever average of 15,389 in 2023/24.
Hospitality packages sold out for 15 of the 19 home games. The launch of the new North Sea Kit witnessed a 55.9% sales increase on the previous record for a new shirt.
AberDNA, a fan membership scheme established to engage young fans and fund improvements to the football operation, witnessed a 50% increase in numbers over the past two years, exceeding 9000 for the first time.
The momentum slowed with a sobering defeat to Celtic in the semi-final of the Premier Sports Cup. Aberdeen won just one of their next 14 games, sliding to a fifth-place finish in the SPFL Premiership. By the time they returned to Hampden for another meeting with Brendan Rodgers’ team in the Scottish Cup final, expectations had been tempered by a run of one win in seven games.
Funny game, football. Tied at 1-1 after extra-time, Dimitar Mitov’s saves from Celtic’s Callum McGregor and Alistair Johnston in the sudden-death penalty shoot-out sent interest levels surging higher than the northern lights. The city of Aberdeen now fell fully back in love with its football team.
Over 100,000 fans flocked to Union Street and the surrounding area for an open top bus parade the following day.
When the new home kit was released, that previous sales record set by the North Sea strip was quickly overtaken.
For the first time, over 11,000 fans have snapped up full season tickets for the new campaign; a 15% uptick on the total this time last year.
“The impact of winning the cup can’t be overstated,” acknowledges Gunn. “It absolutely does lift everything around the club.
“We had to be really patient for that cup win. I have been at the club a long time and that’s the first time we have been successful in that competition, so it was an amazing day and an amazing weekend.”
The task of constructing a new team certainly becomes easier when the Scottish Cup is safely under lock and key in the trophy cabinet.
Aberdeen have added several new signings for the upcoming season, with Nicolas Milanovic, Emmanuel Gyamfi, Kusini Yengi, Nick Suman, Kjartan Mar Kjartansson and Adil Aouchiche coming in. Defender Alfie Dorrington has also returned on loan from Tottenham.
Gunn never found the task of selling the Aberdeen project to potential signings especially taxing. When a club can point to a statue of Sir Alex in the car park and a replica of the old European Cup Winners’ Cup in the trophy cabinet, they can add the evidence of a glorious past to the promises of a brighter future.
Yet the sell was made easier still by those jubilant scenes from Aberdeen city centre as management and players passed the Scottish Cup around the open top bus. Gunn offers no apologies for using footage from Union Street as part of his summer sales pitch to new players. He’d be daft not to.
“Those were incredible scenes and the amount of people that came out to recognise the achievement was remarkable. So we absolutely do show players the scenes of Aberdeen winning the cup and the enjoyment everyone derived that day, and I would like to think that all of these ingredients combined have an impact when players are deciding whether Aberdeen is the right club for them or not.
“Look, I think we’ve had a good story to tell up until now anyway.
“We have a good environment at Cormack Park. We have a loyal fanbase that follow us all over the country and further afield when we are in European competition.
“We had a good experience in European competition last time and were unfortunate not to get out of the group stage when the performance level was good.
“And the whole environment we are creating for players to perform in is something we can use to attract talent to Aberdeen.
“One of the other important things is continuing to build a reputation as a club which gives them a platform at a good level where they are hopefully competing at the right end of the league domestically, fighting for European spots and enjoying lots of trips to Hampden in cup competitions.
“The missing ingredient was the ability to get over the line. Now we have actually got there and of course that helps us.
“What I have found — and I think Jimmy would reinforce this as well — is that Aberdeen still have a good reputation across Europe.
“But has winning the Scottish Cup added to that reputation? I would say so.”
The club’s 25th permanent manager, Thelin had taken Elfsborg to two second-place finishes in Sweden’s top division and narrowly missed out on the club’s first league title in 13 years on goal difference.
A solid, unspectacular central defender with lower-league side IF Hagapojkarna, the Swede was equally understated off the pitch. One journalist in Sweden told the BBC that the 47-year-old was widely regarded as one of the nation’s most boring men. After four managers in a little over three years and a brief, unfulfilling experiment with the blunt Yorkshireman Neil Warnock, a quiet, dependable type appeared to suit Aberdeen fine.
“The chairman Dave Cormack had publicly stated at the time that we needed to get out of this cycle of bringing in a new manager, investing in a group of players, seeing that fail to work out and then making a change,” recalls Gunn. “You just get caught in that cycle.
“We had met Jimmy for the first time the year before. So we got to know him really well over a period of time and that gave us an opportunity to make a good decision in terms of who we hired.”
The early unbeaten run always threatened to be a false dawn. In a footballing landscape dominated by two teams from the city of Glasgow, they usually are. When Aberdeen secured a 2-2 draw at Parkhead in October, retrieving a 2-0 half-time deficit, Celtic seemed to take it as a personal slight.
They scored six the next time the teams met in that stinging slap down in the League Cup semi and smashed five goals or more past Thelin’s team over the course of the season.
Their most recent romp had come in the final league meeting of the teams at Pittodrie the week before the Scottish Cup final. Travelling to Hampden on a fleet of buses and cars, Aberdeen supporters took up the brace position.
It’s tempting, if futile, to wonder now what the reaction to another savage loss might have been. As already mentioned, the Dons had entered the final on the back of one win in their previous seven games. In a league where the average lifespan of a manager has dropped to 12.75 months, another heavy defeat would have prompted calls in some quarters for Thelin to go the same way as Stephen Glass, Jim Goodwin, Barry Robson and Warnock.
“Regardless of what happened in the cup I wouldn’t say, internally, that Jimmy was under pressure with regards to his stability in the role,” says Gunn.
“Where the pressure does come at a club like Aberdeen is with the expectation. Be that from fanbase or media or wherever. It’s about trying to manage that expectation while all the while knowing that we have work to do to build this infrastructure.
“Delivering a trophy in the first season is an unbelievable achievement but we know fine that, even now, we are still in the early stages of building.”