As the unthinkable happens and Dundee United edge closer to their inevitable relegation from the Scottish Premiership, the blame has firmly landed at the feet of the chairman Stephen Thompson.
After yet another pitiful defeat at home against Hamilton this past Sunday, some fans had finally had enough and gathered together outside the front gates of Tannadice to demand his resignation.
This week it’s come out that Thompson is now keen to sell the club and is overseas speaking to potential investors, while manager Mixu Paatelainen is also said to be heading for the exit as soon as this nightmare season ends.
Like I say above, it’s unthinkable that Dundee United should find themselves in this situation. Once considered a model club on the surface – playing exciting football, selling young players at a great profit to the envy of chief executives of football clubs across Scotland, spending the third largest playing budget in the league and presenting a position of financial stability – for United to be where they are now shows a catastrophic failure on every conceivable level.
But who is really to blame, and what needs to happen in the future?
Here are all the guilty parties in this sorry state of affairs.
1. Stephen Thompson
Right now, the finger of blame points squarely at the Dundee United chairman and with good reason. They say a fish rots from the head and that the man at the top must ultimately take responsibility. And they are right.
His rap sheet makes for grim reading, including…
• Maintaining his large salary while hiring a General Manager at considerable cost to perform the duties you would assume his own salary covered.
• Taking his eye off the ball to pursue his dream of owning the Newcastle Jets.
• Selling key players to league rivals and cup final opponents.
• Using transfer income to pay back personal loans at 0% interest ahead of the soft loans that carried 6%.
• Creating a negative atmosphere around the club with a number of public gaffes such as allowing the contract details of Jackie McNamara to leak and then sacking him in a rather cut-throat manner, falling out and ultimately losing youth supremo Stevie Campbell and publicly slating the players.
• Signing off on contracts that did not contain suitable clauses to protect the club in the event of relegation.
• Allowing the former manager free reign to sign who he wanted without taking a keen enough interest in the recruitment.
• Not sacking Jackie McNamara at the end of Season 2014/15 when it was clear he had chucked it.
• Operating the club at a huge loss that could only be sustained by selling players at inopportune moments.
• Overseeing a situation where a player had to wait more than two months for a work permit to be authorised, resulting us having to play a hopeless youngster who flogged goal after goal.
• Being caught out having to pay six figure compensation for more than one young player who turned out not to be good enough for the first team.
• Taking almost a month to hire a new manager, and bungling the process by making it so public.
But it’s not all black and white. I read a comment in the newspaper today from Maurice Malpas, blaming Thompson for not investing the transfer money back into the team.
That’s not true.
For all Stephen Thompson’s faults – and as you can see, there are many and the chances are that list is more than likely far from complete – he has made sure his managers have had the funds required to build a squad that should have been capable of finishing in a position safe from relegation.
So that brings us to the next guilty party.
2. Jackie McNamara
I’ve written about this before, so there’s an element of going over old ground here, but the plight of Dundee United is in large part down to Jackie McNamara and his recruitment of players.
Questions that must be asked of him include…
• Why did he think that the untested Zwick and incompetent Szromnik were good enough?
• Why did he base an entire pre-season building around the hope that a player held together by sugar glass and blu-tak – Mario Bilate – could stay fit?
• How much thought really went in to signing guys like Robbie Muirhead (alleged questionable attitude), Darko Bodul (an attacking midfielder we said was a striker and who is so unsuited for Scottish Football it almost makes you weep) and Rodney Sneijder (do I even need to elaborate)?
• Why did he not sign anyone with pace or any wide players considering the style of play and formation he steadfastly stuck to?
• How come there are a sizeable number of players playing for Top Six sides this season who were punted by him for not being good enough?
• After his contract details were leaked, did he really put in the effort required?
• Did his contract mean that he signed young players who he might profit from in the future ahead of more experienced pros who could have done a better job?
There’s no doubt in my mind that Jackie McNamara’s signing policy is a major reason for the position we currently find ourselves in. But when he left the club, Dundee United weren’t even bottom of the league. They only reached their final destination when David Bowman took charge against Partick Thistle.
And that’s before we even get to…
3. Mixu Paatelainen
I like Mixu as a person. He comes across as a nice guy who cares about the club. But there can be no mistake that he must also take some of the blame for being where we are.
His failings include…
• An inconsistent approach to dealing with his players. This includes slating them one week and praising them the next for churning out the same level of terrible performance.
• Freezing out players like Simon Murray, Coll Donaldson and Chris Erskine and then suddenly bringing them back in at a moment’s notice, meaning they were not always match sharp when they were expected to perform.
• Persisting with underperforming ‘talent’ like Billy Mckay, Mihael Szromnik and Ryan Dow.
• Signing players who are either never fit to play (Florent Sinama-Pongolle), can’t last 90 minutes (Guy Demel), took two months to get here (Eiji Kawashima), have questionable mentality and desire (Gavin Gunning) or were known to him but suspiciously didn’t look nearly good enough (Riku Riski).
• Failing to address the need for pace and width.
• Playing a system that obviously didn’t work.
• Complaining about the players’ lack of tactical know-how and yet failing to address it.
I think it’s fair to say that Mixu’s well intentioned forays into the transfer market didn’t work and that had Stephen Thompson gone with a different manager – for example, if he’d bitten the bullet and paid for John Hughes – then we may not be where we are now.
Let’s face it, the money we saved going for Mixu ahead of Hughes will be wiped out by having to pay the big Finn off at the end of the season.
But maybe nobody could have saved us? Maybe the real problem is the fourth guilty party?
4. The Players
For some people, it’s never the players’ fault, is it?
There’s an ingrained belief that no matter what, it’s always the fault of management when things go wrong and not the boys out on the park. They are the heroes; they are the guys that fans want to buddy up to.
But these are some of the most passionless losers I’ve ever seen.
Managers can only do so much. It wasn’t Jackie McNamara’s fault when Ryan Dow missed an open goal against Kilmarnock or when Darko Bodul spurned chance after chance.
There was nothing Mixu Paatelainan could have done to stop Gavin Gunning from inexplicably heading the ball into his own net against Hamilton or to ensure Billy Mckay scored the ridiculous amount of one-on-ones he’s failed to convert this season.
No, the players must take a large part of the blame.
Let’s not forget…
• Sean Dillon deciding to hold a team meeting about the issues at the club at least five months too late.
• The inexplicable lack of effort they put in for key games such as Motherwell and Hamilton at home.
• Individual errors from almost every single member of the first team squad that have cost us dearly throughout the season.
• The body language of some players that suggests “I don’t give a toss”.
• The attitude of some of the squad who have been publicly condemned by the likes of John Rankin and Guy Demel in the press.
Some of these guys aren’t good enough and never will be, and that’s on the managers who signed them, but others have not stepped up when it has mattered. And that isn’t good enough.
So What Now?
As you can see it’s a fine mess that Dundee United are in. While I agree that the man at the very top must take ultimate responsibility, replacing him – which does need to happen – is not enough.
You look at the entire set-up at Tannadice and can only conclude that almost everything has to change. The manager is not up to it, the board – who advise him – is almost as much to blame as Stephen Thompson, the players who will be left here next season are largely not fit for purpose and the club will still be losing money. Replacing only one element of this mess – whether it’s bringing in a new chairman, a new manager or new players – is just not enough to arrest the slide.
But I’m not sure if such wishes are realistic. There’s expectancy among some fans that a chairman should be this selfless cash dispenser who must happily give up his personal fortune for our enjoyment.
Like Eddie Thompson did.
But Eddie Thompson created the culture of operating the club at a huge loss, amassed a mammoth debt and is far from being a role model for any sane potential investor.
Meanwhile the players who are left with us next season won’t just walk away for free because they feel bad for being crap. They’ll still be here unless they get paid off, and any money used for paying off players is money that won’t be used on bringing in new ones.
And all the while, the white elephant that is our supposedly wonderful youth system – a set-up that has seen the sum total of three players make their senior debuts in the last two years and play the sum total of seven games (two starts, five sub appearances) between them – will continue to swallow up cash. But it must be good because Craig Levein said so.
That’s another debate for another day though. But right now, the fans should probably buckle up for the slow road to recovery.
I just don’t think it’s going to happen overnight.
Written by Stuart Milne