MIDDLESBROUGH could have taken a much easier option. There were plenty of managerial candidates out there who would have felt like a safer pair of hands – Gary O’Neil, with his track record at Bournemouth and Wolves, Steven Gerrard, with his world-class reputation as a player and title win at Rangers. Safe, but flawed. So, to their credit, the Teessiders have gone elsewhere.
Boro have appointed an overseas head coach before – Aitor Karanka, who remains the last man to take the club into the Premier League – and have provided plenty of unproven bosses with the chance to make a name for themselves on Teesside. Gareth Southgate, Steve McClaren, Michael Carrick – none had head coach experience before taking over at the Riverside.
Never before, though, have the club gone down the road they have decided to take with Kim Hellberg. A young, ambitious head coach, who has made a name for himself at a lower level and got tongues wagging across Europe, but who is completely unproven in the English game as either a coach or a player. It’s a model that has worked for a number of their Championship rivals, most notably Sunderland, last season, with Regis Le Bris, and it feels like the right appointment for Boro to be making now, when they are rebuilding from a position of strength following Rob Edwards’ unwanted departure. Rather than inheriting a mess, Hellberg will be starting his career in England from an extremely solid foundation.
His appointment feels like a ‘Kieran Scott call’ rather than a ‘Steve Gibson one’, and that’s how it should be. Gibson remains Boro’s biggest asset, with his unwavering support ensuring his club continue to avoid the chaos that swirls around a number of their Championship peers, but he is not an expert in recruitment, overseeing a department whose job it is to keep abreast of the latest coaching developments across the world.
That is Scott’s remit, and having built up a considerable amount of trust and credit thanks to his work signing players in the last few years, Boro’s head of football has more than earned the right to drive the current recruitment process. His call on Edwards was the right one, for all that the new Wolves boss let him down badly when he walked away after just four months, and he and his team clearly see something in Hellberg that persuaded them to act decisively to prevent Swansea City from snapping up the 37-year-old last week.
Gibson has backed Scott’s judgement, with the alignment at the top of Boro’s executive structure something that has not always existed, but which has been carefully cultivated in the last few years. Attracting a world-class name such as Gerrard might have appealed to the Boro chairman, but he has made the right call in ignoring the starlight and instead going for the candidate who has established his reputation through the strength of his coaching CV rather than the global reach of his surname.
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Boro’s move for Hellberg has finally dispelled the myth that Gibson was unprepared to move for a head coach already in work. That was never the case, but having railed repeatedly against clubs going behind his back to poach his own manager, the Boro chief was never going to be hypocritical and do exactly the same thing to another club.
For Boro to make a move for a head coach already in employment, they needed to know that the club in question was willing to at least engage and entertain their interest. Hammarby had already agreed to allow Swansea to speak to Hellberg, with a reported pre-agreed release clause of €270,000 effectively making their boss ‘fair game’. Swansea will be furious at Boro gazumping them, but Gibson will quite rightly see that as the way business works. It’s certainly markedly different to doing the dirty on a club who would otherwise have rejected an approach for one of their current employees.
Hellberg has decided that Boro are a better bet than Swansea, and the current Championship table, with the Teessiders 16 places above the Swans, would suggest he is right. And that’s before you factor in the strength of the relative squads, the stability of the clubs’ off-field set-ups and the likelihood of further strengthening in the January window.
The Swede is set to bring his current assistant, David Selini, with him, but crucially, he regards the retention of Adi Viveash in a senior coaching role as desirable rather than something that is being forced on him. For all that Hellberg clearly knows how to coach, and boasts an excellent command of English, he will encounter plenty of unknowns in the Championship. Viveash will help him negotiate them and act as a welcome bridge between the Edwards era and what is about to follow.
Boro never wanted Edwards to leave, and in an ideal world, they would be heading into the winter with their former boss still in place. That isn’t going to happen, though, so rather than seeing Edwards’ departure as a major setback, Gibson, Scott and Neil Bausor have embraced the current situation as an opportunity to reset and improve. In Hellberg, they think they have the right man to lead that process. Time will tell, but it instinctively feels like a much better move than so many of the others they could have made in the last fortnight.
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