The Time is Now

FAO: The Football Monitoring Board

As the celebrations following our 8th Scottish Cup triumph cooled in the days after May 24th, focus turned to how the Dons could capitalise on the moment - a first triumph in that competition since 1990 should have been the catalyst to move the Club onwards and upwards.

We didn’t make the most of the goodwill that followed the League Cup win in 2014 but surely we wouldn’t let this opportunity pass us by? Would we?

Commercial Success

Off the pitch, the Club did pretty well out of that Hampden victory - plenty of Cup Winners merchandise flew off the shelves in the days and weeks afterwards. Season ticket sales for this season reached a record 11,500 and AberDNA saw us reach 10,000 paid up members.

A three-year, club-record extension to our shirt sponsorship followed, as did record sales again in our replica shirts - the North Sea away kit beocming the fastest selling away kit in histry, outstripping the Northern Lights kit from a couple of years ago.

Corporate hospitality places for the 2025/26 season were also snapped up quickly with limited spaces available throughout the course of the season ahead from Day 1. All in all, when it comes to maximising the cash coming into the Club off the back of the Cup success, Robbie Hedderman and company knocked it out of the park.

Since then, we’ve seen the announcement that Robbie would depart his role as Commercial Director at the Club to take on the CEO role at Shamrock Rovers in his native Ireland. Robbie has done a stellar job in his time heading up the Commercial function - backed by a team of dedicated and talented individuals - they’ve built on the previous work of Rob Wicks to deliver year on year increases in the revenue coming into the Club and all associated with that side of the Club should be, rightfully, proud of their work.

As an aside, the candidate brief for Robbie’s successor makes for interesting reading. Particularly in relation to the responsibilities for the role going forward that sees whoever takes on the role be tasked with delivering a 50% increase in commercial revenues over the next 4 years.

As I mentioned above, Robbie and his team have delivered an unprecedented set of results in this area in the last few years but it should be noted that they also came at a time of significant tailwinds to help along the way. Two group/league stage appearances in Europe help simply by virtue of the additional ticket sales & corporate hospitality that more games bring and that also allow you to look to extract more revenue from your sponsors, etc.

The Scottish Cup victory also helped to bolster these results significantly - do we think we’d have topped out at 11,500 season ticket sales after a 5th place finish in the league where our form since November of the previous year had dropped off a cliff? Do we think hospitality or shirt sales would have been so robust had that been how the previous season had wrapped up?

As we are all too familiar, silverware is not a shoe-in around these parts - without those tailwinds and with the reward of guaranteed European football until Christmas fast diminishing from the Scottish game for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to see how the Club can extract the same value (let alone 50% more) out of it’s commercial endeavours - this is all before you put into context a local economy in the North East that is bracing itself for more misery which will, likely, see discretionary spend from a number of companies in the area of hospitality and entertainment dry up.

A poisoned chalice? One may suggest so.

This is all before you even get onto the fact that our latest Annual Report makes it clear that we are heavily reliant upon either (a) a big money transfer sale of a player (or two); or (b) League stage European football to make the books balance. Perhaps more of that in a later blog.

The Thelin Conundrum - Context

That win at Hamdpen solidified Jimmy Thelin’s place as manager of Aberdeen Football Club into this season. Had we taken a (predicted) spanking in the Final, there’s a strong argument to be made that our results since November, coupled with a Hampden humbling would have seen Dave Cormack, Alan Burrows & Steven Gunn under intense pressure to dismiss Thelin there and then.

There were plenty of arguments for and against that line of thinking made in the erun up to the Final itself but the cold, stark facts remained that we had been utterly dismal once the initial shine of Thelin’s fast start to life at AB24 had worn off. Mitigation could/would be made in his favour surrounding recruitment, etc, and I would have, personally, been surprised if the Club had jettisoned the Swede in the summer.

Perhaps though, the Cup win was what everyone needed? It gave Thelin enough credit in the bank across the board to push on into this campaign - surely he’d be given the necessary resources and support to then mould the side more into the image of the Elfsborg sides we’d seen and read about prior to his arrival and to make a concerted effort to push on domestically and to make a fist of making it into the playoffs of the Conference League?

With the appointment of Nuno de Almeida last December as our Head of Recruitment it felt that there was now, at least, some stability in the footballing operation.

De Almeida became our 4th Head of Recruitment in as many years following the revolving door of Darren Mowbray, Jordan Miles (remember him) and Chris Badlan. No matter what you may think about a “Moneyball” approach to recruitment, having that sort of turnover in the individuals charged with heading up your player recruitment is detrimental in the extreme and points/pointed to other issues further up the food chain (more on that later).

The summer recruitment though left (and still leaves) much to be desired. For a Club who had known that Bojan Miovski would depart in the summer of 2024 for quite some time, the fact that we scrambled to loan Kevin Nisbet late in that summer window said a lot about our lack of proactiveness. The fact that we then had a further 12 months to then think about a long-term successor and ended up going back to acquire Kevin Nisbet in the dying embers of deadline day says a lot.

Maybe Kusini Yengi was meant to be that guy? Signed relatively early in the window on a free transfer from Portsmouth and handed the No. 9 jersey - Yengi’s signing was one of the more curious pieces of business that we’ve carried out as a Club in many a year. Reportedly on a significant weekly wage, Yengi arrived as a 26-year old centre forward having played less than 100 games of first team football and had mustered a paltry 23 goals.

Perhaps though Yengi was brought in to act more as a target man No. 9, someone you could play the ball into, he’d hold and bring others into play with strong technique and physicality - much in the way that a number of Thelin’s sole strikers had operated at Elfsborg? Causing chaos and allowing those wide players & attacking midfielders to proft off?

A cursory look at Yengi’s “showreels” offered little hope in this area - a simple dig into the most simple of data showed that this was not his game and this was all confirmed via the eye test in pre-season outings at Cove and against Ipswich.

So why did we do it?

Therein lies the million dollar question - just how did we end up saddled with this guy on a 3 year deal when he, patently, doesn’t tick any of the boxes that you’d expect the recruitment team were asked to profile against?

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a dig at Yengi on a personal level - he was offered a deal and took it and fair play to him (or his agent) for securing that particular bag - but within 4 (FOUR) first team games for Aberdeen, Thelin had already seen enough and Yengi has been, rightly, bombed out of the squad since and the Dons went back to the well to acquire Marko Lazetic from AC Milan after failing to get his signature back in January.

Yengi is probably the most egregious of the signings made in the summer - the likes of Kjartansson & Bilalovic look talented but are clearly earmakred for the future and their game time has been limited. Emmanuel Gyamfi has been barely fit to get a read on whether he is any good or not and it’s taken Adil Aouchiche 4 months to get to a level anywhere near what his pedigree suggested we were getting.

Nico Milanovic showed flashes on his arrival of a promising winger but he has flattered to deceive since - a player struggling with form in a new league in a side that were rotten for much of the opening phases of this campaign.

This was, clearly, a summer window designed to bring a new flavour of youth to the Club.

Gyamfi, Kjartansson, Milanovic, Bilalovic, Aouchiche, Lazetic and a returning Alfie Dorrington arrived with an average age of just 20.5. Perhaps it was no real surprise that as the summer window wound to an end that panic set in at our start to the campaign and the call went out for experience - as we saw Kevin Nisbet & Stuart Armstrong brought into the squad along with 27-year old Jesper Karlsson.

The age old problem of bringing in players for development is that it is all well and good building a squad for the future but football supporters demand a competitive team on the pitch on a weekly basis - the likes of Gyamfi, Kjartansson, Bilalovic, Lazetic and Milanovic may all go on to be extremely shrewd pieces of business by the Club in the long run but that’s little comfort to supporters who spend their hard earned cash supporting the team up and down the country or abroad, just to see them humiliated in Athens or put in abject showings in Prague or Parkhead.

As it was, Steven Gunn was the individual who paid the heaviest price for the summer’s dealings - Gunn departing his role as Director of Football in the wake of the summer window.

The decision painted in the press release as being Gunn’s decision and it having been a mutually agreed piece between Gunn, Cormack & Burrows but the timing was off, there are enough rumours around exactly what went down and the very fact that Gunn was not namechecked at the recent Club AGM (unlike Robbie Hedderman) tells you all that you need to know.

Again, on a personal level, there is nothing here against Gunn - he was (and is) a massive Aberdeen fan at heart and everyone who we’ve ever spoken to who has had dealings with him will tell you he’s a good guy who was extremely dedicated to his job and was, particularly, good on the administrative side of things. That’s not to say though that his promotion to the role of Director of Football was not ill-founded and we’ve stumbled from one shitshow to another on the field for the vast majority of his time heading up the football operation which is, ultimately, what he should be judged against.

It is important to put all of the above into the mix when we consider Thelin’s tenure at Aberdeen - there has been a level of chaos surrounding the manager for much of his time at the Club - on top of that, he lost a trusted lieutenant in the form of Emir Bajrami within months of being here. Bajrami has never been replaced and whilst it’s too easy to point the finger at his departure as being the reason for our dramatic fall off in form last season, there is a definitive correlation between the two.

Bajrami was passionate and fired up on the touchline, the Ying to Thelin’s Yang. The fact that he has never been replaced is a curious one in the extreme.

On top of that, there’s the personal factor. Thelin’s family did not follow him to the North East of Scotland. There are plenty of factors in play about this and you can form your own opinion as to whether that is or isn’t appropriate - that’s for Thelin and his family to decide.

What can’t be understated is the effect that will likely have on Thelin on a personal level.

The Thelin Conundrum - The Reality

The cold hard facts of the matter is that for the calendar year of 2025, we have not been in good form:- P53 W18 D11 L24 - a win percentage of just 33.9%.

The statistics only tell one half of the story though - the eye test will tell you that not only have we been poor from a results perspective, we’ve been dreadful to watch for the vast, vast majority of this calendar year.

Thelin stubbornly stuck with his shape and system all through last season, only changing it up come the Cup Final for which he will receive all the credit in the world at turning up at Hampden with a pragmatic game plan that gave us the best possible chance of lifitng the Cup and it got us over the line.

As this season started off, the same old issues were there for all to see - weak defensively, prone to conceding soft goals from nowhere whilst being reasonably tidy in possession but without ever really threatening to do much with it.

Indeed, as it stands in the Premiership today, our goal tally of 20 for the season to date is level with that of bottom side Livingston. The endless recycling of possession, checking back inside, static forward players makes us the easiest side in the league to defend against. Our inability to beat the first man from set piece deliveries only heightens the bluntness with which we are an attacking “threat”.

Compare and contrast to Hibs’ opener yesterday - a fast breakaway culminating in quick, one touch passing around the box, coupled with decent movement which opened us up easily for Klidje to net. If we were faced with the same situation, does anyone really feel like we are going to produce something similar?

We have shown it in small flashes this season - our first half at Dundee was decent enough as was much of our display at home to St. Mirren but that’s about it. You can make an argument that we have some good players in attacking areas (on paper) but they simply aren’t showing it. Some of that is clearly a confidence matter, but after a prolonged period of this type of display that also carries over no matter who the personnel are, you have to start looking in the direction of the manager & coaching team.

Things at the back aren’t much better.

Thelin shifted away from his 4-2-3-1 almost out of desperation to protect his job more than anything else and the 3-4-2-1 certainly helped, initially, to make us more solid defensively and we were able to begin scraping wins together without being overly convincing - it’s thanks to those wins that we at least find ourselves in mid-table purgatory instead of scrapping it out with Livingston and Kilmarnock at the foot of the table.

However, that change in shape has come at the expense of any sort of natural attacking threat and in recent weeks, more of the age-old issues are re-appearing. Players remain prone to making daft errors that belie their individual experience (Devlin v United), at times our defensive structure goes out the door with alarming ease, you can pinpoint individual moments in games across the season to date where it simply looks as though the players on the park have no idea what is being asked of them and where they are meant to be at any given moment. This was never more apparent than at Easter Road on Tuesday night.

Players appear confused as to when they should press, when they should hold - when we press we often don’t do it as a coherent unit, making it far too easy for opponents to bypass entire lines of our defensive makeup with one simple pass - again, Hibs exploited this time after time on Tuesday and were left with players driving forward against our backline with impunity.

This isn’t even an issue of experience, we see this occur whether it’s old hands like Graeme Shinnie and Stuart Armstrong on the pitch or if it’s some of our younger players.

After 18 months it’s simply not acceptable for us to be in such a state of confusion on the pitch defensively and unable to show any level of coherent forward play.

We can sit and analyse individual moments across the calendar year and we can bemoan refereeing calls or VAR decisions as much as we like but the fact is when you strip all that back, you come back to two simple and basic concepts:-

(1) we have not recruited well enough (in the main); and

(2) those players that make up our squad are not being coached well enough

We’ve covered the first point above.

On the second point, we don’t know enough as to why this is happening - are the coaching team simply unable to convey their messaging appropriately to get the players to execute? Are they asking too much of them? Are they being naive as to how Scottish football operates and are trying to implement ways of playing that simply will not work from week to week? Why are we still attempting to place rount pegs in square holes from week to week?

Is there something deeper around the man management style of Thelin that is not connecting? Angus MacDonald’s interview with the P&J this week makes for interesting reading - whilst you may need to read it with a pinch of salt as it’s Angus’ own perspective on things, the fact that he says that Thelin basically stopped talking to him after the debacle at Fir Park perhaps says something deeper about Thelin’s style?

Unhappy members of a squad hanging around the place (of which there is likely a few just now) are not going to be conducive to a positive atmosphere at the best of times.

If we take it as read that both points 1 and 2 above are correct, then can we really gamble on another window with Thelin being provided more funds to try and correct the trajectory we are on?

Or is it time to take the view that with a new Sporting Director at the helm, that the funds would be better spent giving a new manager the January window to shape a squad in his image and build towards 2026/27 with real intent?

It’s genuinely painful to be writing this at the end of 2025 - a year that brought so many of us the highest of highs in our Aberdeen supporting lifetimes.

We all know that our board are hardly the most proactive of participants when it comes to acting swiftly and decisively but the evidence is beginning to become unavoidable, thanks Jimmy for your efforts and for May 24th 2025 but it’s time.