Michael Beale to Sunderland: The good, the bad, and the WTF

here we go again. Sunderland appear to have a new head coach in Michael Beale, with fans left to try to make sense of it.

So it appears that Sunderland have settled on Michael Beale as their new head coach, and it is fair to say that it hasn’t gone down phenomenally well with the supporters.

The former QPR coach has been out of work since getting sacked by Glasgow Rangers in October, and failure to impress at one of the Old Firm clubs in Scotland is always going to be a bit of a red flag for supporters.

Anyway, with the initial shock subsiding, let’s take a closer look at the Michael Beale to Sunderland thing – the good, the bad, and the WTF?!

I’ll get the bad out of the way first.

The bad

The ‘bad’ is very easy to see with Michael Beale, isn’t it? He left Rangers after a really shoddy transfer window left their previously good squad completely unbalanced and ill-equipped to contest with Celtic.

That’s always a bad look, isn’t it? If you finish second in the two-horse race that Scottish football is and it’s not even close, it’s going to rightly raise alarm bells.

Michael Beale is expected to be named as Sunderland's next head coach. With @AdamLeventhal @PJBuckingham https://t.co/RDhR4u3E5O

— Michael Walker (@mwalker2771) December 15, 2023

Throw in the extra emotion of constantly battling your bitterest rivals for every honour every year and it’s going to create bad feeling towards you from your own supporters.

There is also the way his character was called into question by the nature of his departure from QPR.

The Hoops were the club who gave him an opportunity as a head coach and when Premier League Wolves came calling just a few months into his stint at Loftus Road, Beale rejected their advances.

That’s all well and good, but the way in which he did it did not reflect well upon him at all. First of all, he made a very public song and dance about it, and then that song turned out to be absolute bul***t.

"Integrity and loyalty are big things for me, and if they are the values you live by you have to be strong,” he told the actual QPR website. “I have been all-in here and I have asked other people to be all-in so I can't be the first person to run away from the ship."

A month later he had quit to join Rangers.

There is quite a lot that Sunderland fans will put up with. In fact I’d say Sunderland fans, considering all they have been through, are among the most remarkably patient in English football.

However, a bulls****er is definitely not one of them, and he will arrive at the club lacking trust – not only in his football but in his character as well.

The good

There is a couple of seeds of hope buried in that ‘bad’ section above, most notably the fact that a year ago Beale was in line for a Premier League job. They are not especially easy to come by, as we all know. In fact, most have to earn them through the one-two combination of promotion and survival.

Michael Beale impressed at QPR / IMAGO

He got that on the back of getting a very ordinary QPR team, largely the same one that has struggled since, to the top of the Championship last October.

Beale undeniably did well at QPR. In fact, his record there (P22, W9, D5, L8, Pts32) is very similar to what Sunderland’s is this season (P21, W10, D3, L8, Pts 33). How much QPR have struggled since with largely the same players certainly speaks well of how he was performing there.

His record at Rangers, taken in isolation, is good reading too, winning 72% (31 of 43) of his matches in charge. Naturally, context is important there too and overall he was a failure there, but his win-percentage was impressive. In fact it was better than Steven Gerrard’s there, albeit from about a quarter of the sample size of games.

It’s also worth remembering that Beale did a lot better at an Old Firm club than Tony Mowbray did.

Head coach will suit him more than manager?

An absolutely vital aspect of judging the Beale appointment for Sunderland is to remember that his failure at Rangers was as a manager, not a head coach.

Beale was in charge of transfers at Rangers, saying in August: "I’ve had freedom to recruit players.”

That recruitment did not go well for him and it was that which was the root of many of the criticisms he faced in Glasgow. He left the squad unbalanced, failed to replace important players, and left himself with no Plan B during games.

At Sunderland, he will not have any such control. He, like Mowbray and Neil, will have a recruitment team making the decisions for him and creating his squad. He will be given the tools and asked to concentrate only on the coaching.

That is something that will undoubtedly suit his skillset more. I mean, look at what Mike Dodds was able to do with this Sunderland squad if you’re looking for a reason to be optimistic about Beale in charge.

‘Expert’ behind Steven Gerrard Rangers success?

Michael Beale got his opportunities as a manager after being a big part of the Steven Gerrard success at Rangers.

Rangers under Gerrard was a success story as he was able to deliver an SPL title nine years after they were demoted to the bottom tier of Scottish the Scottish league.

Beale was a key figure in Steven Gerrard's success / IMAGO

However, according to many, including Gerrard himself, it was Michael Beale who was the real power behind their partnership.

“It would take me 15 to 20 years to become as good as Michael Beale as an on-pitch coach, delivering sessions on a daily basis, so I let Mick be Mick because he's the expert,” Gerrard said.

A lot of people won't have a clue what Michael Beale does on the training pitch, but what he does is really quite special.

“I haven’t had the luxury of retiring early from the game or not being a player, in terms of having that pitch time to really become a coach for the past 20 years like a Brendan Rodgers, a Mourinho or a Michael Beale.”

Certainly, Gerrard’s career in management has appeared to have suffered badly since separating from Beale.

‘I want us to go for it every single week’

In theory at least, Beale’s footballing philosophies should marry well with the mentality of the club right now and what the fans want to see.

He has spoken openly about wanting to play aggressive attacking football, with the term ‘take the handbrake off’ becoming synonymous with him.

"I want us to be on the front foot, to take the handbrake off and for us to go for it every single week. I think that's what makes this crowd get excited," he said following his Rangers unveiling.

"The fans come to see their team win, but they also come to be entertained. It's important that we both of those things.

“Utopia for me is finding a group of players that have freedom to rotate in the final third.”

Of course, having a plan and a philosophy is easy. Actually putting it out onto a football pitch is another matter entirely.

The WTF

Much of the anger we are seeing towards Michael Beale on social media from Sunderland fans is probably not about the man himself at all, but the sense that the club have let them down again.

As we’ve just discussed, there is plenty of up-side with Beale. The problem is that you have to sift through a lot of the shock and anger to really find it.

That shock and anger is justified too. Sunderland have asked the fans for a lot of trust since Kyril Louis-Dreyfus bought the club.

There was smoke and mirrors about the percentage of the club he had bought leading to questions about who was actually running the club. Trust was requested. There was a total revamping of the way the club operates. Alex Neil walked criticising the ownership and the club asked supporters to truth them instead. A quality striker was sold and not replaced with like-for-like, but we have been asked to trust them on that too.

Kristjaan Speakman has asked supporters for a lot of trust :: IMAGO / NurPhoto

For the most part, fans have given the club that trust. Part of that was a suggestion that things would be different this time around and there is some genuine ambition inside the club, even if the model itself – developing, selling, reinvesting – on the surface could be seen as the antithesis of that.

Sacking Mowbray when they did, they again asked for trust. It looked like they had something genuinely ambitious in mind, especially when the club made a big play to get Will Still out of Stade de Reims.

That Still chase, and the Francesco Farioli links of last spring, made many think that trust had been well-placed and would be rewarded with an obvious display of ambition. After all, if you wanted safe, then why sack Mowbray at all?

Ultimately, it is probably that which has made a Michael Beale appointment sting a little. This will be the 24th managerial appointment Sunderland have made in my time supporting the club – it will be the 20th time the position has been filled by an out-of-work candidate or an internal appointment. That doesn’t feel very transformative at all.

If you think back to the Alex Neil appointment, I don’t think there were a huge amount of Sunderland fans who were happy about it.

Having lost Neil, replacing him with an apparent journeyman like Tony Mowbray most certainly didn’t stimulate much excitement.

So, what you can say with complete fairness, is that and endorsement from Sunderland fans at the time of appointment is not necessarily especially meaningful.

Then again, if we are going to make that point, there are also the Phil Parkinsons and Simon Graysons to consider as well, so it doesn’t mean Sunderland fans are wrong either.

In the end, we move on from the initial shock and disappointment and the supporters will get on board. That is tried and tested and not in doubt.

We just have to hope that ultimately, like when Mowbray joined, there is a lot more substance to the Michael Beale appointment than it appears to be on the surface. 

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