Kevin Nagle’s to-do list after his Huddersfield Town takeover is confirmed

It seems like we may be fairly close to Kevin Nagle’s takeover of Huddersfield Town being completed. It feels a bit like waiting for the Vatican to appoint a new Pope, as we patiently wait outside the EFL gates for white smoke to come out of their chimney. 

Kevin Nagle tweeted on Sunday night about the takeover, replying to an impatient fan that “We have moved as fast as possible. Waiting for the final sign off. No issues.” So it sounds like things might be near the final hurdle. 

With that in mind, I thought I’d do a write up of all the things Kevin Nagle is going to have on his plate once the takeover goes through. He’s going to be a busy man! Or at least his team will be.  

Set out his vision for the club

I think the most important thing we all want to know about Kevin Nagle is what he wants to do with Huddersfield Town. If everything gets approved as expected, he will be in a position to set the course for the club during his stewardship.

Will he want to invest heavily in the club on players on short‐term contracts to take a punt on quickly getting into the Premier League and benefit from the huge riches on offer at that level? Or will it be a slow and sustainable build to help the club compete consistently at the top end of the Championship so promotion becomes inevitable? 

Will he want to continue developing younger players or will he prefer to bring in experienced campaigners? Does he want to be involved in the day-to-day running of the club or will he put his people in place and allow them to get on with it? Will there be some sort of strategic partnership with Town and Sacramento Republic? There are dozens of questions that he can’t really get into now but once the takeover completes he’ll be able to flesh out his vision for his ownership. 

Which leads on to my next point…

Win over the fans (he’s already doing well on this one)

Kevin Nagle will find his job as owner of Huddersfield Town much easier if he has the bulk of the fans on his side. It’s literally impossible to keep us all happy at the same time, so that’s not a realistic goal – if he gave every Town fan a million pounds in cash there would be some fans that complained that pubs don’t like taking £50 notes. 

The early signs are very positive that Nagle wants to build a good rapport with fans. He’s a regular Twitter user and seems to be really enjoying interacting with Town fans. He’s friendly, approachable and comes across as a decent guy. He won over a lot of fans, including me, when he tweeted a picture of him visiting Marstons Chicken shop on Leeds Road in his flip flops when he came to Huddersfield for the final game of the season. 

Phil Hodgkinson, Nagle’s predecessor, made a real mess of his interactions with fans, and Nagle can learn from his mistakes. Phil tended to over-promise and under deliver, he would make bold statements about what he thought was going to happen when he wasn’t in a position to make them (suchas promising five Aaron Mooy-level signings), exaggerated his wealth in a vulgar manner and would get prickly at the slightest criticism. It also seemed like he had a tendency to drink and tweet, judging from the late-night Twitter spats he’d occasionally get into with fans, which would be hastily deleted the following morning.

So Kevin Nagle can easily avoid Phil’s biggest errors by just being humble, honest, and not making promises he can’t deliver. While we all want to see some ambition from our new owner, it needs to be grounded in reality. Any promises made are likely to be remembered down the line, so they have to be based upon what can be realistically achieved. 

So far Nagle has been great with his intereactions with fans. Once the takeover completes, he’ll be able to scale this up. Perhaps an interview with Radio Leeds, The Examiner or one of the fan podcasts would be a good way to get his message across. It would be good to hear from him in depth, so we can get to know more about him. Dean Hoyle was always great at winning over fans with his open and honest discussions in these formats, so he could pick up some tips by talking to Dean. 

Appoint a backroom team

Another job for Kevin Nagle will be to decide on the structure of things behind the scenes. As it stands, we have David Baldwin, who I believe was brought in as Managing Director to handle the takeover. So he may be asked to stay on by the new regime or they may have their own man they want to bring in.

Leigh Bromby may also be in a precarious position. In all honesty, his job would probably be fairly insecure even without the ownership changes going on at the club.  While his job as Head of Football Operations is wide-reaching and involves all sorts, the single most important part of it is choosing our head coach. After he bungled replacing Carlos by putting Danny Schofield at the helm when he wasn’t ready for the responsibility, he made the same mistake again by going for an under-experienced coach when we really needed an old hand. Since Fotheringham’s sacking, he’s been sidelined. While he hasn’t yet been given the boot, Baldwin has been the one to do all “voice of the club” stuff Bromby might have once expected to do, so it feels like he’s been pushed to the side.

Matt from the And He Takes That Chance podcast spotted that Kevin Nagle had Jake Edwards sat next to him in the stands for the Reading game. Edwards was, until recently, the President of the United Soccer League, the second tier of US football (or soccer if you must call it that). It could be that Nagle just likes to keep bald executives next to him during games so he can rub their heads for luck, but I suspect this chap may be lined up for some sort of role in the new order of things at Town.

Choose a manager / head coach

I think the executive team will need to be in place first, but very shortly after that, the new head coach or manager will need to be appointed. Without that talisman in place it’s hard to start planning. But you need to really have the executives in place to make the decision. And to have the executives in place, you need to have your long-term vision for the club clear, as those people deliver it. So it should all flow from one decision to the next. 

I’ve put head coach and manager in the header for this section, as it’ll be up to the new leadership to decide if they want to keep the head coach model or have an old-school manager. I’ve bleated on enough in the past about my preference for managers over head coaches but I do accept that in the modern game it’s much more sensible and sustainable to have a head coach to deal with the playing side of things and a team of other people to deal with recruitment, fitness, welfare, etc. But then again, when we reverted back to an old-school manager at the end of last season, things suddenly clicked back into place, so maybe the old ways aren’t ready for the scrap heap just yet.

The two names I’m seeing linked most often with Town are Neil Warnock returning (again) and Michael Duff at Barnsley. I don’t know if there’s any truth to these rumours but we’ll no doubt find out once things start moving with the above points. 

I’m a bit conflicted about the idea of Warnock returning. It would make sense to have him back after he managed to get a tune out of a squad that looked to be dead and buried. With a preseason and a transfer window to shape his own team, it wouldn’t be daft to think he could have us competing at the other end of the table. Particularly when you consider our form at the end of the season was good enough to be in the playoffs with a weak squad. On the other hand, he is an old man who’s made it clear he doesn’t want to work for the whole season and last season felt like a situation tailor made for his special set of skills.    

Barnsley’s unfortunate defeat in the playoff final yesterday will have increased our chances of being able to get Michael Duff from Barnsley. It will require a compensation payment though, so it may be that this cannot happen until the new regime is in place. It would be strange for the old owner to sign off on a new head coach and to pay for the compensation to bring them in.

Sign some players

Like all football fans, Town fans will be hoping their new owner will be opening up his cheque book when he gets his hands on the club. And it’s unquestionable that Town need some new players this summer. I would argue that this summer we don’t need the fundamental rebuild that we’ve had to do in previous summers. While there are glaring gaps in our squad, the issue is more about quality rather than quantity, so rather than going wild in the aisles when the transfer window opens in earnest, I hope we look to make sensible and strategic investments.

If you look at our squad of first team players, most positions on the pitch are fairly well stocked in terms of bodies but in some areas we lack quality. So rather than bulking up the squad with free agents which aren’t quite good enough for the Championship, I’d rather we focussed on three or four players which can go straight into our starting eleven and make us better. So more Helik-type transfers and fewer Boyles.  

A creative midfielder, a pacey winger and a prolific striker would be at the top of my shopping list. None of those positions are cheap and my preference would be for players that are either at or nearing the peak of their careers, who have experience in the Championship. Which probably means transfer fees in the low millions (at least) and significant wages too. I think spending proper money on this squad this summer would be a decent investment as without more quality in the squad another season of struggle feels very likely, and relegation would cost more than improving the playing squad this summer will add up to.