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Rangers return was always a no-brainer for Michael Beale – is he ready, and why now?
This was the job Michael Beale considered a no-brainer. It was the one he always knew he would not be able to turn down. It was the dream he left Ibrox with upon his exit with Steven Gerrard a year ago but he had no way of knowing if, or when, it would come true.
One day. Well, that day is here, and it has come sooner than anyone would have anticipated.
Beale has left Queens Park Rangers of the English Championship after 22 games in charge to rejoin Rangers, but this time it is as their new manager rather than his previous job as first-team coach.
His appointment comes just over a year since he followed Gerrard out the door to take over at the
Premier League’s
Aston Villa.
After spending the three and a half seasons prior to that as the former
Liverpool captain’s trusted lieutenant on the training pitches at Auchenhowie, he now joins the select group of 18 men to have been permanent manager of the Glasgow club.
He has already made an impression. Training was delayed until Monday afternoon so that Beale and his staff could meet the squad and take his first session.
They underwent conditioning and fitness assessments after two weeks off but Beale laid down his fundamentals. His message was that he wanted them to enjoy and dominate football matches again, be united as a group and most importantly win, but do so in style.
It has been an eventful week which saw
Rangers being granted permission to speak to Beale by west London side QPR on Saturday.
The £1million release clause in his contract was triggered, which
Wolverhampton Wanderers activated recently, and the 42-year-old Londoner was granted permission to speak to Rangers.
It may have cost more for his staff to be released too but a new contract that had been offered to Beale and which would have changed the dynamics of any potential deal was not finalised.
QPR’s director of football Les Ferdinand did not want to protract negotiations as the club’s first-team squad, who returned to training on Wednesday following a short break while the club season is on hold for the playing of the
World Cupin Qatar, were looking for clarity with so much speculation the past two months. Their stance is that they only want people at the club who want to be there.
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Since the removal of Gerrard’s successor Giovanni van Bronckhorst last Monday, several names had been linked with the vacancy at Ibrox.
It is understood Francesco Farioli was one of those Rangers met. The 33-year-old Italian has built a reputation for playing imaginative football at Alanyaspor in Turkey after serving as now Brighton & Hove Albion manager Roberto De Zerbi’s goalkeeping coach at
Serie A side Sassuolo for two years before moving into management. However, he is considered one to keep tabs on.
Instead, Rangers have entrusted Beale with the responsibility of restoring the club’s league dominance they had asserted 18 months ago.
But why Beale? Why now? And why Rangers, rather than the Premier League job at Wolves he rejected a month ago?
The last one is the question QPR fans will be asking themselves after he turned down top-flight football at Molineux after the sacking of Bruno Lage and reaffirmed his commitment to the second-division club, saying, “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.”
It is not as big a volte-face as it may appear, though.
As an ambitious young manager, there are reasons why the Wolves job wasn’t perfect enough for him to leave his first managerial role less than six months in.
Rangers are a club ingrained in Beale’s heart, and he knows the place and the players inside out. Helping Gerrard to rebuild the club and win their 55th title in the 2020-21 season was a huge achievement and, once you have tasted that euphoria in a city like Glasgow, which gets under your skin, that connection is always going to be there.
Wolves was a Premier League job and that status means he would have stood to earn more than at Ibrox.
But Rangers are an institution, competing for trophies every year; they reached that
Europa League final last season, and the
Champions League group stage they were part of this autumn for the first time since 2010-11 is the new benchmark.
To grow to love a club and have a young family who loved their life in Glasgow does not always arise in management. Beale’s youngest daughter was born in Scotland and was given the name Alba, if any more proof of her parents’ affection for the country is needed.
It is a precarious profession and he had already moved twice in just over a year, so this will not have been a decision he took lightly — his family didn’t move down to Birmingham, where Villa play, until some months after he joined the club.
Beale had numerous chances to leave and take charge of a club during his time at Rangers but he stayed with Gerrard. He turned down the job at Championship side
Cardiff City the same week they moved to Villa.
Rangers rate Beale highly from that previous spell with them and view bringing in a sought-after manager as a coup.
Because Beale is so well known to the Rangers fans, a section of the support will view this as the lazy and unimaginative choice by a board that is not flavour of the month with them right now. They may see his profile, as the coach who was here when that title was won two seasons ago, as an attempt to placate those who were angry towards the end of Van Bronckhorst’s reign.
Beale has barely any experience as a manager and a cynical mind would ask why, if Rangers thought that much of him, they didn’t offer him it a year ago. To appoint Van Bronckhorst and his staff, and now replace them with Beale’s team 12 months on, has cost the club money.
No appointment is
safe at Rangers, though, and is it any less of a risk appointing someone with 200 games as a manager who doesn’t understand the unique pressures of the club?
Beale chats to Connor Goldson at Rangers’ home game against Aberdeen in October (Photo by Rob Casey/SNS Group via Getty Images)
As Gerrard’s trusted first-team coach, Beale assumed a large share of the responsibility on the training pitch — it could be framed that the apprentice has now become the master.
But the former England captain was open in stating that Beale was in charge of training. Gerrard said it would take him 20 years to become as good a coach as Beale is, given that is the amount of time his assistant invested in building his experience with
Chelsea and Liverpool at academy level, and at Brazilian club Sao Paulo.
By the time QPR came calling in the summer, Beale admitted he felt “overcooked” as an assistant.
It would be a stretch to say he returns to Rangers oven-ready as his 22-game reign at Loftus Road (won nine, drawn five, lost eight) does not change his CV drastically. He began strongly with nine wins and three draws from his first 16 league games but experienced a wobble in the final weeks before the World Cup break, taking one point from five games; despite that, having QPR sitting seventh was a very good overall start.
Managing a club the size of Rangers, with the relentless pressure to win every trophy available, every year, means that neither they nor city neighbours and arch-rivals
Celtic are ever truly built for the long term. Expectations have changed since he arrived with Gerrard in the summer of 2018, when there was time for the new regime to bed in and build from the low base of the previous season’s third-place finish.
Now the scrutiny will be on him straight away once the season resumes with a December 15 home game against
Hibernian and Beale will need to take on the additional pressures that come with being the public figurehead of the club.
Gerrard has had to internalise that sort of intense pressure his whole adult life, having had to shoulder great responsibility in his playing days. But even he had to go through a transition to becoming a manager. Beale will have to cope with new tests with Glasgow’s 24/7 football news cycle and supporters who can be unforgiving if you do not start well.
What stands him in good stead is that he will have been able to study Gerrard up close and see how he handled his emotions, managed upwards, got across the messages he intended and insulated himself from the cacophony of noise on every corner.
