OTD: MICHAEL BEALE SACKED

On this day in 2024, former Sunderland manager Michael Beale was relieved of his duties on Wearside after just 12 matches in charge. Widely regarded as one of our worst ever head coaches (even if his win percentage wasn’t as bad as some of our other ex-bosses) mainly due to his attitude and poor performances.

Before becoming a coach, Beale was briefly a youth player at Charlton Athletic but chose to retire at just 21 to pursue his non-playing career. He got started by founding a futsal club for children in London, which attracted the interest of Chelsea and he was given a job as the assistant coach of the under-7 and under-9 squads in 2002.

He left Chelsea a year later for Liverpool, starting out in charge of the under-15 team and working his way up to the under-21 side. In 2017 he departed England altogether for Brazilian outfit Sao Paulo, becoming their assistant coach for six months before the head coach was dismissed. The ability to speak Portuguese was at least acquired though.

Returning to Liverpool was his next step but he wasn’t there long prior to being offered an opportunity by his ex-Liverpool colleague Steven Gerrard to be appointed as a first team coach at Rangers. His time here was successful, he played his part in the Gers winning their 55th league title (and first in a decade) in 2021.

November of the same year of the title win saw him move with Gerrard to Premier League Aston Villa however he was finally given a chance to be the main man in the dugout when Championship Queens Park Rangers came calling in the summer of 2022. After a poor start to life there, Beale’s team rescued a point at none other than the Stadium of Light in very unusual circumstances. With QPR trailing 2-0 late on, they found a goal and then scored in stoppage time through their goalkeeper, Seny Dieng, to avoid a defeat. This spurred the team on and they took 26 points from a possible 39 in the following matches, taking them to the peak of the second tier.

Beale rejected a job offer at Wolverhampton Wanderers in October, assuring the Hoops faithful that he was loyal to the club. The next month he left the club for Rangers, which understandably tarnished his reputation almost entirely at his former club. This can also probably be identified as the start of him gaining a negative reputation in the footballing world.

His stint at Rangers started well, he won four in a row in the league and was appropriately awarded the Manager of the Month Award for December. He was eventually sacked eleven months after being appointed due to a trophyless first season and a stumbling start to the 2023/24 campaign. Beale therefore managed to annoy two clubs called Rangers in the space of just under a year.

Sunderland had just sacked Tony Mowbray after a very mixed beginning to the season, interim head coach Mike Dodds lifted the mood a bit with two wins from three but it was pretty accepted that he wouldn’t be in the role in any permanent capacity and the club would look to bring in someone else. There were rumours of Will Still being close to joining, a young Belgian-British coach managing Reims in France who was garnering a lot of media attention due to him going on a lengthy unbeaten run and because of his age. Exciting. What wasn’t exciting was when it became more apparent he wasn’t coming and that we’d settled on Michael Beale. I think most would have been okay with us just sticking with Dodds until the end of the season at that point, which didn’t work out very well when it did end up happening.

Anyway, it was officially announced on 18th December 2023, to a chorus of digital booing on social media and, I’m sure, a lot of unhappy conversations in the pub. We didn’t actually have a strong hatred of the man just because we’d decided to be nasty as a fanbase, we had heard from Rangers’ and Queens Park Rangers’ supporters about him. They were more than happy to launch a barrage of criticism about a whole host of things, especially from the QPR camp regarding how he had left. 

It was a disaster to be frank, he lasted just 12 matches, winning just four. We got tonked by Coventry City in his first ever game, lost to them lot (in fairness there was a division’s difference) and what finally did him in was refusing to shake Trai Hume’s hand when he brought the defender off in an away defeat to Birmingham City. His football was dull, his press conferences were often quite arrogant (they did improve as time went on, presumably after somebody decided to give him some media training) and the fans just didn’t gel with him. There were a couple of bright moments, after we beat Stoke City and Plymouth Argyle at home it looked like maybe he’d come out fighting on the other end through the initial storm but we then lost back-to-back away matches to two teams who ended up relegated. That was the final straw and he was gone.

After Sunderland, he worked for two months in Saudi Arabia at Al-Ettifaq under Gerrard, as his assistant, and created an anonymous burner account on Twitter to defend his time here and attack our fans and owners. This was stupidly named something that could be linked back to him, it was discovered and quietly deleted after much mockery. Times have been brighter for us since you have to say.