HASSELBAINK: ‘The type of club we are trying to build at Burton’
In his most revealing interview since rejoining Burton Albion as manager, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink talked in detail about his plans to build “value” into the club to make them more sustainable in future. Never a man to be troubled by social media criticism, he nonetheless urges supporters to keep a lid on expectations with the club mid-table in League One.
reports. IT WAS a comment by Rotherham United assistant manager Richie Barker ahead of Saturday’s game against Burton Albion which prompted the question.
Barker pointed out that it was a great credit for Burton Albion to be competing consistently with clubs such as Sunderland and Ipswich Town in the top half of League One.
I put it to Hasselbaink that while he and his assistant, Dino Maamria, along with some supporters, were disappointed with the team’s inconsistency this season, knowledgeable outsiders looking in, with a different and dispassionate perspective, tend to admire where the Brewers are at and the job the management duo are doing.
The Dutchman, always polite and considered in his responses to media questions, surprised those of us at the press conference with the depth and passion of his response.
His task, he made plain, was not something he felt the need to justify regularly, preferring merely to get on with it.
While he has Twitter and Instagram accounts, he does not often comment on individual games but
Maamria does and, it became clear,
COLSTON CRAWFORD
some of the criticisms of selections and performances have got back to Hasselbaink – and hurt a little.
That said, he laid out just what he is trying to do: to build value in the playing squad, so that selling players for fees can provide another revenue stream; to provide a challenging and successful team at the same time; and not to overstretch the club so that situations like Derby County’s or, perhaps more pertinently to Burton, Yeovil Town’s do not arise.
Nor, he stressed, should the Brewers find themselves in a position in which a player with the market value of Scott Fraser should be allowed to walk away free, as Fraser did in 2020.
Here is everything Hasselbaink said:
“I don’t have big conversations with people abut it but I am actually very happy with where we are. Yes, we are inconsistent and that needs to improve and if we improve we will be higher up in the league. But what people sometimes need to understand is, with all due respect, the kind of club we are, how big we are, the size of our club. That doesn’t mean that you don’t want to compete and you don’t want to be up there. But we are a club that have to be, in a way, a selling club.
We need to make sure that we stay in League One. Then, in the years, like five or six years ago, when we are up there and having a good year, then we need to go for it and try to get promoted.
But then, when you are in the Championship as a club as we are, it is in a way a big problem. What do you do when you are up there?
We don’t really have the finances to be up there. We will have a go but you have to be really smart to think about how to maintain ourselves in the Championship with the size of club we are. How much money are we going to spend?
If you overspend – well, look what has happened to Derby. And then you come down again.
Look what happened years and years ago to Yeovil. Look where they are now (in the National League).
We need to understand what we need to do. We need to get younger players, develop them, and when they are too good, in a way, for us, we need to sell them for as much money as possible.
Then the club is healthy and you keep it healthy and keep moving forward. That’s the club we need to be – to try to put good football on the park and develop players.
If, one year, we are in the top six or the top two because we are going really well and we have got together a really good squad and we don’t have to sell one or two players that year, then you go for it.
But you have to know that if you get promoted, you might go straight down. Rotherham are a bigger club. They can get 12,000 in their stadium. Compare them with us – and they are still going up and down, up and down.
But they are doing a magnificent job because they are keeping their budget competitive and they keep on going. That’s the right thing to do and they are a very healthy club.
I’ll bet you they don’t want to go down when they are in the Champi
onship but they do have the tools to go back up straightaway and that is very good business. And they have stayed loyal to the manager and that is very important too.
You don’t really want to go with the same kind of budgets as other teams in the Championship because, if you do that, the existence of this club might be wiped away.
That’s where we are at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong. I am, with Dino and my staff, one of the most ambitious people.
We want to push, we want to win more matches and be higher up.
We are really disappointed when we come away from places like Wycombe without having something out of the game.
But you also need to realise that, when we arrived here, with all due respect to who was here before, we didn’t have a lot of assets in the team, although the team did pick up significantly. This summer we decided, look, we’re going to try to get some assets, try to get players in who we can develop, to make better.
We can try to get our promotion that way and by getting a value on players so that the team can become valuable.
To get value in the squad was the main thing. That’s how we are approaching it.
So, at the moment, we have a lot of young players in the squad and I think their value is only going to keep on rising if they keep on doing the job and improving.
The age of the squad is really healthy. We need to make sure we can get hold of them and keep hold of them until somebody makes us an offer that we can’t refuse.
We cannot have it that a (Scott) Fraser goes away for nothing. We can’t have that any more.
I think we are in a good place. Could we have been in a better place? Yes.
That’s how we have to look at it. We are always hungry.
At times it’s very difficult and I’m not somebody to fight and go and use the media in this way.
I just let it be and try to do my work.
But the expectation from certain individuals is sometimes a little bit false, so I thought I had to explain this properly.
I am one of the most ambitious people. We want to push, to win more matches, be higher up
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink