Euro vision at centre of Dempster’s grand plans
IN 1955, under the leadership of visionary chairman Harry Swan, Hibernian became British football’s first entrants into European football when they faced German side Rot-Weiss Essen.
Now, 62 years on, the Easter Road club’s current hierarchy is leaving no stone unturned in a bid to put the Leith club back on the continental map.
Not just content with qualifying for the Europa League annually, though, chief executive Leeann Dempster wants Hibs to do themselves justice once they reach that elite level.
To that end, she has sanctioned fact-finding missions to Southampton and St George’s Park and all points in between as Hibs seek the best ways of working to grow the club and deliver on-field success.
‘Why should a club like us not aspire to having regular European football?’ said Dempster.
‘That should be where we are driving ourselves to be. If we aren’t aiming for that, then we are not doing our job properly.
‘We really feel we could — and should — be operating there. We don’t have any divine right to be there, obviously, but we feel with the right plan, dedication and the right decisions we can be operating right at the top of the elite environment.
‘When we get into Europe we just don’t want to be a club that bounces back and forward. What we want to do is try and compete properly.
‘Look at Aberdeen — their finances are materially different because of European competition. They have added on a significant sum with the rounds they have had in the Europa League in the last couple of years and that’s allowed them to do things on the footballing front that we, up until now, have been unable to do.’
Dempster lifted the lid on an extensive series of trips made along with head of football operations George Craig to Brentford, Bournemouth, Bristol City, Derby and the English FA’s St George’s Park base in Burton-upon Trent.
But it was Southampton, where Craig’s former Falkirk colleague, Ross Wilson, is director of football operations, that provided Dempster with the blueprint for a ‘Club DNA’ structure Hibs hope will remain in place long after the current hierarchy moves on.
‘The thing we felt when we went down to Southampton in particular was everybody in the club knew what their goal was,’ said Dempster. ‘Everyone knew where Southampton stood, the importance of the academy, the importance of performance.
‘They had an identity that was there, even from the first few minutes of being at the training centre. Even little things like the branding, it was a club working in absolute concert.
‘That’s what we are aspiring to, the idea of a club DNA. So that at some point in the future when me, George Craig, Rod Petrie, Neil Lennon, Sir Tom Farmer leave the club there is a good structure, a good skeleton that they can continue.
‘There was nothing that made us think, “We need to do X, Y, or Z”, because we are doing all the same things (as other clubs) — like hydro-pools, tech, pitches, video clips. It’s just a different scale (at Southampton) and we want that to run through the whole club.’
In recent years, Southampton have sold key players like Sadio Mane, Dejan Lovren, Adam Lallana, and Victor Wanyama and lost managers Mauricio Pochettino to Tottenham and Ronald Koeman to Everton. But the club’s structure has enabled the Saints to cope relatively seamlessly with change.
‘Southampton lose players and managers but they have that stability,’ said Dempster.
‘It’s not rocket science. It’s about having an environment and having someone at the centre who is driving it.
‘I’m driving everything else in terms of the first team. George Craig’s mantle is all football — developing footballers.’
For all their forward thinking, Dempster revealed that Hibs have turned to retro football game Subbuteo in a bid to get their message across.
‘George came back from St George’s Park and said performance analysis on a screen is sometimes too quick and boys are sitting at the back and not getting it. So he walks up to me with a Subbuteo board! They are using that down there.
‘They have the top technology, but to help the players visualise it they set it out on a Subbuteo board. I thought, “Bloody brilliant”. It is not anti-laptop. It brings the two (new and traditional) together. It’s not about making it simpler for the guys but making it more collaborative.’