In the last twelve months, many of the clubs in the Scottish Premiership – including some of the biggest – have changed managers with varying degrees of success. When said changes have taken place, and as things stand, when dug-out changes inevitably take place again in the near future, one highly qualified name perpetually eludes the discourse and discussion around suitable candidates – Billy Reid.
Why Reid’s name is continually overlooked by boards of Scottish clubs is a mystery – particularly when you examine the vast amount of high level experience he’s accumulated in the decade since he last occupied a technical area in the land of his birth.
Firstly though, lets remind ourselves of who Billy Reid was, followed by a look at who he is…
Reid left Hamilton Academical in April 2013 after 8 largely successful years at the helm. It was an amicable split with appreciation and respect reciprocated between the club and the departing manger. At the time, Reid declared:
“This has been on my mind for a while and probably since the previous Chairman Ronnie MacDonald left almost a year ago. No disrespect to Les Gray the present chairman but it was Ronnie who brought me here and who I worked closely with during our First Division win and our 3 year spell in the SPL. I have probably been unsettled since then so I had a chat with the club and decided to look for something new. There has been no fallout or anything like that it is just time to move on.”
Les Gray added: “The club would like to thank Billy for his almost eight years in charge – a period which has seen the club at its highest level in almost 80 years. We won promotion to the Scottish Premier League in 2008 had three seasons in the SPL – including a 7th place finish – three Scottish Cup quarter-finals and two Ramsdens Cup finals. The decision to separate was an amicable one. Billy felt he needed a fresh challenge, and the club was like-minded. It was simply and naturally felt that it was the right thing to do at the right time.”
As Chairman Les Gray pointed out, Reid wasn’t just able to lead Accies to the top flight against the odds, he kept them there for three years. During that time, the South Lanarkshire club developed a reputation for playing good football with an emphasis on youth. So much so that in July 2010, Reid rejected the offer of the job at Swansea City to replace Paulo Sousa. A key point here is that at that time, Swansea City had a reputation for appointing young, up and coming managers who liked to play the game on the front foot with the ball on the deck. Roberto Martinez had departed the Swans for Wigan Athletic the year before – the man who would take up the post Reid turned down? Brendan Rodgers.
Whilst it’s justified to place Reid into the category of manager who likes to play the game in what we would today label ‘progressive’, he was working with extreme limits budget wise at New Douglas Park. Many of the clubs he was jousting with at the time had more money down the cracks of the sofa. Tactically, there occasionally had to be compromise, adaption and pragmatism. Former Accies captain Alex Neil told Sky Sports that when he was studying for his UEFA Pro License, Walter Smith revealed to everyone’s surprise that the template tactics he applied to guide Rangers to the 2008 UEFA Cup final were inspired by Billy Reid’s Hamilton:
“He was talking about the importance of tactics and how you set up your team, and he gave us a story about that great UEFA Cup run that they had. They played Barcelona at home (in the Champions League group stages) and he spoke about how he was setting his team up and where he got it from was Billy Reid’s Hamilton Accies team that had played Rangers! Everybody I tell that story, they just look at me as if to say ‘what?”.
Financially, Reid was constantly swimming against the tide at Hamilton. Teenage sensations James McCarthy and McArthur, both nurtured under Reid’s guidance, would depart South Lanarkshire for Wigan Athletic in consecutive summers – 2009 and 2010. The fees raked in for the pair were astronomical, worth close to £5m combined – life changing money to Hamilton Academical. The numbers were great for the long term health of the club, but in the short term, a talent drain had began which created a hole in the side that proved too difficult to bridge. Billy Reid had become a victim of his own success. A year on from turning down Swansea City, Hamilton were relegated from the Scottish Premier League.
For Reid and Hamilton, the glory days were now viewed through the rear view mirror. When the aforementioned parting occured, Reid was at the time the longest serving manager in Scotland.
Three years prior to his departure from Hamilton, Billy Reid attended the 40th birthday party of his former player and assistant manager, Graeme Jones. At this gathering he was introduced to a friend of Jones’ from his playing days – Graham Potter – who nine months later would begin his own professional managerial career in the fourth tier of Swedish football with Ostersunds FK. There was an instant connection between the pair and this coaching intersection would prove to be a seminal moment for Reid.
Once Potter’s own managerial adventure was up and running, Reid crossed the North Sea, headed for Scandinavia to take in a game between Ostersunds and Orbero. Reflecting on this experience in 2021 for The Athletic, Reid recalled: “They (Orebro) were a giant team and the Ostersund players were tiny by comparison, but they played Orebro off the pitch. It just fascinated me. I went to training the next day and I just felt he (Potter) had the same philosophy as me.”
Following his departure from New Douglas Park, offers for Reid’s services in Scotland were strangely and frustratingly thin on the ground. It’s at this juncture that Billy Reid heads off the beaten track and essentially out of the social, sporting consciousness of Scottish football. Floating in the vast sea of unemployment, Graham Potter threw down a rope and Reid grasped it with both hands, taking up the assistant managers job with Ostersunds.
Over the next four and a half years, Potter and Reid would take Ostersunds to unimaginable heights. Their methods, sporting and otherwise would see the provincial Swedish side become an international case study in modern football management.
On the field, three promotions were achieved, a Swedish cup win (the clubs only major honour to date) and an incredible run in Europe that saw Galatasaray, PAOK Salonika and Hertha Berlin all swatted aside before the European adventure met it’s end at the hands of Arsenal.
Off the field, Potter and Reid’s methods would garner as much fascination as the football. The management duo and the players would perform in musicals, sing on stage in front of 2000 people and even perform ballet in their very own recreation of Swan Lake – yes, you read that correctly. It was all part of what Reid described as the ‘culture academy – an innovative, out of the box way of bringing the players outside of their comfort zone and to show them they could achieve things not even they themselves could believe they were capable of. The unorthodox but efficacious approach used in Sweden by Potter and Reid was worthy of a chapter in Ben Lyttleton’s 2017 book ‘The Edge – What Business Can Learn From Football’.
Eventually, as it always does for those making waves in football, England came calling. Well, Wales actually.
In the Summer of 2018, Billy Reid eventually did make his way to Swansea, this time not in the managers hot seat but again assisting Potter as he took up the reigns at The Liberty Stadium. The stay in Swansea would only be a brief one, lasting a year. A big impression was made in that year. Swansea were first stabalised and then began to kick on, playing attractive football and finishing tenth in the Championship.
Graham Potter was the hot ticket of English football at this point in time. Brighton and Hove Albion of the Premier League came calling in the summer of 2019 – he and Reid had reached the promised land.
Just six years after leaving Hamilton Academical, Reid was now a highly regarded coach in the richest league in world football. At Brighton, as he had done in Sweden and Swansea, Potter relied heavily on Reid for on the grass coaching as the fortunes of the East Sussex club were turned around. Records were smashed left, right and center over the next three years. Highest league finish, highest points total, highest victory in the top flight – 4-0 v Manchester United in May 2022.
Reid regularly took on media duties, interviews and even found time to play the role of a barman in a feature film directed by a Brighton supporter about the first British woman to swim the English channel – Vindication Swim.
Vultures began to circle The Amex Stadium and in September 2022 Graham Potter was appointed Chelsea manager and brought alongside him his trusted sidekick – Billy Reid.
This time, it wouldn’t be a happy ending. Results and performances stuttered and crashed amid a backdrop of chaos at boardroom level. Graham Potter was sacked just six months later with Billy Reid in tow. Whilst the Stamford Bridge experience was a painful one, a certain level of perspective must be applied – who hasn’t been sacked by Chelsea?
Outside of the Old Firm, Scottish football clubs are en masse indigent. Geographically even, Scotish football is at a major disadvantage – eternally peering over the fence from the land where it is forever winter and never Christmas straight into the land of milk and honey where money grows on trees. As a result, thinking outside the box when it comes to managerial appointments is becoming a prerequisite. It’s a football landscape that doesn’t have the benefit of over inflated television revenues or state wealth investment. It is either the good will of supporters funding clubs or impassioned, philanthropic benevolence that keeps the lights on.
After leaving Hamilton Academical over a decade ago, Billy Reid could’ve waited for the next gig on the domestic managerial merry-go-round, but nobody picked up the phone. It’s possible he could even have drifted from the game entirely, blaming everyone else in the process. But he didn’t – he spent the next chapters dutifully and diligently honing his craft and expanding his horizons in the most unlikely places. Is this experience and education really to be lost to Scottish football? I guess if nobody asks then we’ll never really know. And what a shame that would be.
Calum Maltman
