When Craig Brown was in charge of Preston North End nearly 20 years ago, he would tell a story about how he tried to navigate his way through his most testing times as a manager.
Each summer, Brown wrote his best XI down on a piece of A4 paper and slipped it into an envelope before placing it safely in one of his office drawers.
If Preston started to lose games, he’d open that drawer and unseal the envelope, looking at the sheet of paper.
This would make him remember what he was thinking when his mind was separated from the stresses of the season and in the next game, according to availability, he’d try and revert back to his judgment when it was at its clearest.
An old manager’s trick, one that would have been unavailable to Alex Neil while in charge of the same club over the last few months as he attempted to shake the team from a malaise which in truth has lasted since January 2020, when Preston were in the play-off positions. Following lockdown, they slipped from sixth to ninth before starting the new season in terrible form at home, losing five on the bounce.
The names of two Bens, Davies and Pearson would probably have featured inside Neil’s secret envelope. But with their contracts ending in a few months’ time and neither wanting to renew, one more than quadrupled his wages by joining champions Liverpool and the other was allowed to sign for Bournemouth in the most recent transfer window, along with Darnell Fisher who went to Middlesbrough.
The end of January and beginning of February was a hectic period at Deepdale. Preston were the busiest club in English football’s top four divisions. Lots of players came, lots of players went. Seventeen transfers were sanctioned in total: eight signings, eight departures; 11 of the deals loan agreements.
With that, Neil’s side — which was already missing goalkeeper Declan Rudd and commanding central defender Patrick Bauer owing to long-term injuries — lost a sense of itself.
Seven of the next 11 matches ended in defeat. A loss at home to Luton Town last Saturday sent Preston down to 16th position in the Championship table. It was a result that leaves them nine points above the nearest team in the relegation zone, but Rotherham have four games in hand.
Neil is a manager in a permanent state of mixed furrowed expression who tends not to open up a great deal. Yet there was a startling admission after the Luton defeat.
“People talk about you knowing your best team and I used to get criticised for having my best team and playing it more often than people thought I should have done,” he said. “If I’m being brutally honest at the moment, I haven’t got a Scooby-Doo what my best team is.”
Never in their history had Preston sacked a manager this late in the season. Managers had left before in March but that had been of their own volition: 19 years ago, David Moyes joined Everton, and in 1986, with the team at the wrong end of the bottom of the Football League, Brian Kidd — who later became an assistant at both of the Manchester clubs — offered his resignation.
“With your best team you know what you are getting from them week in, week out,” Neil continued. “What I get from one week to the next, God knows.”
It sounded like Neil had lost control of Preston’s future. The next morning, he was told his £1 million a year contract was being terminated.
In November 2019, Preston were top of the Championship. Stoke City, meanwhile, may have been bottom but the promise of greater resources to play with, as well as a better contract, meant Neil rather fancied the opportunity to jump between clubs at the opposite ends of the table.
In the end, Preston reported Stoke to the EFL for making an alleged illegal approach and Neil stayed but in the meantime, Preston quietly went about assessing their options. Peter Ridsdale’s official title is an advisor to the owner Trevor Hemmings but the day-to-day responsibilities are with him rather than the billionaire.
Among the club’s considerations as Neil’s potential replacement was Lee Bowyer, who would have made an interesting appointment given Ridsdale’s connections with the then Charlton Athletic boss from their time together at Leeds United.
Bowyer, of course, only recently departed Charlton for Birmingham City so that rules him out as Neil’s successor for now. The Athletic understands Preston have had more than 50 serious applications for a role that only received interest from five managers when Graham Westley was appointed in 2012.
For the time being, Neil’s assistant Frankie McAvoy has been named as the interim head coach until the end of the season. McAvoy’s title is a departure from Neil’s, who was the firmly the manager. Though it has been suggested that Preston might look to hire a sporting director this summer and alter their structure, club sources have told The Athletic it is currently more likely that Ridsdale will work closely with another manager but without directly replacing Joe Savage, who was head of recruitment until he joined Hearts in December.
Savage’s responsibilities have partly been filled by the arrival this month of James Beet from Barnsley as a recruitment analyst. While this reinforces the influence of Ridsdale and any future manager, it also shows the club is embracing an approach driven by data.
Like McAvoy, Savage had worked with Neil at Hamilton and Norwich City. In each of his jobs, Neil developed a reputation for making reasonable profits from cheaper signings and this had been possible to some degree because of Savage’s judgment as well as his contacts.
The biggest sales at Preston during Neil’s three-and-a-half-year spell in charge came from purchases that pre-dated his arrival but Savage was known within the North West as a tireless worker whose advice had previously helped Preston get more signings right than wrong.
Savage, however, had wanted to leave Preston for almost a year. Hearts were offering him a promotion as sporting director and he will have more of a say on the Scottish club’s entire transfer policy. At Preston, he was tasked with providing lists of players that the club could sign within its small budget. From there, it was the board’s decision what happened next. Savage was not involved in negotiating any contracts or transfer fees — that fell with Ridsdale, who then presented Hemmings with the sign-offs.
Savage had long thought that much of his work was going to waste. Inside Preston, there is some regret that Savage was given a title that suggested his role would encompass greater variety and heightened responsibility when perhaps chief scout would have been more befitting.
The roadblocks in front of him at Preston, as well as his ambition, meant he did not want to be viewed any longer merely as a scout. Hearts also suited him because it allowed him to live closer to his wife and his young daughter, as well as his brother who is now recovering from treatment for a serious illness.
Savage’s exit nevertheless meant Preston entered their busiest period of transfer activity in years without one of the three primary elements of their recruitment department. Savage might not have been involved in the business end of deals but he did open doors to the agents who were significant figures in brokering them.
The contract situations of Davies, Pearson and Fisher meant Preston had to do something. Despite being owned by a billionaire, their economic world is a real one. The money from sales creates the revenues to replenish the squad. Had all three left in the summer for nothing, Preston would have effectively started a rebuild without the sort of funds that would allow them to target anything but free transfer signings.
It is believed that there was some urgency inside the club to start this process last summer but in the middle of a pandemic, other clubs did consider it prudent to pay decent fees for players that would soon enough be available for nothing.
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