Paul Heckingbottom: managing upwards

"It wasn’t a dream, we’ve done it!"

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Words: Sam Parry

How should we measure the relentless success that Paul Heckingbottom has brought to Sheffield United Football Club? I have an idea.

Recall our relegation to the Championship in 2021, when fans - us - clamoured for a new name. When, as we know now, the wrong man was hired to pick up the keys from the Caretaker. By November of the same year, Slaviša Jokanović’s attempt to jam square pegs into round holes was over. Sacked. Expectations shattered. Pegs scattered.

We’d made no permanent signings. There was no obvious strategic direction on the pitch nor off it, a team leaking goals; patterns of play so brutally ideological that it cast our players in a gloomy light. As I watched the glittering relics of that great Chris Wilder team, I couldn’t have been the only one to think they were no better than tired replicas, that we – Sheffield United – were once again no better than average.

Then came the obligatory image of Paul Heckingbottom signing his contract—and it’s funny how sights and sounds are so easily recordable as images, video, and audio. Smell has a different sensory charge. Catching you onto something familiar, something evocative of time and place and memory. When Heckingbottom was hired, we all caught a whiff of that uncanny, thickening fog: Sheffield United, the basket-case club of the time before, and the time before, and the time before that.

A virtually infinitesimal minority of Sheffield United fans believed Paul Heckingbottom was the man for the job. We were all sceptics – a five-year deal!? The news was greeted with such opprobrium it’s easy now to misremember:

When it comes to universally despised and derided decisions, you would be hard pressed to find one that evoked a more extreme reaction in football than Sheffield United appointing Paul Heckingbottom as their new manager.

Nathan Spafford, Football365 - 30 Nov 2021

Play-offs - 2021/2022

Only results change minds in football. That's just the water we swim in. Some might argue that turning around an underperforming football team is easy. You could make the argument that Heckingbottom couldn’t do any worse with the side he inherited; it’s one thing to think that and another to witness such a rapid ascent.

Yes, square pegs were returned to their holes. Yes, the team already possessed quality and depth. But restoring confidence and arresting the slide was the work of monumental effort and mere months. Sixteen wins, seven draws and five losses later, the Blades ended the season inside the play-offs.

And we did so in style. Rediscovering form founded on our deep experience of 3-5-2 and its patterns of play. Casting out deadwood like Lys Mousset and restoring that oh so Sheffield United sense of hard work and resilience. We exploited the qualities of Gibbs-White, Ndiaye and Norwood to their fullest. We were back and we were us.

Failing to beat Nottingham Forest in the play-offs did not feel so much like a failure to succeed but a failure in the planning. Had we hired Heckingbottom from the start of the season, who knows where we might have ended up?

By the second leg of play-off semi-final, Blades fans were largely won over by the manager’s honesty, decency and points-on-the-board. We found ourselves 2-0 down in that game. (3-1 on aggregate). Then there was that moment when Heckingbottom launched the ball into Djed Spence’s abdomen.

The incident was bizarre, physical, and aggressive. It was a player’s, not a manager’s, reaction to adversity. It sparked a melee around the touchline, flicking a switch. And what had appeared as a hopeless cause became a level playing field – we brought it back to 3-3. Maybe I shouldn’t love this moment as much as I do. But this emotive spilling-over made us all aware of Heckingbottom’s hunger for success, an incurable instinct that would drive us, a season later, to promotion.

Promotion: 2022/23

Managing upwards

In his autobiography, Roy Keane speaks of how managing upward – negotiating the conflicts that arise at the executive level – is the skill that keeps you in a job. Players win games, but there’s so much more to football management than what happens on the training ground. And it is this ability that Heckingbottom proudly alluded to upon promotion on Wednesday:

When you're working with the players, that's the easy bit; it's everything that comes around it. That's probably what I take the biggest satisfaction from: the fact that I've been able to manage all those other bits, whether that's protecting the players [or] being able to direct and influence key decisions to help us get to this moment.

Paul Heckingbottom, Football Heaven - 27 April 2023

Those key decisions off the field have made an immeasurable difference to our success on it. Approaching his full first season in charge, Paul Heckingbottom faced several interdependent challenges:

• Prince Abdullah on record as wanting to sell the club; little appetite for all but the most necessary investment

• No recourse to significant additional funds for transfers and wages, a recruitment strategy limited (mostly) to loans

• The training ground, long acknowledged as comparatively poor in standard, not yet up to standard

• Significant outside interest in one of our key assets, Sander Berge

• A high probability that we will need to sell assets

• A sense of expectation amongst our fans that does not tally up with the financial reality

All of that before we take to the field for our first game. As those executive-level challenges unfurl, they are quietly addressed whilst being met with success on the pitch. Be in no doubt, the start we make to the season changes everything.

On 30 August we beat Reading 4-0, and the record shows: W4 D2 L1. We top the table. Had results been different, had we taken half as many points, it is a safe bet that Sander Berge would have been sold the next day. Berge’s departure had been reported as confirmed, but he didn’t leave on deadline day. We cannot know for sure how much leverage Heckingbottom had in that decision, but one thing is absolutely certain: it was only a logical decision to keep Berge because promotion was on the cards.

Throughout his career, Heckingbottom has contended with owners and boards whose destructive decision-making has hampered on-the-pitch events. The skill of managing upwards cannot in any meaningful way be taught. Learning on the job, Heckingbottom has experienced the tumult of boardrooms on the brink at Barnsley, Leeds and now at Sheffield United – a takeover, mid-season, really?

All of the things “that come around it” felt as if they were going against us. Injury after injury. Training ground without undersoil heating. Then the January transfer window. Not only interest in Sander Berge but also Iliman Ndiaye. We kept hold of them despite bids – big bids. But we signed nobody. Teams usually need options to get them over the line (think: Gary Madine and James Hanson); they need a point of difference. Heckingbottom didn’t get it: we kept Berge and Ndiaye and got rid of Khadra; that was our lot.

Transfers

If keeping hold of our assets was a minor miracle, then signing Anel Ahmedhodžić – our only permanent signing of the season – was a Grail-finding moment. An heir to Chris Basham, the most significant signing in my lifetime.

Rewinding to Chris Wilder's premiership, it's easy to forget the persistent attempts to find a player who would either replace, compete with, or offer something different to Chris Basham. Signings included Jake Wright, James Wilson, Ethan Ebanks-Landell, Richard Stearman, Ben Henegan, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Martin Crainie, Phil Jagielka, Panos Retsos. Of course, none of them would displace Bash.

Basham’s heir would need to be a right-footed centre-back able to play in a back three; tall enough to win headers; a natural defender; athletic and with energy – able to get up and down the right-hand side of the pitch; ideally with the ability to really play football.

There are few of those knocking around. Identifying that man, putting in the groundwork to convince him that Bramall Lane is the best staging post for the next steps in his career and getting the signing over the line… well, that wasn't easy. Plenty of clubs sniffed around. But Heckingbottom signed his man, and Ahmedhodžić has repaid that faith. The data speaks for itself: when Ahmedhodžić plays, Sheffield United averages 2.18 points per game. That’s better than every other Blades player.

Of course, all of that success is the result of Anel Ahmedhodžić's performances, not Paul Heckingbottom’s, but good players bring success. And Heckingbottom has successfully acquired – probably – our most valuable asset for many years. That's not just arbitrary impact; it's the impact Paul Heckingbottom wanted, planned for, targeted, and succeeded in. It's the impact that has topped up the quality we already possess in Sander Berge, Iliman Ndiaye, Oliver Norwood and, of course, the Manchester City loanees.

Quality strikers cost a lot of money. Bringing in Tommy Doyle and James McAtee, two loanees from Man City, has improved the quality of attacking rather than the quality of attackers. They’ve had a transformative effect on our season, especially towards the back end of the campaign. So good, in fact, that it’s almost as if Heckingbottom planned it that way, and maybe he did.

We all remember McAtee’s boys-against-men performance against Luton. It shows Heckingbottom's certainty in the player to keep the faith, and introduce him slowly into the side until such a point where, in his last ten games, he’s scoring and making goals with ease. For Doyle, he’s managed to push Oliver Norwood out of the team. To consider what an extraordinary feat that is, it’s only right to state Norwood’s record this season across the entire division: Tackles (4th), Tackles won (1st), Interceptions (5th), and Touches (8th).

I don’t think it’s fair to compare Doyle and Norwood as players. They are, I think, more different in their respective qualities than some people seem to think. Norwood makes tackles and sprays passes. Doyle is way more of a shuttler, picking it up deep, turning on the ball, restarting possession, and nabbing a goal – in that sense, he’s probably closer to Berge. But what he’s added to this side in the last few weeks of the season is a point of difference, a new way to build up, a final flourish to finish the season.

Upwards

Tactically, Heckingbottom has relied on the 3-5-2 that brought so much success under Wilder. He’s built on that. This side is more unpredictable in the final third; there’s more individual brilliance and less reliance on structured patterns of offensive play. Iliman Ndiaye has had one of the great Sheffield United seasons. Sander Berge is a class above.

But this team also has more mistakes in it. I think I love them because of their flaws. Unable to cart off players and find replacements, Heckingbottom has got a tune out of certain individuals who I would never have expected to still be at the club, let alone helping us to promotion and an FA Cup Semi-Final: success, despite our flaws. For this reason, I never understand the grump-ridden, sclerotic team-bashing of some.

I can’t fathom how Heckingbottom has managed the ceiling-high expectations. Surely that is one of the hardest things to do? I sometimes wonder how a vocal minority of fans have allowed their expectations to inflate, balloon-like, to such surreal proportions. A loss, a bursting bubble, an outpouring of vitriol, unwarranted and delusional.

Still, Heckingbottom has met every single over-blown expectation. We are going up. And the fog that hung around Bramall Lane on 29 November 2021, a fog that could’ve been thicker, darker, more ominous, has been lifted. There are many protagonists deserving credit for their contribution to our promotion – and I hope we don’t forget this when we lose games in the top flight: chief among them is Paul Heckingbottom.

We were all sceptics once.

How should we measure the relentless success that Paul Heckingbottom has brought to Sheffield United Football Club?

Easy: we are all converts now.