Messy recruitment, arguing owners: Hibs slump has no clear end

It is the middle of August and Hibernian have taken their usual position at a crossroads between trouble and hope. This is a club where supporters have learnt to be no more than cautiously optimistic and to approach every new season on the assumption they will not have a long wait for the onset of disappointments.
Hibernian are barely off the starting blocks and already they’ve been beaten by third-tier Kelty Hearts in the cup and lost both of their opening Premiership games to St Mirren and Celtic (five goals conceded, none scored). All of this in the aftermath of their supposed new sugar daddy Bill Foley tossing up a bolt-from-the-blue verbal grenade about the owners taking his money without paying enough attention to him. The campaign is six games old and the title of last week’s The Hibs Ramble podcast was: “It Can’t Get Any Worse, Can It?”
Well, this is Hibernian, so silly question. The guys behind the recording know their club inside out and that means they realise that worse is exactly what they can and almost certainly will get, specifically between 3pm and 5pm on Sunday afternoon when their team face the toughest fixture possible. Hibernian sailed serenely through 75 per cent of their Premier Sports Cup campaign but that humbling defeat to Kelty cost them a seeding in the last 16. Hibs being Hibs, low on lucky white heather and four-leaf clovers, the draw condemned them to facing Celtic again, at Parkhead.
Back-to-back games against the best team in the country is an ominous challenge for any manager, let alone a 36-year-old first-timer who has the next few months to prove himself and hopefully break a lamentable and crippling cycle of hiring and firing. David Gray is Hibernian’s sixth permanent manager in five years. Paul Heckingbottom, Shaun Maloney, Lee Johnson and Nick Montgomery each lasted between 19 and 52 games and only Jack Ross survived any decent length of time, getting to 96 matches in charge. Hibernian have sacked managers in 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
That is more than just unenviable recent history, it caused an accumulation of baggage which continues to weigh them down as Gray attempts to execute an essential rebuild. The annual churn of managers — each of them understandably allowed to make their own set of signings — created a mongrel squad with players in and out of favour, collectively anchoring them with a sizeable wage bill without providing value for money.
The recruitment has been a mess and one consequence of it is the nonsense of 15 players coming out of contract at the end of this season. Another is the team’s consistent mediocrity: in those past five seasons they have had only one top-four finish and also limped home in seventh, eighth and eighth. They have been the league’s perennial big-club underachievers, so prone to collapsing that every other fanbase in the league has gleefully belted out “Hibs, Hibs are falling apart, again” at one point or another.
So that is the context for Gray, who needs no lessons on what he has taken on given that he has been around for ever and stepped in as the caretaker after Ross, Maloney and Johnson were binned. Legendary status around Leith for scoring the winner in the 2016 Scottish Cup final will buy “Sir David Gray” some time if his opening months are a struggle.
It will help him too that they have gone through so many managers that sacking fatigue has set in, meaning the immediate focus is on the owners and the hierarchy. Hibernian have a lot of heads and no mouth, in that they are owned by the Gordon family, have Ian Gordon as the lead director, Foley as a 25 per cent shareholder, Ben Kensell as the chief executive, Malky Mackay as a new sporting director and David Marshall as technical performance manager and yet still leave supporters exasperated that they do not receive adequate communication from the powers that matter, namely Gordon and Kensell.
The most startling summer story out of the club came when Foley echoed that sentiment. Through his Black Knights consortium the owner of Bournemouth ploughed in £6million to buy a quarter of the Hibernian shares in February, but by July he felt moved to publicly complain that he was not being listened to and chastised his fellow owners — the Gordons have 60 per cent — that Hibs would be better off if they started taking his advice. “I believe they will listen to our input now,” the 79-year-old said, pointedly, after the Kelty defeat. A few days ago Mackay said the relationship between Hibs and Foley’s people had to “flow” and that he speaks to the Black Knights group once a week. Supporters remain in the dark about exactly how things now stand between the Gordons and Foley.
Any division will sink them. Hibs need unity to navigate to a position of long-term recovery and stability. So far they have made nine signings, all free transfers or loans except for the £600,000 spent on the Scotland Under-21 striker Kieron Bowie from Fulham. Bowie and the former MK Dons centre half Warren O’Hora have impressed on the limited evidence so far.
Adding aggression and energy to a passive midfield is a pressing issue. Kwon Hyeok-kyu may bring some of that but the latest arrival is on loan from Celtic and cannot face his parent club on Sunday. Three bids have been submitted for Dundee’s Luke McCowan, the most recent of them £750,000. The team is a work in progress and it is hard to assess how Hiberian will cope with a new squad, a new manager and a new hierarchy.
They have not won at Parkhead since 2010 and have conceded between three and six goals on each of their past three visits. Gray has warned of short-term pain while the new team takes shape. Against Celtic it will almost certainly get worse before — they hope — it gets better.
Celtic v HibernianPremier Sports Cup, last 16. Celtic Park, Sunday August 18. Kick-off 3pm. TV: Premier Sports 1