It’s funny when you think about the characteristics that lead to a manager being dubbed as unfashionable in the modern day.
Bespectacled, bald and thoroughly ordinary-looking, John McGlynn doesn’t use buzz words or jargon or try to blind you with science. He also gladly leaves unorthodox, experimental tactics to the goatee-bearded hipster coaches who are half his age.
The 64-year-old’s speciality is tirelessly identifying football players with potential, building and coaching a team on a limited budget, and winning matches.
He does all of this with aplomb. There was once a time when that was a one-way ticket to the big time.
The lack of recognition and opportunities at the very highest level for the man from Wallyford in East Lothian has long been a mystery.
Berwick Rangers proved to be his pinnacle as a footballer. Has the lack of a stellar playing career hindered his progress as a manager? It certainly did Brendan Rodgers no harm.
John McGlynn has been working miracles at Falkirk with a limited budget
McGlynn has led Falkirk to sixth place in the Premiership in the first season since promotion
The former Celtic boss is just one of many big names in football whose estimation of McGlynn knows no bounds. Rodgers was blown away by the Scot’s tactical acumen when Hearts came within a hair’s breadth of knocking Liverpool out of Europe in 2012.
Another fan was Edgaras Jankauskas, the former Tynecastle forward who won the Champions League at Porto under Jose Mourinho. The current Lithuania manager once said that the Scot had the biggest impact of any manager he has worked with in his career.
A plumber to trade (he famously installed the showers at Stark’s Park) McGlynn got on the tools in football at Easterhouses Lily Miners Welfare in the early 90s before managing Musselburgh Athletic, where he once pulled on the boots.
In the mid 90s, he was invited to help out with the coaching of Hearts’ youth sides under Jim Jefferies. A burgeoning reputation grew the moment he guided the club to victory over Rangers in the 2000 Youth Cup final.
Soon made a first-team coach, he held the fort after the abrupt departures of John Robertson and George Burley.
McGlynn was given a crack at the permanent job in Gorgie in 2012. It lasted just nine months.
Subsequent job offers came from Livingston and Raith Rovers, where he’d been previously.
He worked as a scout for Celtic under both Ronny Deila and Rodgers, but no Premiership side evidently saw him as officer material. Not back then, anyway.
Perhaps McGlynn didn’t feel like he had a point to prove to anyone when Falkirk turned to him in May 2022. If he did, his credentials have now been written in large, bold capital letters and underscored several times,
Look at the position the Bairns were in back then and you wonder how such a significant club in Scottish football could have sunk so low.
Relegated to League One at the end of 2018-19, they churned through four managers in three years. Ray McKinnon, Lee Miller, Paul Sheerin and Martin Rennie all arrived hoping to reawaken a sleeping giant. None succeeded.
There were still 3,366 fans at Rennie’s last home match in charge, against Alloa on April 23, 2022 – a remarkable crowd given promotion hopes had gone up in smoke for yet another season. After finishing sixth, something had to change.
There was logic in turning to McGlynn. He had led Raith Rovers out of the same division in 2020 at the second time of asking, then recorded finishes of third and fifth in the Championship.
He wasn’t the only person at the Fife club to make a grave error of judgment by sanctioning the signing of David Goodwillie, found in a civil court to have raped a woman.
‘We completely made a mistake,’ said McGlynn at the time. ‘We didn’t anticipate the level of fallout. It was an enormous error and we’re sorry.
‘We’re not bad people. I’m not a bad person. I just want a chance to make it right. I’m a husband, I’m a father. I get it.’
McGlynn’s departure from the club at the end of 2021-22 was inevitable, however. He needed the change of environment and fresh challenge which Falkirk offered.
Fears that the club were beyond saving arrived at the end of his first season. The team secured a play-off spot only to be humiliated 7-2 on aggregate by Airdrie. A fifth straight season in the third tier beckoned.
It was to be a textbook case of the picture being darkest before the dawn. McGlynn’s men romped to the League One title without losing a game in season 2023-24, finishing 16 points above Hamilton Accies.
With the momentum of a juggernaut from an invincible season, they went back-to back the following year, securing promotion from the Championship by a three-point margin over Livingston.
In their first season back in the big time since 2009-10, the Bairns have defied their newly-promoted status.
Saturday’s win over St Mirren left them sixth in the Premiership table – three years, eight months and eight days after occupying the same slot two leagues below.
The real beauty of what McGlynn has achieved is that it owes nothing to chequebook management.
McGlynn is now set to go head to head with Martin O’Neill as Celtic come calling
Aidan Nesbitt and Leon McCann were already at the club when McGlynn arrived. Liam Henderson joined from Arbroath days after the manager entered the building.
Finn Yeats also came in that juncture. So did Gary Oliver. From facing the likes of Edinburgh City and Clyde to tackling Celtic and Rangers, it’s been quite the journey.
McGlynn has added steadily along the way. Calvin Miller signed in 2023, with Dylan Tait and Ethan Ross arriving a year later.
Keenan Adams was kicking a ball with Cumbernauld Colts when McGlynn spotted him. He scored a screamer at Parkhead this season.
Connor Allan was released by Rangers in the summer. He’s been a revelation. There have also been welcome sprinklings of experience in Scott Bain and Brian Graham. Both have made telling impacts.
There were legitimate fears early in the campaign that the team were not resolute enough defensively.
McGlynn astutely addressed this concern, without compromising too much on the attacking football which was been the team’s hallmark as they rocketed through the leagues.
With Falkirk already 16 points ahead of the play-off spot having claimed three wins in their past four matches, a fanbase who seemed stuck in a recurring nightmare four years back are now dreaming of what might be possible.
Ahead of their meeting with Celtic, the rejuvenated Bairns have both style and substance. Not before time, McGlynn has his due recognition.
