By Jason McKeown
He just wanted to play football. Just wanted to make the most of the final few years of his career. Just wanted to make up for lost time after serious health issues. But now Kevin McDonald faces up to an uncertain future, unwanted by the football club who less than a year ago wanted him to be their manager.
The Bradford City squad are currently undertaking pre-season preparations in Austria, but Kevin McDonald is not with them. Ordered to stay home. Train with the youth team. The team bonds without him, as the 35-year-old searches for alternative employment. He has been told he can leave. Told his future lies elsewhere. The door shut. He joins the rat race against hundreds of out of contract footballers this summer in trying to find a new club.
How it got to this for McDonald lies at the heart of the problems that blight Bradford City. Namely short-termism, and the routine ripping up of plans and trying to start all over again. As supporters grow increasingly impatient about the slowdown of summer signings – searching hard for real evidence of a promised larger playing budget – we are told that unwanted high earners must first be shipped out, before new faces can be recruited. McDonald is apparently one of the players asked to seek new pastures.
You can of course see why Graham Alexander might not fancy his former Burnley team mate McDonald. The veteran midfielder had some really good games for Bradford City last season. But also delivered some pretty awful performances. The road back to full, 40-plus-games-a-season fitness is long for a player who went undertook a kidney transplant two years ago. You never 100% knew what you were going to get from McDonald last season. Alexander eventually gave up on his veteran midfielder, and found the consistency he needed elsewhere in the squad.
McDonald last featured in the 3-0 loss to Harrogate in the midst of that awful March collapse. There are rumours the Scot wasn’t exactly a role model in how he accepted his end of season demotion. That he has been disruptive. And so when all is said and done, reasons to move McDonald on to have greater resources elsewhere are understandable.
Still, it’s tough on McDonald – who turned down a League One contract with Exeter City to join the Bantams. As recently as April 2019, he was still playing Premier League football for Fulham. He has since been to hell and back, and because of it will want to play on for as long as possible. After his kidney transplant, he found it very difficult to find a club willing to take a chance on him. “That period was probably harder than the transplant, to be honest with you,” McDonald said in 2023. Now, he’s back there again.
And this is where the short-termism of Bradford City remains such a hindrance to the club. McDonald was signed by Mark Hughes, who lost his job two months after the season began. McDonald then became caretaker manager, and it’s strongly rumoured the club wanted to give him the job full time, after an impressive start. McDonald clearly didn’t want it, standing down as caretaker before a replacement was found. Alexander ultimately came in, and as McDonald stepped back into the dressing room, he faded to bit part player and then to unwanted face.
City and Hughes gave McDonald a two-year deal, yet less than half way through this agreement they’re telling him to move on. Telling him not to pack his bags for Austria. The landscape has completely shifted around him. McDonald is no longer considered the solution, but the problem. He deserves to feel more than a little aggrieved, even if rumours suggest he might have displayed it in a better way. The closing stages of his career deserved a happier ending.
The problem for City is that this cycle of short-termism shows little sign of slowing. The club goes into the 2024/25 season with Alexander in the hotseat. In six of the last seven Bradford City seasons, they’ve ended the campaign with a different manager to the one who started it. For 86% of the time since 2017, the Bantams have kicked off the season with one plan, and finished it with another.
(By incredible coincidence, the one year they kept the same manager for the full season also happens to be the only year they made the play offs. Weird that.)
Each manager has their own ideals, own way of doing things, and own preferences of players. Yet the club keeps signing players on contracts that by some distance out-live the manager who wanted to offer it. McDonald is not the first player in recent years to sign for one Bradford City manager and find themselves unwanted by the next guy. We’re more than happy to commit to paying decent wages for a set period of time, only for those decent wages to suddenly be viewed as a problem that needs fixing.
That’s football of course, but as fans are asked to invest their hopes in a head of recruitment, CEO and chairman who have overseen these decisions, it’s hard to have huge confidence that the choices made this summer will be looked back on any differently. We can’t sign any more players right now, because we’re fixing the mistakes of the past. And while managers quickly pay the price for those mistakes, the other people who oversaw and sanctioned these decisions don’t seem to face any accountability.
There is another way. And that starts with sticking with the manager for more than 12 months. Letting the guy who spent the summer building a squad have at least the 46 league games to deliver. The constant churn of ripping up a squad and recruiting heavily each close season has to stop, but only will if the club can stick with a manager through more than a couple of transfer windows.
Success for Graham Alexander is not just in how quickly he can move on yesterday’s mistakes, but for his tenure as Bradford City manager to outlive the player contract decisions he’s making right now.
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Well, Jason, this appears to be a bit of a scoop for you. I’ve personally not seen McDonald’s situation explained in such detail elsewhere – or reason given for his apparent absence from training or failure to go to Austria.
There are two ways of looking at his situation. He has stated a wish to prolong his playing career and may have turned down the chance to manage the club in order to do this. In this circumstance it makes sense for Alexander to tell him at the end of last season he probably will not be playing for us in the following one.
The other view is that McDonald signed for us in good faith, sacrificed a fair chunk of his own season to help us out and deserves better than to effectively be shown the door.
Clearly McDonald’s alleged disgruntlement will not endear him to supporters. Being told you’re not in the manager’s plans is not uncommon in football and indeed it seems Alexander has said the same to two or three others. Most players accept the inevitable and hope to come to some kind of amicable solution which will involve a good reference and some financial easing.
Personally I would not want to go further and blame the club here for ‘short-termism’ in sacking managers prematurely. That to my mind is a separate issue. I would rather question the recruitment. As I recall we signed McDonald and Taylor within days of each other. Both came with, shall we say, baggage. At the time I was quite pleased we’d added height and experience to the team but for entirely different reasons there were question marks over both.
Earlier in this close season we managed to dispense with the services of Taylor and Odusina, having already shuffled off Osadebe. I assume David Sharpe has been brought in to radically reform the way we handle transfers. The current prudence is presumably a direct consequence of the previous craziness.
The merry-go-round of managers coupled with long contracts for players, who quickly become redundant to the incoming manager (and often his successor) has been a constant theme of this administration.
Vadaine Oliver is a perfect example. He seems to have been surplus to requirements almost from the day he joined the club. We go into another season where it appears he needs to be moved on.
I do sense that there was a bit a change in approach towards the end of last season. Maybe the penny has dropped and there’s an acceptance that the club needs to stick by GA for longer than just half a season.
Hopefully, that is the case and it delivers the end result; promotion out of the league. Unfortunately for Kevin that means he’s an unwanted man at VP. But if GA does deliver then we’ll ultimately see it as a right decision.
The Oliver transfer has been a flop. A 3 year deal for a nearly 31 year old who had 1 good season his whole career, no resale value either other than a ‘nominal fee’.
For me, as long as we’re in L2 I would impose general rules like these on new signings (I.e not for those already with us):
1. No 3 year deals for 30+ year olds.
2. 12 month contract max for 34+ year olds. I’d be tempted to say no contracts for 35yr olds.
Exceptions would have to be exemplary, and as part of that, they would have to have no transfer fee, and contracts would have a base level wage with appearance bonuses. Goalkeepers would an exception also.
citys signings of over 30 year old players has been a major reason behind the lack of success on the field,to throw two,three year deals at the feet of over the hill types is negligent to say the least…the club is paying for it now…but what do city do this summer?..sign two more over 30 year olds in sarcevic and Byrne!!…think there’s a lot of emotional sentiment in the signings of sarcevic imo,Alexander previously worked with him at Fleetwood!..not convinced throwing contracts out to these older ends will have its positives!!
I found it strange that McDonald stood down as caretaker manager before a replacement was found. Perhaps disillusionment took effect before Alexander’s appointment.
When he played, I always feared that some freak accident, like being sent crashing into a perimeter wall, could have catastrophic consequences on his transplanted kidney. That’s why I thought he may have been keen on a stab at the job permanently.
If he’s displaying his unhappiness in a disruptive manner, the sooner he moves, the better, for both parties.
But who’s going to take him? With a year left on his contract, a cash settlement to terminate looks the only way out.
Whilst I agree with the article relating to short-termism being an issue, it’s harder to argue the point this close season. How many players did we have options on keeping or releasing? This summer hasn’t seen the mass squad overhaul we’ve seen in the past. Surely that’s an indication we’ve finally woken up?
But what i am more concerned about is the spreading of unfounded (possibly malicious) rumours regarding McDonald. Does anyone know for certain that he was “ordered to stay home and train with the youth team”? Has anyone considered the alternatives of why he’s there?
As for regurgitating the rumours of a spat, again, unfair on him. The club tried to get him to change his mind about applying for the job permanently. However, he always maintained his position that he wanted to play and not possible to do both jobs. He was desperate to get back to being a player, so when results started to turn, he stepped aside, forcing Sparks into completing his very lengthy recruitment process. Kev was then left out whilst he regained some match sharpness & then reintroduced back into the squad. His performances weren’t consistent & he ultimate his place in the squad. Even Gilly couldn’t force his way back in.
So, why does there have to be some conspiracy? There are lots of reasons we want to offload him from the playing squa, so I’d rather we didn’t share unfounded rumours.