The end of season award circus is back in town
There is nothing quite like the Scottish football awards season to remind you that this sport is essentially a massive, high-stakes high school popularity contest.
You can grind all year, overachieve with a squad of free transfers, and still get ignored. It happens every single year. The ballots get handed out, and the actual football being played becomes a secondary concern.
The WhatsApp groups light up with managers telling their mates to vote for them, and the tactical mastery being displayed on the pitch is completely forgotten. We pretend there is some deep, analytical process behind these shortlists. We pretend the voters are sitting in dark rooms, grinding tape and comparing expected goals. They are not. They are ticking the box next to the guy they had a pint with last month.
The PFA Scotland Manager of the Year shortlist just dropped. It features Falkirk's John McGlynn, Hearts boss Derek McInnes, and Stenhousemuir's Gary Naysmith. Three guys who have absolutely earned their flowers.
But there is a glaring omission here, and it is driving me insane. Before we get to the robbery, we have to break down the guys who actually made the cut. The storylines here are genuinely fascinating, even if the voting process is deeply flawed.
John McGlynn and the impossible three-peat
You have to respect what is happening at Falkirk right now. According to the BBC, John McGlynn is officially in the running for a third successive PFA Scotland manager of the year award.
A three-peat. Do you know how hard it is to stay relevant for three straight years in this league without your squad getting gutted? It borders on the impossible.
Most managers in Scotland have a short shelf life before the fans turn on them, or the board runs out of money. The pressure cooker environment means that a bad month can get you sacked before Christmas. McGlynn has somehow bypassed all of that chaos. He has turned Falkirk into an absolute machine that just chews through opponents week after week.
You watch them play and it actually makes sense. It is not always pretty, but it is brutally effective. He isn't out here trying to play prime Barcelona tiki-taka with guys getting paid part-time wages.
He sets them up to win football matches. His defensive organization is absurd. They close down space faster than anyone in their division, and they punish mistakes with ruthless efficiency. You watch a Falkirk game and you immediately see the fingerprints of a manager who controls every single phase of play.
If he wins this third award, we have to start having a serious conversation about where he ranks in the modern era of Scottish management. Back-to-back-to-back awards voted on by your peers is ridiculous. It is the kind of dominance that usually gets a manager a massive payday down south.
Your peers hate you. They want your job. If they are voting for you three years in a row, it means you beat them so badly they had no choice but to tip their cap.
Derek McInnes and the art of survival
Then you have Derek McInnes. The BBC confirmed he is on the shortlist for his work with Hearts. The guy is a managerial cockroach in the best possible way.
You cannot get rid of him. Every time you think his tactics might be getting stale, he reinvents himself just enough to pull off a massive result. He just keeps surviving and thriving.
McInnes knows how to build a team that makes you miserable. I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Playing against a McInnes side is like trying to eat soup with a fork.
It is frustrating, it takes forever, and you usually leave angry. He has stabilized a Hearts operation that historically loves to hit the self-destruct button the second things start going well.
Is it the sexiest brand of football? Absolutely not. You aren't going to see viral clips of Hearts stringing together forty passes before tapping it into an empty net. Will it get you three points on a freezing Tuesday night when the pitch looks like a potato field? Yes, it will, and he will not apologize for it.
The voters love him because he is a known quantity. He is part of the established fabric of the sport in this country. When you cast your vote for McInnes, you are voting for stability and professionalism. You are voting for a guy who knows exactly how to navigate the mud.
Gary Naysmith working miracles in the mud
Rounding out the trio is Gary Naysmith. Stenhousemuir. Let that sink in for a second.
Getting a nomination while managing Stenhousemuir is like getting an Oscar nod for a student film shot on an old iPhone. The disparity in resources between what Naysmith is working with and the rest of the country is laughable. We are talking about fundamentally different sports being played under the same governing body.
He is competing against teams with actual scouting departments, while he is probably watching WyScout clips on a cracked iPad on the team bus. He has to beg and borrow to get a squad together.
He deserves this spot simply for keeping the lights on and keeping his players motivated. Lower league football in Scotland is an absolute meat grinder.
The pitches are awful, the travel is brutal, and the margins for error are practically nonexistent. A couple of injuries can derail your entire season because you do not have an academy to pull kids from. Naysmith has navigated all of that and put together a compelling season that forced the entire country to pay attention.
It is genuinely nice to see the PFA recognize someone outside the usual suspects. Usually, these awards just default to whoever finishes second in the Premiership.
Naysmith being here is a massive win for the guys working out of portable cabins. It proves that if you actually perform a miracle on a shoestring budget, the rest of the country might actually notice you.
The Askou robbery
But we have to talk about the missing name. The BBC report casually drops the line that 'Askou misses out' like it is a minor footnote to the day.
Are we kidding right now? How do you look at the job Askou has done and decide he doesn't even deserve a nomination?
It makes zero logical sense. The man came in, completely changed the mentality of his dressing room, and delivered results when absolutely nobody gave them a chance. He took a group of players that looked completely lost and gave them a clear, actionable identity on the pitch.
He had them playing aggressive, forward-thinking football while half the league was terrified of their own shadow. He brought a modern European approach to a league that still romanticizes long balls and crunching tackles. This is the glaring problem with peer-voted awards.
They are inherently biased towards the guys who have been around the longest. It is an old boys club. Askou disrupted the natural order of things, and he gets iced out of the end-of-season party. He embarrassed a few established managers tactically, and they took it personally.
I am not saying he had to win the actual trophy. McGlynn probably deserves the hardware for the historical weight of the three-peat.
But leaving Askou off the shortlist entirely is incredibly disrespectful. It sends a loud message: you have to pay your dues for a decade before you get a seat at the adult table. You have to learn the secret handshake before they put your name on a plaque.
The system is broken
Look, the PFA awards are always going to generate arguments. That is literally why they exist. They give us something to shout about at the pub before the actual football starts.
But when you look at the voting process, it is crystal clear that narrative beats reality every single time. McGlynn has the history narrative. McInnes has the redemption narrative.
Naysmith has the ultimate underdog narrative. Askou didn't have a neat little story with a bow on it, so the voters couldn't figure out where to put him.
He just had good tactics and a well-drilled squad, and apparently, that isn't enough anymore. It is lazy voting from top to bottom.
Managers get the ballot, look for the names they recognize, tick a box, and hand it back so they can get back to training. Nobody is actually sitting down and analyzing the underlying numbers. Nobody is looking at the context of the squad builds, the wage bills, or the tactical flexibility required to survive a brutal winter schedule.
We desperately need an overhaul of how these things are decided. Make the voting public. Let us see who voted for who.
I guarantee if these guys had to attach their names to their ballots, you would see a lot more thought put into the selections. You wouldn't see managers just voting for their former assistant coaches or the guys they play golf with on Sundays.
Until then, we are stuck with this predictable popularity contest. Congratulations to McGlynn, McInnes, and Naysmith.
They are all great managers having great seasons, and they should be proud of the recognition. They earned their spots through hard work and consistency.
But the omission of Askou leaves a massive sour taste in the mouth. It is a harsh reminder that in Scottish football, who you know is often infinitely more important than what you actually do on the pitch.
The voters chose comfort over recognizing actual tactical innovation. We are just a few weeks away from the end of the season. The real trophies are handed out in May.
The UCL Final is coming up on May 28, the World Cup is looming, and thankfully, we will have actual football to distract us from these voting controversies. Let's hope the actual league table does a better job of reflecting reality than the PFA voters did.
