Bradford City are looking for a new manager after dispensing with the services of Mark Hughes.
The Bantams were play-off semi-finalists last season, but they’ve had an indifferent start to the current campaign, languishing 18th in the table. They’re the lowest-placed former Premier League club in the Football League, and for a club with an average attendance of 17,000, almost double that of every other team in the division, that is not good enough.
They’re now looking for their 13th manager in a decade and hoping that it is not unlucky 13 for whoever comes in. They’ll be going through their candidates closely, but one man is sure to jump out at them, or should we say two men. Danny and Nicky Cowley, formerly of Huddersfield, Portsmouth, and Lincoln City, should be top of the Bantams’ wish list.
Here are three reasons why.
They’ll Galvanise The City
When Danny and Nicky walked into Lincoln City, the team averaged 3,000 attendance. They looked at the stadium and remarked how one day they’d like to fill it. Three months later, the stadium was filled, and their average attendance hasn’t dropped below 8,000 since.
They reignited a belief in Lincoln and awoke a team that, for the National League at least, was a sleeping giant. They were in the community, shaking hands and taking photos. Overnight, red and white shirts started appearing up and down the City’s High Street. They leveraged natural charisma to build bonds that still exist today, that even ran through their open letter to supporters upon their departure.
Imagine that at Bradford, awakening 17,000 fans and maybe even nudging attendances up towards the 20,000 mark. More fans means more money, bigger budgets, and better players. At Lincoln, it took them two seasons to take a midtable National League side to League One because they brought a feel-good factor.
Bradford City are a big club for League One, even the Championship, but they need that spirit and belief bringing back. Danny and Nicky Cowley can do that.
They Are Winners At This Level
They might have struggled at Huddersfield (although they kept them in the Championship), and they weren’t a raging success at Portsmouth, but if there’s one level they know well enough to bring success, it’s League Two. In two years there with Lincoln, they won the title and earned a place in the play-offs. They know how to approach the basement division and how to make a team with a good budget one of the best in the division.
They can tap into the non-league market for players and find stars, as they did with Bruno Andrade, and they can leverage loans as they did with Shay McCartan. They know what type of player and what profile of person is needed to compete in the fourth tier, and that makes them a perfect fit for Bradford City. Understanding League Two, something it could be argued Mark Hughes struggled with, is crucial for getting out of the division.
They’ll Bring Cup Success
Football fortune; that’s how they took Lincoln City to League One. They earned the money they spent, whether by their historic run to the FA Cup quarter-final or their triumph at Wembley in the Checkatrade Trophy. They earned big matches at Goodison Park in the FA Cup and had Everton at Sincil Bank in the League Cup.
Bradford are a team with a good cup pedigree – who can forget beating Chelsea in the FA Cup, or reaching the League Cup final? Fans are surely aching for a bit of that success, a headline-grabbing result that makes the whole city believe brothers from Essex can deliver that. A good cup run can ignite a season, and they’re always one-off games.
Before Lincoln’s 2017 FA Cup fifth-round tie with Burnley, Danny famously said that winning was not impossible because ‘impossible was just an opinion’. That is the spirit and attitude Bradford City needs right now.
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