Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
Outside the Riverside Stadium, just in front of the wonderful ornate red-and-white club gates, stand the three greats of Middlesbrough’s past: George Camsell, Wilf Mannion, George Hardwick.
Around here, grandparents would sit children on their knees and discuss these and other pillars of north-east football history; I know because I was one of the kids.
As they sadly pass on, the statues take over to spread the word. The last of those three players left Middlesbrough in 1959. A lot of water has flowed under bridges on the Tees since.
There is a fourth statue here too, rising up 50 yards beyond the gates and in your eyeline throughout as you read the plaques and circle the plinths and desperately try to keep yourself warm on a freezing November afternoon before the ground opens.
The Riverside itself, from the start of its construction exactly 30 years ago, is a testament to the generosity and longevity of one man. Middlesbrough is the club that Steve Gibson saved. This is the home that he built.
Gibson’s tale is still one of the greatest in English football history. In May 1986, having fallen into the third tier for only the second time in their history, Middlesbrough were forced to call in liquidators with their debts approaching £2m. By August, 30 club staff were let go and padlocks were placed on the doors of Ayresome Park. Middlesbrough was dying.
Step forward a 28-year-old local businessman who had left school at 17, become the youngest ever Labour councillor in the town at 21 and founded a transportation company at 23 after borrowing £1,000 from his dad. Gibson went along to Ayresome Park as a child and had already become the youngest director in the club’s history at the age of 26. By 1994, he owned the club and was its chairman.
The expansion project was extraordinary and extraordinarily successful. Not only did Gibson restore Middlesbrough, he entirely rebuilt them. They moved into the Riverside Stadium in 1995, celebrating its opening with a return to the Premier League.
They signed global stars and found a diminutive Brazilian as their modern-day icon. Gibson oversaw four Premier League promotions, four domestic cup finals, a European final and a first major trophy. He employed two future England managers (and one performed better with his country than the other).
The figures alone are astounding. A year ago, Gibson wrote off £107m of loans to the club by converting them into shares. An exact figure of his total financial commitment is not possible to calculate, but only because its size is so vast and the scope of his contributions so extensive.
Some might guess at £250m; say that same number to others in the know and their answer is simple and comes with a laugh: “And the rest”.
It is too easy to forget that devotion when things get tricky. Blame in a football club tends to trickle upwards, even if its eventual resting place is at the feet of the one person who ensured that Saturday afternoons and Tuesday nights could be spent watching a football club and the rest of the time spent fretting about it. You allow everybody to forget the worst times but in forgetting them they lose context and gratitude can slip away with it.
Things did get tricky here, because an era seemed to pass by overnight before everyone realised that they had taken it for granted. Middlesbrough had 11 straight Premier League seasons that seemed as if they would last forever, then seven more in the Championship. Only the stabilising work of Tony Mowbray and the ambition of Aitor Karanka allowed Middlesbrough to take their place in the top flight back in 2016.
That season, Middlesbrough’s last in the Premier League sunshine, was dismal beyond belief. Karanka oversaw a team that was pitifully short of attacking prowess (27 goals scored), Gibson kept faith in Karanka for too long – including giving him money in January and replaced him with Steve Agnew when the manager was eventually sacked in March. From mid-December onwards, Middlesbrough won four matches and three of those were against lower-league teams in the FA Cup.
In May 2017, with inevitable relegation confirmed, Gibson uttered the words that would be weaponized against him by those who failed to understand his overall impact: “There can be no other objective – we want to smash the league next year”.
Middlesbrough spent £50m on new players, won four of their first 13 league games, sacked Garry Monk after six months in charge and a promotion campaign fell on its face in the play-offs.
Middlesbrough 0-1 Blackburn Rovers (Wednesday 27 November)
- Game no.: 40/92
- Miles: 290
- Cumulative miles: 6,609
- Total goals seen: 112
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Middlesbrough fans chanting “Champions of England? You weren’t even born” to Blackburn Rovers supporters. Blackburn won the league in 1995. We are all getting old.
That season provoked the most vehement criticism of Gibson’s tenure. There was even accusation from some supporters that he had taken Middlesbrough as far as he could and should look for outside investment to ensure accelerated improvement.
Which, with the greatest of respect, is unmitigated nonsense. If Gibson had walked away from this club at any point in the last 35 years, the best person to take over would be a guy prepared to spend hundreds of millions of their own money without wanting anything back who looked an awful lot like Gibson wearing a fake moustache.
As for the ambition to “smash” the Championship, it was a soundbite that clanged against Gibson’s usual demeanour. But it was also a statement of intent from a man looking to re-energise a fanbase and it was backed up with a vast period of financial generosity to attempt to make good on it. Ask yourself: what would the reaction have been if Gibson had said he was happy to tread water in the second tier and failed to back his managers?
What happened next was predictable. Without the luxury of parachute payments, no owner can be as benevolent as they like because financial rules prevent it. Supporters became accepting of realism that hands were tied and that their club needed to take their medicine because expensive signings on high wages are difficult to shift when their form sours. Premier League relegations punish you twice if instant atonement is squandered.
To an outsider, Boro then became stuck in a moment, the perennial fourth or fifth favourites for promotion who never got promoted, left behind those others who had the parachute payments and thus the competitive advantage. They appointed three coaches who, unfairly, blurred into one: Tony Pulis, Neil Warnock, Chris Wilder. There were reasons to appoint each of them and none were desperately poor, but none got Boro up.
Time plays tricks on the mind. The cliche is that it passes by when you’re laughing and drags its heels when life feels stuck on repeat. But the opposite can be true too. This is Middlesbrough’s eighth straight Championship season. That perennial Premier League staple for those of a certain age is nothing of the sort: one top-flight season in 15 years. What Middlesbrough needed was a new age.
In 2021, Gibson appointed Kieran Scott as the club’s new de facto director of football with the responsibility to overhaul Middlesbrough’s transfer operations. Without parachute payments, the days of buying peak-age players on long contracts had to be minimised.
Scott’s job, as per his own quote, was to “control what the future looked like”. That meant creating pathways from a prodigious academy, moving to a buy-develop-sell model to subsidise losses and creating an on-pitch strategy that allowed them all to flourish. A year later, Chris Jones arrived as the new Head of Recruitment, a key ally of Scott having worked together at Wolves and Norwich City.
You can see the evidence in action. In the space of two years, Middlesbrough sold Djed Spence, Marcus Tavernier, Chuba Akpom and Morgan Rogers and all had vastly improved their reputation on Teesside. You had to go back to 2018 to reach the next sale for more than a couple of million pounds. For too long here – because of the owner’s investment – selling your best players was considered to be a show of extreme weakness. Not when it’s part of a process.
“Kieran and Chris have evolved the club massively in this space,” says Jonny Bullock of the Boro Breakdown podcast. “This has always been a two to three-year plan for Middlesbrough. We’ve had to build a new way of operating both on and off the pitch.
“Big picture, you can’t help but be excited about the prospect of the football club. You can see the foundations being built, you can see players being bought for now and some in a couple of years’ time. It feels like it’s slowly coming together.”
Greater stability, and greater potential, arrived almost from the off with the appointment of Michael Carrick, who is the first manager here since Karanka to last 100 matches in charge. In the manic world of Championship management, Carrick is also the second longest-serving manager in the division.
Carrick is clearly an excellent coach and this will not be the highest watermark on his CV. The tactical identity is clearly of a type that can flourish higher up, but it’s the composure of his man management and dealings with the media that are most impressive for a relative novice in this corner of the profession. Things have not always gone well and progress has been anything but linear. Carrick is still here because he offers strong evidence that he is stronger for the experience, not jaded.
Crucially for Gibson, Carrick has no ego about the realities of his situation. Had he joined this club five, 15 or 25 years earlier, his transfer budgets would have been larger and his responsibility to work within a limited framework non-existent. Carrick has dealt with the loss of key players in every window. It only gives him more scope to impress, not less.
Maybe, just maybe, all the ingredients are right and this is the year, but the Championship is mighty difficult to conquer. The current top two are both clubs who came down this year and have stronger squads than most of the rest. Leeds United spent big and were pre-season favourites. Nearby, Sunderland are building something fascinating of their own.
Just as pertinently, Middlesbrough are still a riddle. They started the season with seven consecutive different results: win, loss, draw, win, draw, loss, win. They won two in a row and lost two in a row. They beat relegated Sheffield United and lost to promoted Derby County. They scored 15 goals in three games before I arrived and then looked utterly toothless in a 1-0 home loss against Blackburn Rovers.
To some extent, it doesn’t matter. The best element of this club, the thing that makes it almost unique, is that nothing ultimately matters. Seasons will come and go, time will keep on rolling. There is clear ambition but never any emergency. There’s no point wasting your energy as a supporter losing your head, because the owner never does. He is a statue to permanence. The wage bill still exceeds the income here; is anything else relevant?
During the second half against Blackburn on Wednesday evening, the two sets of supporters both chanted, one after the other, in praise of local owners who led them on: first Jack Walker, then Steve Gibson. Blackburn have been owned by the Venky’s for so long that few can remember much beyond the malaise they inflicted. Whatever happens at Middlesbrough, Gibson will surely stay and they will be lucky to have him.
As such, and it’s something I’m thinking as I leave the Riverside and walk with thousands of others into the freezing night, it’s hard to escape that promotion would be a fitting achievement, whenever it comes. He has been a club director here for more than 40 years and chairman for more than 30. The game has changed around him, the natural home of state owners, hedge funds and multi-billionaires from far-off places.
Steve Gibson has seen glory and despair and stared both in the face. He still has, as one person at the club jokes, “the most expensive season ticket in the country”. He has always had a dream and it never ceases in its intensity. Without him there would be no Middlesbrough FC. They are him and he is them.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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