MARK McGHEE saw highs and lows as Brighton & Hove Albion manager after a medal-laden playing career that took him from his native Scotland to England and also to Germany.
McGhee was in charge when the Seagulls memorably won the 2004 play-off final to gain promotion from the third tier, beating Bristol City at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff.
Keeping the Seagulls up the following season was arguably an even greater achievement considering at the time playing home games at the crowd-restricted Withdean Stadium meant the club was at a huge disadvantage compared to most clubs in the division.
With the Amex still a distant dream, relegation came at the end of the 2005-06 season, and it wasn’t long into the following season that Dick Knight wielded the axe on the Glaswegian’s time in charge.
“It was hard to sack Mark, but we had to have a change,” Knight wrote in his autobiography, Mad Man: From the Gutter to the Stars. “Everyone recognised what he had done in taking up and keeping up a team that was not that great, to be honest. Hats off to him, he had done a terrific job. And he is a very intelligent, personable guy.”
Knight took decisive action when part of the crowd became vociferous in wanting McGhee out, and the chairman also felt some of the young players drafted into the team weren’t responding to him.
He was finally toppled over lunch at Topolino’s, and Knight admitted: “It was a difficult decision. There was strong vocal opposition to McGhee, but also a large, less noisy element who were behind him.”
McGhee liked Brighton so much he made it his home despite subsequently taking on a series of other roles the length and breadth of the country.
It’s probably fair to say the Scot has never been afraid to speak his mind, which his former Newcastle boss Bill McGarry mentioned to him. McGhee recounted in an interview with theleaguepaper.com: “I was managing Wolves at the time. He said ‘Mark, you talk too much. Tone it down a bit’. I tried to take his advice, give nothing away in media briefings. Then, somebody would say something interesting and I wasn’t able to stop myself.”
It’s probably what helped him gain a place on the Sky Sports Soccer Saturday panel when he was in between management jobs.
McGhee would most likely look back on some jobs he’d perhaps have been wiser to stay away from, for example taking temporary charge of Eastbourne Borough in 2018, although his enthusiasm was undimmed as he revealed in an interview with thenonleaguefootballpaper.com.
Born in Glasgow on 20 May 1957, his father was an electrical engineer and his mother a fertility consultant at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. McGhee was on the books of Bristol City at the start of his long career but he returned to Scotland and became a part-timer with Greenock Morton while also training to be an architect.
Aforementioned manager McGarry signed him for Newcastle for a £150,000 fee on 30 December 1977 and he made his debut on 2 January 1978.
His face didn’t fit after Arthur Cox took over as boss, but Alex Ferguson took a punt on him in March 1979 and signed him for Aberdeen, and it proved to be one of many shrewd decisions the esteemed Scot would make in his career.
McGhee was named Scottish PFA Players’ Player of the Year in 1982, and the following year was part of the Aberdeen side who beat Real Madrid 2–1 to lift the 1983 European Cup Winners’ Cup in Gothenburg.
He also scored the second goal as Aberdeen defeated Hamburg 2-0 to win the UEFA Super Cup in the same year.
Asked about the best goal he scored, he said: “Probably the winning goal in my last game for Aberdeen.”
McGhee reckoned his best moment in football came on 26 May 1984 when he scored against England at Hampden Park. He headed in a cross (as pictured) from his great pal Gordon Strachan past Peter Shilton.
“It put us 1-0 up but Tony Woodcock equalised to make the final score 1-1.”
It was one of four caps he won for his country. Nearly two decades later, in January 2013, Strachan appointed him as his no.2 with the Scottish national side.
But back to those playing days, and with two Scottish league titles and three Cup wins behind him, McGhee tried his hand at European football and spent 16 months at Hamburg. The spell was probably more of an education than a success, with injuries limiting his game time.
A £170,000 fee took him back to Scotland, to Celtic, where he had mixed fortunes during four years with the Glasgow giants. He was, though, part of the squad that won a League and Cup double in their centenary season.
After winning another Scottish Cup winners’ medal in 1989, he was on the move again, back to Newcastle.
Now with Jim Smith in charge, Newcastle paid £200,000 to take McGhee back to St James’ Park, where he formed an impressive strike partnership with the legendary Micky Quinn as Toon finished third in the old Division Two.
“We were good friends, but we didn’t blend on the pitch like Toshack and Keegan, Quinn told theleaguepaper.com. “Mark was a free spirit. He’d get the ball and drift left or right and drop deep.
“He’d turn defenders and drag them out of position. He would hold the ball up well for me to get into the box and score goals. He went where he wanted, but it worked.”
This Football Back Then picture shows McGhee in action for Newcastle against Albion’s Nicky Bissett.
His farewell performance came on 6 April 1991, not long after Ossie Ardiles had taken over as manager, and McGhee departed having scored a total of 36 goals in 115 appearances for the Magpies.
Next stop was Sweden, where he played briefly for IK Brage, but he seized the opportunity to try his hand at management by taking up the role of player-manager at Reading in the summer of 1991.
He’d been recommended for the role by his old boss Ferguson, and, after quitting playing through injury in 1993, he led the Royals to promotion from the third tier the following year.
A struggling Leicester City gave him a chance to manage in the Premier League but he was unable to keep them up and, less than a year after joining, decided to switch to Wolverhampton Wanderers, to succeed Graham Taylor.
Wolves just failed to gain promotion in 1996-97 (they lost in the play-off semi-finals) and were ninth the following campaign. Four months into the 1998-99 season, following a string of poor results, McGhee was fired.
It would be 20 months before he gained his next opportunity, this time at Millwall where he enjoyed initial success, leading them to promotion from the third tier, and then narrowly missing out on another promotion when they lost in the play-off semi-finals to Birmingham City.
When he parted company from Millwall in October 2003, he wasn’t out of work long because Brighton needed a replacement for Steve Coppell, who’d been wooed to take over at Reading (pictured above, with chairman Dick Knight, at his unveiling as Albion manager).
Those Albion fans who stuck by the team in the humble surroundings of the Withdean Stadium enjoyed some good moments during McGhee’s time as manager, in particular promotion via the play-off final in 2004.
He certainly found a formula to get the best out of certain players, as Adam Virgo, converted from defender to goalscorer, observed in that theleaguepaper.com article. “Mark is a very good communicator and very experienced,” he said. “He can make you feel ten feet tall. He’s very good at being honest, at analysing your game and telling you what you’re good at.”
After his departure from the Albion, McGhee was out of the game for nine months but got back in at Motherwell, turning them from near relegation candidates to qualifiers for European competition.
The lure of his old club, Aberdeen, proved too strong in the summer of 2009, but his tenure proved to be disastrous – and brief.
He spent the majority of 2012 as manager of Bristol Rovers, where one of the squad he inherited was former Brighton defender-turned-striker, Virgo. The following year, his old pal, Strachan, appointed him as assistant coach to the Scottish national side.
He later combined the role part-time when he returned to Motherwell but there were mixed fortunes second time round, and he left them again in early 2017. Towards the end of that year, he popped up at League Two Barnet, but the arrangement lasted only two months before he was moved to a ‘head of technical’ role, and then dismissed in March 2018.
McGhee was ‘slaughtered’ on Twitter when he took over as interim manager of National South side Eastbourne Borough in the spring of 2019, after being beaten 3-0 by Wealdstone in his first match in charge, his new side reduced to nine men after two players were sent off. Borough won just once in 11 matches.
When Albion under 23s coach Simon Rusk was appointed manager of Vanarama National League side Stockport County in January 2021, McGhee was appointed as one of his assistants.
His final managerial post was at Dundee in February 2022 when he took temporary charge of the Scottish Premiership side until the end of the season (with Rusk as his assistant), but they couldn’t avoid them being relegated, overseeing just one win in 13 matches.
McGhee finally announced his retirement from the game in September 2022 at the age of 65, telling the Sunday Post: “I won’t be pursuing any other managerial vacancies, and nor would I want to be a director of football or a head of recruitment. That’s not what I am – I’m a manager.
“I feel that players now deserve a young manager who can give them the energy I was able to when I started out. They don’t need a 65-year-old with a dodgy ankle.”
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