Hibs aim for 7/10 score in key performance area - can they hit mark?

The varied contributions of Adam Le Fondre (left), Dylan Levitt (centre) and Riley Harbottle underline the need for a better strike rate. | SNS Group

Hibs sporting director Malky Mackay has revealed plans to drastically improve the club’s strike rate when it comes to recruitment. And he’s vowed that rookie boss David Gray will be involved in any signing made on his watch.

Mackay, given a brief to overhaul the entire football department when appointed to the role of sporting director earlier this month, knows that a scattergun approach to talent identification has contributed to the mess at Easter Road. Fixing that has been one of his main priorities.

The former Scottish FA technical director said: “All we’re trying to do is take the risk factor down in terms of players not working. You want there to be a strong chance that, out of ten players, seven work out. There are always going to be one or two that don’t work out or one reason or another - but you don’t want it to be two out of ten that work out.

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“I was lucky enough that I was taught about a recruitment process many years ago. It was something I lifted across to Cardiff, took to the Scottish FA where we built a recruiting department and there are now talent ID courses across Scotland - there are a lot of people learning about it. It’s something that sporting directors on the continent have been doing for 25 years. 

“You saw that title going down to England ten years ago, and now there are assistant sporting directors in England.  It’s something that, in terms of recruitment departments with sporting directors running them, it’s a process. We’ll get to a point where there are a number of players for a position who we can afford, who we can possibly get, who will work well in our team, or has potential and whether we’re signing them as a starter, or back-up, or a youngster who’s come through our academy.”

New sporting director Malky Mackay is hard at work. | SNS Group

Stressing the importance of new manager Gray’s role, Mackay added: “Once we get to that point, a group of us including David Gray will talk through the options. Nothing will be getting done at this football club without David’s complete involvement. 

“We do this together, and we make sure that we bring in the correct character. The character of the player has to be to a point where there’s a real reasoning why they’re coming into this football club.

“It’s certainly something we’ve been needing - more leadership in the team. That’s something we’ve all acknowledged, and we want players to be able to come in and hit the ground running and be at a level where they can go in and take the club back to the areas it should be.

“There’s going to be a lot of hard work involved. Some we’ll get, some we won’t, but we will work together and make sure that more often than not, the players who come in are going to be of benefit to Hibs on a longer-term basis by showing their skills on the pitch and pushing us up the league and getting us to finals and semi-finals. We’re going to have a recruitment department with a process, which is something I learned works as a young manager. I worked with a sporting director at Watford, John Stevenson, a long time ago where there was a process and a really defined way of recruiting players.”

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Having already added a goalkeeper and two central defenders to the squad, Hibs are still monitoring interest in French attacker Elie Youan, having slapped a price tag in excess of £2.5 million on the 25-year-old. But Mackay said: “There haven’t been any viable offers yet. We’ve taken a variety of calls about him, but nobody has actually put in an official bid. So he’s our player at the moment, he’s an asset to the football club and he continues to be until such times as we receive an offer that both he and we feel is the correct one for him to leave the club.”