Alan Burrows lifts lid on how Aberdeen came to Barry Robson decision and the Jurgen Klopp quip

Alan Burrows has plenty of experience in appointing new managers from his time at Motherwell, but it will have been daunting for the newly-appointed Aberdeen chief executive when he walked through the Pittodrie door and one of his first tasks was to head up the search for a new first-team head coach.

Burrows arrived at Aberdeen at the end of February, a month on from the dismissal of Jim Goodwin. A club smarting from the embarrassment of being knocked out of the Scottish Cup by non-league outfit Darvel and at that point facing a fight just to reach the top six in the Premiership, the Dons entrusted academy coach Barry Robson with the interim manager’s job as Burrows and his fellow directors searched for a more permanent arrangement. At that point, they were almost certainly unaware that their Mr Right was sitting right under their noses.

“It has been fairly well documented one or two candidates were identified or spoken to,” admits Burrows. “They ranged from as close as Inverurie to as far east as Japan.” Aberdeen were leaving no stone unturned. But during his so-far brief tenure, Burrows has not watched the Dons lose. Robson has them on a seven-game winning run, stretching back to a 1-0 victory over Livingston on February 25 that was the catalyst for the 44-year-old’s Granite City revolution. Burrows met him for the first time two days after that victory and was impressed. The stock has only risen since, culminating in Monday’s announcement that Robson has been given a two-year contract. Aberdeen are third in the league and warm favourites to qualify for Europe with five matches remaining.

“I’d never met Barry before I came to Aberdeen but heard a lot from the people at the club about how highly they rated him,” says Burrows. “He was in effect a manager in waiting. I was intrigued to meet him for the first time. Genuinely after the first meeting at Cormack Park on the Monday after the Livingston game, I remember spending an hour-and-a-half with him, Steve Agnew [assistant manager] and Steven Gunn [director of football operations].

Barry Robson impressed chief executive Alan Burrows and the rest of the Aberdeen board with his results.

“I remember saying to Steven after he left, ‘I can see why everyone likes him.’ Barry took the opportunity from his first meeting with me to put across his philosophy and mentality about how he sees the game and Aberdeen. But right from the get-go I thought, ‘I like this guy.’ It didn’t influence the process though. I always say when I do these things it is never just the CEO who appoints the manager. Barry had to impress the whole board, we’ve got an owner [Dave Cormack] here who is very active, involved and engaged in running the football club. Barry didn’t have to impress me or Steven Gunn, he had to impress everybody, and the way the team has responded to him and how he has conducted himself off it has convinced everyone on the board he is the right man for the job.”

Burrows pauses and then reveals further detail of his first rendez-vous with Robson. He has just been asked whether Robson made it clear early on that he wanted the job. “I’ll tell you a funny story,” he says. “When I met him, he said ‘oh, here he goes, the guy who is going to appoint the manager. Don’t worry, Jurgen Klopp is in the building.’ “I said, ‘have you locked him in the cupboard like?’ It was only afterwards I realised it was my first interaction with him and I said to Steven Gunn ‘I hope he took that on board as a bit of banter’ and Steven said ‘no, don’t worry, he’ll be fine, he’ll take that as a joke.’

“Barry has made no secret of the fact in the last four of five years he fancied being a manager and he was working towards that. I think he had other opportunities to be a manager somewhere but didn’t feel it was quite right or at a level he wanted to start at. This hasn’t landed in his lap. He has been planning for this for some period of time and hopefully that is reflected in some of the work he has done early doors. Without actually saying ‘I want the job, hire me’ he didn’t give off the impression he didn’t want it, let’s put it that way.”

Burrows claims there was no one result or performance that stood out for him or the board but surely Aberdeen’s last match, a 2-0 win over Rangers that had Pittodrie rocking, must have been the final piece of evidence to any doubters. “I don’t think there was a Eureka moment,” he explains. “There’s a danger you can become overly emotional by results. It was a gradual process of how he was conducting himself, how he built his staff around him and how he was implementing the plans he had been working on in the past four years in a holistic way.

Burrows joined the Dons from Motherwell earlier this year.

“It wasn’t just the way the players responded to him, the people around the club as well was important. He acts and feels like a manager. He has that presence, that unknown quality. When people ask you ‘what makes a manager?’ it’s hard to pinpoint what it is but Barry has that aura about him which I think all good managers have. I’ve seen it work in my previous job with managers and I’ve seen it not work. But over a period of time Barry was chalking off people on the board. They were really buying into him to the point anybody who was left to be convinced – and there weren’t many – were on board after the Rangers game.”

Aberdeen are in a good place right now, a far cry from 12 months ago when they flirted with relegation. The immediate goal is to beat Rangers at Ibrox on Sunday, and finish the season in third place, but Burrows makes no secret of the long-term ambition. “The club has never hidden its ambition to be a top 100 European club. The only way we can be that is to be in the group stages of European competition. It’s been a long-held view in the club and it is where I think the club should be aspiring to be.” The belief is that Robson can get there.