Preview: Dundee Utd v Celtic: United, and not a front

NEVER has the “United” in the name of the Dundee club playing at Tannadice appeared more incongruous than it did last month.

A poor run of form culminated in them being turfed out of the League Cup by Falkirk. Within hours, the Sun was splashing that the sacking of manager Peter Houston was imminent. All fingers pointed at chairman Stephen Thompson for how that belief might just have been formed. Houston demanded to know where the story had come from, defended his record as the manager who led the club to 2010 Scottish Cup success and said he wanted answers from his board. They all met on the Sunday of that week, a day after a league win at Dunfermline, and cleared the air and lived happily ever after. The end.

Or at least, that’s how the Dundee United chairman views an episode he is keen to present as constructive rather than wholly unseemly. “Everything is fine with Peter and I. In fact we are getting on better now than we ever have and are planning for next season,” he says.

Thompson isn’t keen to dwell on the origins of that back page. “I was abroad at the time,” he says. “Someone said I should have come out early and backed the manager… I wonder who that was. I wanted to get back, sit down, and now we’ve had a clear-the-air and I don’t want to say much more. We sat down with the rest of the board and talked about it and it’s actually been the best thing that’s happened. There’s a real great feeling between the board, and the manager and the players. We have changed a few things and I think it has been a great thing and cleared the air on any issues we had. I know where Peter is and he understands my position with the club and finance, because he’s got to. It affects what he can do with players, and has got to do with what’s right for the club not just this year or next, but the long term. You could go bust in one year in football. Very easily. Spend £3 million on wages, and you are bust.”

Thompson’s ideal, as with all clubs, is the break-even position that means his family won’t have to put in more money to help the cashflow. He has been doing it in recent weeks, even if they haven’t had to shore up the finances with £100,000 here and £200,000 there, as was the case under his late father Eddie’s stewardship. The bank loan is down to £4m from a £7m high. “Not a bad” outcome three years on from assuming the chairmanship following his dad’s death, Thompson says, though he admits that the £2.8m that will be paid to United from Blackburn Rovers following the sale of David Goodwillie accounts for most of that reduction. The £500,000 profit from that Scottish Cup win also helped but as he ruminates on what it will take to cover costs consistently, he again turns to the managerial position.

“The manager makes all the difference, whether we like it or not,” he says, revealing United only budget for their man guiding them to sixth in the Scottish Premier League and do not count on any cup revenue. “The manager is crucial, the key employee. It is kind of obvious, but true to an unbelievable extent. There is a lot of luck involved in getting the right manager. You might meet them only twice and interviews are so limited in what you can find out about people. You don’t know if you are going to have the chemistry to work when things are tough.”

Thompson was lucky in that Houston, who stepped up from assistant after Craig Levein was appointed the Scotland job, was already at the club, but the chemistry between them has been seen as the sort to produce noxious fumes. However, the United chairman says that has been overplayed. “People put arms and legs on things. Peter and I get on reasonably well. I think I learned one or two things from my father. He got too close to certain managers, particularly Ian McCall, and found it very hard when he left. And it is not something I want – to be close, close. But I don’t just want a good working relationship. You want a relationship where you can be human with each other. It is the most crucial relationship in the club, manager and chairman.”

Thompson says he has gone through more turmoil in the past five years than most do in a lifetime. In 2008, as his divorce was coming through, he lost his best friend, and sister’s husband, only days before his father. With contact lenses and a shaved head, he actually looks younger than when he “didn’t get the chance to grieve” and was “thrust” into role of United figurehead and banker that was previously his father’s passion. Yet experience has allowed him to emerge from Eddie’s shadow. He won admirers for holding his nerve to get top dollar for Goodwillie and leading the resistance to a ten-team SPL as he couldn’t in the cup win in 2010. “Everyone was saying to me about how my father would have felt and how he was looking down on me and it meant I celebrated in a different way. I want us to get back to a cup final so I can enjoy a different experience.”

Thompson is enjoying the different experience of keeping his counsel and trying to be a conciliatory figure. His days of “slagging off others” or “run-ins with the Old Firm” are gone as he adjusts to the “eye-opening” experience of being on the SPL board, voted on to that by his peers in September.

It means he won’t take the bait when it comes to the possibility he could soon be one of the six men deciding if Rangers Football Club would be readmitted to the SPL set-up should they ever go into liquidation. Then there is the inability of Hearts to pay players on time. “There could be lots of important decisions to come up,” says Thompson, who says his club are fully up to date with VAT, PAYE and wages, as well as with their creditors. “It would be wrong for me to say anything publicly, on that.”

He believes he can shape major changes in Scottish football. He is hopeful of a merger between the two league bodies and greater revenues being filtered down to the First Division to end the Armageddon aspect to SPL relegation – which a “good” new television deal did “nothing” to address.

Ten years ago, he never could have envisaged being United chairman. He has no idea if he will still be doing it in ten years’ time. “I don’t see anyone else on the horizon,” he says. “I care deeply about this club and if I do ever walk away I would want it to be when the debt is cleared, the finances stabilised and I could walk away with my head held high.”

Thompson is walking taller than ever in the Scottish game. Just don’t expect him to be walking hand in hand with the current manager any time soon.