Former Albion CEO Ron Gourlay must be commended for this managerial appointment
Ron Gourlay tried to stabilize West Bromwich Albion during a difficult time on and off the field while serving as the club’s CEO.
Guochuan Lai, the club’s current controlling shareholder, has approved a £20 million loan from MSD Holdings as an investment but has been hesitant to contribute any of his own money.
Former Chelsea CEO Gourlay oversaw the operations. After Valerien Ismael was fired in February 2022, Gourlay joined Albion, and he reorganized the club’s executive team to get the Baggies back in the running for promotion.
The 60-year-old’s first task was to choose Ismael’s successor. He gave the position to Steve Bruce, a former manager of Hull City and Sunderland who was vying for a fifth Premier League promotion.
At the time, Bruce’s experience getting promoted multiple times and his familiarity with the division made it seem like the right choice.
Bruce took over the team in sixth place, but what followed was a disastrous tenure that saw the Baggies finish 10th at the end of the 2021–2022 season.
The following season, Albion signed impressive players Jed Wallace, John Swift, and Okay Yokuslu during the summer transfer window, but under the 62-year-old, things only got worse as the team finished the season in the bottom three with just one league win out of 13 Championship games.
Furious that one of the Football League’s original members was headed straight for League One, Gourlay fired Bruce and faced the daunting task of finding a new manager to turn things around.
Following a lengthy and meticulous selection process, Carlos Corberan was chosen. The Spaniard had recently returned from an abortive spell in Greece with Olympiacos.
The forty-year-old spent a previous stint in the second division with Huddersfield Town, leading the Terriers to the play-off final before Nottingham Forest narrowly defeated them.
However, the West Midlands team’s subsequent success has been astounding. Under Corberan’s leadership, the team has gone from being in danger of relegation to being a strong contender to return to the top division. Gourlay deserves a great deal of credit for finding such a capable successor before leaving the team in June.
How has Carlos Corberan performed at West Brom so far?
After arriving in October of last year, Corberan watched a confidence-starved Albion team be easily crushed by the Blades at The Hawthorns in his first competitive match. This gave the Spaniard an insight into the team he would be working with.
However, the playing team responded after learning about his strategies by winning nine of their subsequent ten league games and recording seven clean sheets.
Even though Corberan’s team eventually missed out on a play-off spot despite a comeback run, the possibility of promotion seemed remote when he first arrived in the West Midlands due to crippling injuries and a dearth of a strong goal scorer.
With his team presently in sixth place following the most recent round of midweek games, the 40-year-old is pushing the Baggies to contend for that spot once more this season.
What issues has Carlos Corberan faced this season?
The Albion manager has faced far more difficult situations to overcome this campaign.
Due to the lack of funding for the team, WBA had to once again rely on loans and free transfers to assemble a team that could contend for the top spot in the second division. However, since outgoings took precedence over transfers, Corberan was largely left with the same players from the previous campaign, bringing in only Pipa and Jeremy Sarmiento on loan and adding Josh Maja on a permanent basis from Bordeaux in France.
