“There’s an old joke about a statistician who has his head in the oven and feet in the freezer but, on average, he’s OK,” says Simon Hallett.
“It’s different in football — you’re either deliriously happy or utterly miserable but, on average, it’s brilliant!”
Hallett, majority-owner and chairman at Plymouth Argyle of the second-tier Championship, spoke to The Athletic in the wake of his side winning at Premier League Brentford last month in the FA Cup’s third round, a romance-affirming occasion that set them up for another hot date in round four on Sunday: Premier League leaders Liverpool, at home (and on free-to-air television across the UK on ITV).
“Yes, unfinished business,” says Hallett, referring to Liverpool’s 1-0 win against Plymouth, then in English football’s fourth tier, in an FA Cup third-round replay (remember them?) in January 2017 after a goalless draw at Anfield. “They got a lucky winner!
“I am looking forward to it and the fans are excited. But it will cause some problems, because we’re getting deluged with ticket requests and it’s a scarce resource. When we’ve played at Wembley (in play-off finals and the EFL Trophy final), we’ve taken 30-35,000 — we can only fit in 17,000 at Home Park and 2,500 have to be Liverpool fans.”
If beating Brentford and its reward, a game against arguably the best club team on the planet right now, are the brilliant bits of a life in football, what happened shortly after this interview must be one of those head-in-oven/feet-in-freezer moments.
Eleven days on from beating top-flight Brentford, Plymouth lost 5-0 at home to Burnley, a kick in the shins that could have been much worse as they were five goals down at half-time. Even so, it was a 13th game in a row without victory in the league, a calamitous run that left Plymouth bottom of the Championship, six points from safety. They finally won again last Saturday but still prop up the division.
If we zoom out further though, Hallett’s point about ignoring the extremes — and remembering how much fun it is to own your boyhood club — still stands.
After promotion to League One in that 2016-17 campaign, Plymouth were relegated again in 2019, Hallett’s first season in charge, bounced straight back up to the third tier and then, in May 2023, beat Ipswich Town, now of the Premier League, to the League One title.
OK, life in the Championship has been hard over the past year and a half but they are still there. And nobody can say Hallett has not tried.
If there is one thing that most football fans will know about Plymouth’s recent history, it is that it briefly overlapped with Wayne Rooney’s.
The former Manchester United and England superstar, now 39, was appointed as their head coach last May. Seven months later, he was gone. His 25 games in charge brought only five wins, his 14 losses featured scores of 4-0 (three times), 5-0 and 6-1.
For those who had pointed out there was nothing in Rooney’s previous stints as manager of Derby County, DC United of MLS or Birmingham City to suggest he would be able to get a young side, who finished only a point clear of relegation last season, to play Pep Guardiola-style football, his failure was not a shock.
But that does not mean Rooney was not a risk worth taking.
“I’m a great believer in the idea that if you’ve never failed, you haven’t taken enough risks — I’ve got three daughters and it’s part of my wedding speech,” says Hallett.
“It’s the same with us. If we’re going to go down the road of just being a normal club, trying our best, with our normal budget, we’re going to get relegated. No question. Now, our risk-taking has to be rational, but everything is a risk. I’m an investment guy and, for me, risk is about the variance in possible outcomes. We take risks to create new revenue streams. We take risks with managers.”
Wayne Rooney’s spell in charge saw Plymouth win just four of 23 league games (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)
Hallett’s first calculated risk was hiring Ryan Lowe, a 40-year-old with less than two full seasons in charge of Bury in the third and then fourth tiers under his belt. By the time Lowe was poached by Championship side Preston North End two and a half years later, Plymouth were back in League One, and pushing for another promotion.
Lowe was replaced with 35-year-old Steven Schumacher, who had come with him from Bury as an assistant and had never managed a professional side before. By the time he was poached by another Championship side, Stoke City, in December 2023, Plymouth were in the second tier themselves and Schumacher was the reigning League One Manager of the Year.
It was not a case of third time lucky, though. Hallett’s next hire was Ian Foster, who would last only three months. On the one hand, 47-year-old Foster was another choice with no experience of managing a club side; but, on the other, he had been the second-in-command at EFL clubs Coventry City and Portsmouth, before spending five very successful years with England’s age-group sides.
“Everyone says to me, ‘We should have gone with someone who knows the Championship’,” explains Hallett.
“But there’s very little evidence that knowing the Championship is correlated with better outcomes. (Pep) Guardiola had never managed in the Premier League before (taking the Manchester City job in 2016), Ryan and Steven didn’t have that much coaching experience when they came to us.
“Experience is valuable in some domains but not others. In football, being smart and hardworking gets you as far as experience, and people confuse experience with success.
Lowe, right, and Schumacher got Plymouth promoted from Leagues Two and One respectively (Dave Howarth – CameraSport via Getty Images)
“And, by the way, everyone takes a risk when they hire a manager, because the average tenure in English football is 10 months.”
A fair point, but before we get to Hallett’s fifth hire, what lessons can be learnt from the Foster and Rooney experiments?
“With Wayne, we were probably reacting to what had gone wrong with Ian, who, in many ways, was a wonderful candidate and a very nice person, a great on-the-grass coach, but he wasn’t as good as Wayne at keeping the club together,” says Hallett.
“Wayne literally knocked down walls — he had walls between various people in the football department removed (at the club’s offices), so they sat together.
“He was wonderful around the club. He was very good with fans, to the point where we had to restrain him. I remember we were having a meeting with somebody and one of their staff said, ‘My sister runs a local primary school, can you visit?’. And Wayne said, ‘Sure’. But we had to say, ‘Wait a minute, he is very busy!’.
“I know it sounds silly because he’s such a big celebrity and he’s famous for some bad decisions, but he’s a very decent human being. The impact he had saved the club from fraying.”
Which begs the question…
“He was committed to a way of playing football we were simply unable to execute,” Hallett admits.
“You could see the results, which were clearly poor, but, at board level, we look at underlying performance. From day one, which was a 4-0 defeat to Sheffield Wednesday (on the season’s opening weekend last August), our xG against was over four. On xG, for and against, we were the worst team in the league and that was consistent.
“A lot of people got seduced by wins against Sunderland, Luton and Blackburn in September-ish, but we did not dominate those games. We seemed to be unable to adapt — it was a case of continuing to try things that didn’t work.
“So, when I talk about the risks with Miron, I’m not concerned about his character, tactical ability or coaching ability, but the risk is that we’re changing our style of play. But it’s a risk we have to take because doing what we’ve done so far hasn’t worked at all.”
“Miron” is Miron Muslic, the Bosnia-born Austrian who got Cercle Brugge into the UEFA Conference League this season — their first European qualification in 14 years and only fourth ever. He parted company with the Belgian side in December and became Hallett’s latest calculated gamble the day before that FA Cup triumph against Brentford.
“What wows you is his charisma — but that’s a dangerous thing!,” explains Hallett. “It’s important that coaches have some charisma because they’ve got to engage with fans, the media, staff and so on — charisma is not an undesirable quality — you just have to be careful about it when you’re looking for other qualities.
“We hired him because of the intensity of his playing style and his data. He massively improved the attack at Cercle Brugge and has had extraordinary success with young players.
New Plymouth head coach Muslic (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
“In simple terms, we’ve got one of the youngest squads in the division and younger players can run more. So, there’s going to be a lot of running and there will be a lot of demands placed on our front four or five. We’ve been weak in implementation at the front and back but our forwards are our skill players and we need to get them more involved.
“But, in the longer run, Miron completely understands the notion of being a selling club. We’re investing a lot in our academy, and the player-trading model is a key part of our plan over the next five to 10 years. So, having a manager who understands it, and can make it work, is very important.”
I should probably point out this interview took place before Plymouth’s best player, winger Morgan Whittaker, failed to turn up for that Wednesday-night home game against Burnley on time. If Muslic did not understand Plymouth were a selling club before then, he soon learnt. Whittaker would join fellow Championship side Middlesbrough, who are firmly in the race for promotion to the Premier League, before the week was out.
But I should also note that all this talk about mistakes and risks is not a fair reflection of Hallett or his spell as Plymouth’s custodian. Because he is not just popular with the club’s fans, he is also widely respected within the game.
When his name comes up in conversations with other executives or league officials, you will hear words like “one of the good guys” or “we like him, he’s sensible”. What they mean is that Plymouth are a friendly and well-run club, although the latter was not always the case.
They almost went bust 15 years ago but were rescued from administration by James Brent, a local hotelier. Brent believed his role was to leave the club in a better place than he found them, which he did when he sold his shares to Hallett in 2018.
Now 69, Hallett is from Plymouth, the port city in the far south-west of England from which the Pilgrims sailed to the New World in 1620, but has lived abroad for most of his life. He spent a decade in banking in Hong Kong, before moving to the United States to join a start-up investment firm called Harding Loevner, eventually becoming its chief investment officer. He lives in Pennsylvania, not far from the firm’s base in New Jersey, but it sounds like his heart is at Home Park, Plymouth’s ground since 1901.
Hallett’s first contribution was to provide the money for the redevelopment of the Mayflower Stand, which increased the ground’s capacity and ability to earn money every day of the year as a hospitality and conference venue.
More recently, he has bought land around the stadium, some of which is being used for parking and as a fan zone, with the rest earmarked to become a “mixed-use public and Championship-ready training facility for the first-team squad”. The next big project is a £25million investment in the academy’s base, where Plymouth’s women’s team also train.
Work is also being done to improve the grandstand concourses and there are plans to fill in the two corners of the ground that remain open to the elements. Hallett laughs when he explains this, as it has become something of a running joke between club and custodian over the years. Once all this work is completed, Home Park’s current capacity of 17,000, the third lowest in the 24-team Championship, will increase to “the low 20,000s”.
While Home Park will still be on the small side for a second-tier team with that capacity, Plymouth’s total turnover is closer to mid-table. And this, combined with a refusal to mortgage the future by overspending on players, means they only lost £2.4m last year, down from £3.4m the year before. I write “only” because that is what some Championship clubs lose per month.
Plymouth’s stadium, Home Park (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
Last season, Hallett thinks Plymouth had the lowest first-team budget in the division at £11m — “on a points-per-pound basis, we led the league”. This season, he has upped that to £14m, which is still in the Championship’s bottom five.
Whether that, Muslic’s more pragmatic approach and the muscle memory of beating the drop on the last day of last season will be enough to keep Plymouth up seems unlikely at present but the victory over Brentford suggests something is stirring in their corner of south Devon.
While I was keen to talk to him about the prospect of hosting Liverpool, Hallett was just as excited about the under-18 side’s then-upcoming fifth-round tie in the FA Youth Cup against Everton, Merseyside’s other big beast. (Plymouth’s lads won 1-0 away, and now face Aston Villa in the quarter-finals next month.)
In fact, I cannot remember ever speaking to an owner of a side bottom of the table as positive about their future as Hallett. With a new sporting director to recruit, plans to boost the club’s overseas profile, Liverpool ticket requests to fulfil and those corners at Home Park to fill in, he did not have time to wallow.
There is also the small matter of succession.
“The ideal structure for Argyle would be similar to the way I became owner,” says Hallett, when asked for an update on his long search for an ownership partner. “The plan is for new investors to gradually buy into the project. We’d issue new shares, so I’d be diluted. And then, at some stage, they’d inevitably become the majority owners and we could have a conversation about whether they buy me out or I continue.
“I’m 70 this year. I’m in reasonable shape but, if you talk about risks, stuff happens at my age! Life expectancy at 70 for an American male is 83, 84.”
Realising our conversation was taking a morbid turn, I asked when we might get some news on fresh investment.
“Every time I hint on the timeline, I get it wrong, so I’ve given up.”
For those who may be interested, I would suggest you hurry up.
Plymouth is not the easiest place to get to — it’s a near five-hour drive from London — but is in a beautiful part of the world that draws much of its income from tourism, so is worth it when you get there.
It must be.
Hallett left half a century ago but could never say goodbye.
(Top photo: Harry Trump/Getty Images)
