The collapse and downfall of Ross County Football Club

Beaten by Livingston in last season’s Premiership play-off final, back-to-back demotions now hover on the horizon like a blackened cloud. For Margaret Paterson, an independent local councillor and County supporter since the age of 10, the prospect is almost too much to bear.

“I cried when we dropped out of the Premiership because I was so upset,” she said ahead of last night’s relegation tussle with Queen’s Park, “And I will cry again if we drop into League One.

“The club is so important to the Highlands, and when you choose your team, that’s you for life. Whether they are doing good or bad, you support them through thick and thin.

“It’s difficult times, of course it is. I don’t know what has gone wrong this season, but they just don’t seem able to put it together.

Ross County lift the League Cup in 2016 (Image: Mark Runnacles)

“We just have to be upbeat and hope for the best and keep supporting our team. It’s life, isn’t it?”

Forged from a community of just 6000 on the Cromarty Firth, Ross County revelled in their status as the unsinkable underdogs of Scottish football.

Admitted to the senior leagues in 1994/95, the Staggies spent three decades establishing themselves as flag bearers for the Highlands. Backed by Roy MacGregor, a businessman born and bred in Invergordon, they became a repeated nuisance to bigger and better-resourced clubs. They placed Dingwall, a small town on the far north railway line, on the map.

Defeating Celtic on their way to the 2010 Scottish Cup final, they became the first club to win the Highland League, Third, Second and First Divisions en route to their first spell in the Premiership between 2012 and 2018.

Relegated for one season, they returned to the top flight for another six years. In March 2016, they lifted the League Cup – their only major honour.

Councillor Paterson began going to Highland League games at Victoria Park with her four brothers in the 1950s.

“I was just so proud when they got into the Premiership,” she says. “We are a small town and all the other teams in the Premiership were from big cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh. I can’t explain how proud we were, as a community, to be welcoming them to Dingwall.

“It was good for the town and not just the town. It was good for the economy of the surrounding area as well, and the one thing that I thought was brilliant was that many people who could not afford to travel far got the opportunity to see the big teams. And we often beat them, believe it or not...”

The warning signs were there the day Malky Mackay’s team pulled off a jaw-dropping comeback to preserve their Premiership status in 2023. Three goals down to Partick Thistle with 20 minutes to go in the play-off second leg, they stormed back to draw level and stay up after a penalty shoot-out.

Last season, the legs finally buckled, and down they went. No one expected them to be gone for long. Under former manager Don Cowie, they handed big contracts to the kind of gnarled Premiership campaigners they rarely signed in times gone by. And somewhere along the way the chemistry, the alchemy, which propelled them from the Highland League to the top six of the Premiership and their first Hampden trophy was lost.

Founder of Global Energy Group, chairman and owner MacGregor has spent recent months conducting a strategic review with his chief executive, Steven Ferguson, searching for answers. The campaign has already cost managers Cowie and Tony Docherty their jobs and provoked an emotional outburst from Stuart Kettlewell after last weekend’s heavy defeat to Airdrie.

“It’s a bit bamboozling for us, the last couple of months,” MacGregor says. “When we got into the senior leagues in 1994, both Highland League clubs had a cause. And sometimes when you have success with that cause, be it Inverness or ourselves, you tend to take things for granted. I think we have lost a bit of that cause and, whatever the reason, we have not been able to transmit whatever was on paper to the pitch.

“It’s perplexing. Even more perplexing because a couple of managers have lost their jobs because of it, and, looking back, none of them were at fault either.

“The football world is perplexing generally and we need to make sure that our culture and our cause and what we believe in and what we stand for in our community is very evident in whatever we do and whatever league we end up in.”

Roy MacGregor (Image: Russell Cheyne / Shutterstock)

The first hint of trouble came with home defeats to fellow promotion hopefuls St Johnstone and Partick Thistle. Beneath MacGregor’s avuncular exterior lurks a ruthless pragmatist, and Cowie’s departure prompted the appointment of Docherty, a manager who had lost his job at Dundee despite keeping the team in the top flight.

Working by the side of Derek McInnes, Docherty had learned to win the Championship at St Johnstone and Kilmarnock. A league where legs, energy and desire are half the battle, the lack of all three was identified as a problem.

Denied the opportunity to change the personnel in the January transfer window, a run of four wins, four draws and seven defeats in all competitions brought his tenure to an end in mid-December. He had been in charge for just 13 league games.

The second coming of Kettlewell has failed to make any sustained difference. County travelled to Glasgow for last night’s game against Queen’s Park on a run of six games without a win. Sliding to a 4-0 home defeat to bottom club Airdrie, Kettlewell described the result as “far and away the worst result in the club’s history”.

“I think Stuart was a bit harsh,” says MacGregor, pictured right. “I think he was just so disappointed.”

The worst result in any club’s history is always a subjective judgment. Ross Morren, founder and producer of the County Corner podcast, has witnessed a few contenders in the last 18 months alone.

“The Raith Rovers 6-0 defeat for a start,” he says. “Last season we were beaten 1-0 away to Spartans in the League Cup when they were in League Two and we were in the Premiership.

“There was a capitulation against Livingston in the play-off final as well and we might as well throw in some 3-0 defeats to the likes of Arbroath and Morton.

“In the context of the game – a six-pointer between the bottom two teams – I think the manager’s comments were fair.”

Formed in 1929, Ross County won their first Highland League title in 1966/67 with a squad comprised of local players. Back-to-back titles in the early nineties persuaded then-chairman Hector MacLennan to apply for membership of a newly expanded Scottish Football League. MacGregor’s messianic commitment to doing the Highlands proud saw the club slice through the senior leagues like a knife through butter.

“We had a wonderful spell in the Premier League,” he reflects now. “We managed to survive in there for 11 or 12 years. We were fifth once, seventh twice, so apart from last year, when we finished up 11th, we competed.

“But football is very much dictated by balance sheet. And if you look at world football, be it Saudi Arabia or Qatar or England where 16 of the 20 clubs are American owned, the business model has changed.

“We were a club where, along with another few, the balance sheet and the turnover was not strong enough.

“We definitely got out of jail with the Partick Thistle play-off. And we had warnings that we were having difficulty competing.

“But going down, we felt we had put together a team with enough Premiership experience, we thought, to be able to come back in one year. In reality, it has kind of flipped the opposite way. The problem we have is not technical. It’s cultural.”

When lifelong County fan Morren speaks of players from the club’s “golden generation” he does it with an air of wistful nostalgia. Richard Brittain made 269 appearances, Iain Vigurs played for the club 238 times and Michael Gardyne became an undisputed club legend with 444 games and 73 goals. The key to battling their way through the leagues was a chip resting on each shoulder. A determination to give teams from the Central Belt a kick up the backside.

“The club has always felt like an underdog since coming into the senior leagues,” Morren acknowledges. “It has had to fight its way through the leagues to earn the recognition and respect that it deserved.

Ross County (Image: Shutterstock)

“I think of players like Brittain, Paul Lawson, Vigurs and Gardyne who had knock-backs in their careers and came to County to become part of one of our most successful teams. There was a mentality of ‘I’m going to prove you wrong’ both on the pitch and off it.

“I think we have lost that. It’s very easy to get caught up in the chase for Premiership survival and bring in tried and tested players who have knocked around a few clubs in their time.”

Post relegation, County imported the likes of Declan Gallagher, Ross Docherty, Nicky Clark and Gary Mackay-Steven. The change of strategy stuttered when Clark and Mackay-Steven had their contracts torn up in February. Gallagher, Docherty, Jamie Lindsay and Uche Ikpeazu remained in place for the heavy defeat to Airdrie and, while the small battalion of Premiership

veterans came at a price, the strain on Ross County’s balance sheet has been less than it might have been. Oddly, income has gone up.

“The support for the club, the attendances are as good as they ever were,” reports MacGregor. “That is because the culture I talk about, which is not evident on the park, is evident off it.

“It’s another conundrum in a season full of them. But we have let those supporters down, and we owe it to the supporters to get it right because managers have not been the problem.

“The foundations are deep. We need to find ourselves again and make sure that the players we take in understand the Ross County ethic.”

While fans like Morren never expected the team to run away with a league featuring St Johnstone and Partick Thistle, there was no way of predicting the speed of Ross County’s collapse.

Accustomed to jousting with big-city teams from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, long days and nights on the A9 travelling to towns like Greenock, Arbroath and Airdrie have become more of a grind than usual.

“Based on signings like Gallagher and Docherty, both of whom were consistent performers for Dundee United, we thought we would have a strong base. But a lot of these players are in the latter stages of their career, and maybe there is just that lack of drive that was once there with other players.

“People look at the team and think we will eventually click, but as more and more games pass and more and more alarming performances creep in it starts to look as if the games are running out.”

Home fixtures against Ayr United and Morton offer hope of salvation. A ninth-place finish, perhaps and a play-off final against a team from League One who may, or may not, be Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

“If we were to go into the play-offs, it would be tough because we would be coming up against teams which had endured positive seasons,” adds podcaster Morren.

“When this side suffers a setback, there is none of the fire or the grit to get back into games that we used to have.

“Maybe that’s fatigue because the club have spent the last four years with their backs against the wall.

“It feels like this has been coming for a number of years. I just don’t think anyone expected the collapse to be as dramatic as it has been this season.”