The unofficial rebranding of their 116-year-old club was wearing thin for Ayr United supporters long before they lost patience and faith in their manager.
Scott Brown’s Ayr United this, Scott Brown’s Ayr United that… this is what happens when a smaller club gets involved with an Old Firm icon.
Ayr chairman David Smith would have been hoping that Brown would bring to Somerset Park a bit of the grit, talent and star dust that made the Celtic legend one of the most decorated players of the modern era. His assistant, former Rangers defender Steven Whittaker, was also no stranger to a bit of silverware.
Brown wanted to cut and paste the winning mentality and attitude that helped him win 22 trophies with Celtic and instil it in players at the Championship level.
That was the theory. But how did it play out?
Brown’s first full season was promising with the Honest Men keeping pace at the top before eventually finishing third behind league winners Falkirk and Livingston.
Despite a largely positive campaign, however, the season ended on a sour note after a play-off quarter-final defeat to Partick Thistle.
After watching a 1-0 first-leg lead disappear in a 2-0 loss at home to the Jags, Brown turned the gun on his own players.
Scott Brown’s time was up at Ayr United after a disappointing run of results
‘We’ve had a sloppiness sneak in at certain times and no matter how much you defend those situations in training, it comes down to a big game mentality and we didn’t have the players to turn up,’ he said.
‘They were able to bully us in the middle of the park and win a lot of second balls. The quality we have in the squad from this time last year is night and day but you can play all the nice football you want, you need to switch on in both boxes and if you don’t want to defend as a defender, you have a big problem.’
Common consensus is that managers are best keeping this level of criticism in-house. After a season in which they met or maybe even surpassed expectations, what would the Ayr players have been thinking as they left for the summer break with their manager questioning their mentality and attitude?
For many Ayr supporters, this is now viewed as a turning point for Brown.
Undoubtedly it was also a sign of frustration from a man whose career was spent rubbing shoulders with international level footballers, now trying to manage and motivate professionals a couple of rungs down the ladder.
With their manager linked to the St Johnstone job in the summer of 2025, Brown and Whittaker ended the uncertainty and speculation by committing to Ayr until 2027.
Hoping to improve upon their third-place finish, Brown added experience to his squad in the shape of Stuart Bannigan, Scott McMann, Kevin Holt and Dom Thomas. But in doing so his Ayr side seemed to lose the fluid attacking football that had served him so well the previous term.
The signing – and subsequent releasing – of Championship enigma Thomas has been a disaster. The well-travelled attacking midfielder has all the talent in the world but it seemed to be news to Brown that he wasn’t the player to be pressing opponents and tracking back to recover the ball. Bannigan and Holt, meanwhile, have struggled for fitness all season while seasoned attacker Curtis Main was allowed to depart to Morton in January without an obvious replacement.
Ayr had been hanging on to the final play-off spot for much of this season but a lack of balance has caught up with them of late. In Brown’s last game in charge, a 3-0 defeat at Raith Rovers and a ninth game in succession without a win, 19-year-old striker Lucas McRoberts was thrown in for his first start as a dearth of striking options came home to roost.
Owner Smith was desperate to keep backing Brown. He admired him and met with fans last week to defend him.
Scott Brown, pictured with Brendan Rodgers, enjoyed a successful career with Celtic
Ayr were desperate to give Brown and Whittaker the benefit of the doubt and write it off as a poor season wrecked by injuries to key players.
But form and results tanked so much that limping on until the end of the season wasn’t an option as relegation became more and more of a possibility.
The defeat at Kirkcaldy was so abject a performance that it was hard to see where Brown’s team would get goals from never mind points. The squad’s confidence was gone and Brown was looking increasingly forlorn in the dugout.
Despite Smith’s vote of confidence, the writing was on the wall in February’s Challenge Cup semi-final defeat to Inverness CT. Chasing a goal to get to a first national cup final in a two decades to force extra-time at home to a lower league side, Ayr ended the game with EIGHT defenders on the pitch and no striker!
Attendances were already steadily declining and a lot of fans pledged not to renew their season tickets if Brown stayed on. Three home wins in the league all season is a difficult record to stand behind.
Given Smith has invested massively off the field in a new Matchday hub, a new stand, new offices, new gym and a new training pitch, Ayr really need to see a return on the pitch to justify all the other improvements at the club.
All these positive initiatives to benefit the community are being rather sadly sidelined as players in white and black wilt on the Somerset Park pitch.
No one can doubt that Brown put heart and soul into the Ayr job but where does this exit – apparently by ‘mutual consent’ – leave his nascent management career?
The Celtic legend brought an idealistic approach to Ayr, promising a commitment to fluent passing football. But when that approach failed to yield results, he struggled to marry his principles with the pragmatism that every successful manager in Scotland needs in his toolkit.
He’s not the first to learn that lesson the hard way.
