Craig McLeish was not supposed to be here. Three months ago, he was a name few outside Paisley could spell. The Scottish Football Association had not called. Sky Sports pundits had not circled his face on their tactical boards. He was interim, which in football means temporary, which means disposable. And then St Mirren stayed up, and suddenly McLeish became the man who saved Scottish football itself.
Let us be clear about what happened on the final day of the season: a mid-table club in the Premiership secured survival in a league where survival is not a triumph but a baseline expectation. Except the narrative has shifted so violently that you would think McLeish had personally negotiated a peace treaty while simultaneously discovering renewable energy.
The Scottish government is reportedly considering making May 25th a national holiday. Not officially, mind you—that would be absurd. But the confetti cannons have been ordered. The press conferences are being held in rooms with unnecessarily dramatic lighting. Local newspapers have stopped bothering with match analysis and moved straight to hagiography. One headline last week read: “McLeish: The Man Who Made Us Believe Again.” In a club that has been in the top flight for decades. For not getting relegated.
Here is the thing about interim managers: they exist in a state of quantum uncertainty. They are both everything and nothing. When results improve, they become visionaries. When results decline, they become caretakers. McLeish walked into a club mid-free-fall. The previous permanent manager had left them in the bottom six. The squad was fractured. The confidence was gone. And then McLeish came in, steadied the ship, and guided them to safety through a combination of tactical acumen, player management, and the kind of luck that separates survival from relegation by a single point.
Now the question is being asked with the kind of breathless intensity usually reserved for matters of genuine consequence: will he get the job permanently?
The cynical answer—and cynicism is earned in football—is that it depends entirely on whether the club’s hierarchy has suddenly developed amnesia about why he was interim in the first place. McLeish was not their first choice. He was not their second choice. He was the choice when no one else would take it. That he has done well does not erase the fact that he was Plan F.
But this is where the satire becomes real, and the real becomes absurd. In modern football, a manager who keeps a club up is suddenly valuable. Not because he has proven he can build something long-term—he has had five months—but because he has delivered the one thing that matters in May: survival. The board will now have to decide whether McLeish deserves a proper contract, or whether they should continue the search for someone who was their first choice three months ago. That person, presumably, still does not want the job. And if they do, they will want more money, a longer contract, and the assurance that they will not be fired if the club finishes eighth instead of sixteenth.
McLeish, meanwhile, has already done the hardest thing: he has made it look possible. He has shown that this squad can compete. He has restored belief in a dressing room that had none. He has done the work that the next permanent manager—should the board decide to start from scratch—will benefit from immediately. That is the cruel mathematics of football management: the interim manager builds the house, and the permanent manager moves in and takes the credit.
What makes this moment genuinely interesting is not whether McLeish will get the job—odds are, he will, because it is easier to keep someone who has already stabilized the ship than to find someone new. What is interesting is that we are treating the stabilization of a mid-table club as a monumental achievement. That we have collectively decided that keeping a club up is not simply doing your job, but transcending it. That we have elevated survival to the status of triumph.
St Mirren will finish the season. The confetti will be cleaned up. The press conferences will end. And Craig McLeish will either sign a contract or he will not. If he does, he will become the permanent manager of a mid-table Scottish club, which is exactly what he has already been for three months. The only thing that will change is the title, and perhaps the salary.
But that is the thing about football in May: it does not deal in nuance. It deals in narratives. And right now, the narrative is that Craig McLeish saved St Mirren. Never mind that he simply did his job well. Never mind that survival was always the most likely outcome. Never mind that we are in the business of exaggerating the importance of outcomes that matter only in the context of a sport where money and survival are often the same thing.
The confetti cannons are already loaded. The holiday is being planned. And somewhere in Paisley, Craig McLeish is probably wondering how he went from nobody to national treasure in the span of a single season. That is not a tragedy. That is just football.