Hibs’ new sporting director has spoken of his desire to implement a “Hibs DNA”.
Mathie was today announced as the club’s first ever sporting director, and will assume many of the responsibilities of head of football operations George Craig, who retires at the end of the year.
Asked what his priority was, Mathie explained that the club now had to deliver on the aims laid in out a “DNA document” that was written just before Hibs’ return to the top flight.
“We wrote a document just as we being promoted out of the Championship of what it is we wanted Hibs to be and be really clear on it,” he explained.
“The document itself was good. It said things like we wanted to achieve sustainable success, be a team that competes in Europe, trades players, promotes from the academy and ends up providing a pathway for players to play in the first team.
“All these things are great and really relevant to Hibs, but when you step back, there isn’t really the evidence to say that the club has competed at a level consistently.
“There’s only been about four or five back to back top four finishes in the last 45, 50 years so we need to consider how we try to change that.
“The club’s had periods of success in it’s history, periods bringing through young players and periods of transitions. We want to do that more consistently and that’s the challenge going forward.”
Mathie also admitted the Easter Road club may look to new markets when it comes to signing players.
‘We want to try and make the club more global,” he said. “That’ll potentially have an impact on the markets we look at in terms of recruiting players.
“it’ll definitely have an impact on learning and developing the people we have here and how we think. We’ll be developing partnerships with different clubs and that’ll be happening all over Europe. Two in particular that we’re speaking to at the moment are really big European clubs that we can learn a lot from.
“We want to tie up with clubs at a lower level as well to create links with our academy so that our young players can go and experience another culture that could help them have a fruitful career.”
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