Aberdeen chief Alan Burrows targets ‘consistency of success’ under Jimmy Thelin

Aberdeen chief executive Alan Burrows stressed the drive for “consistency of success” as he evaluated Jimmy Thelin’s tenure as Dons boss.

The 47-year-old Swede spoke about a three-year plan when he joined the club from Elfsborg in 2024 and, to great joy in the Granite City, he brought the Scottish Cup back to Pittodrie for the first time since 1990 in May with a penalty shoot-out win in the final against Celtic, and secured a fifth-place finish in the William Hill Premiership.

Aberdeen have recovered from a poor start to this season to currently sit in sixth place in the league and 33rd in the Conference League table ahead of Thursday’s home game against Strasbourg.

Speaking after the club’s AGM on Monday, Burrows said: “In Jimmy’s first season he achieved two things, we won the Scottish Cup and we achieved European group-stage football.

“That’s the levels and that’s the achievements that we want to hold ourselves to as often as we possibly can.

“This is a football club that has to hold itself to a standard whereby we want to win trophies, we want to compete at the top end of the table.

“We want to play European competition regularly. We’ve done that in year one, if you like, of that tenure.

“The drive is consistency, and that’s the part that we’re really striving to achieve, is consistent success on the field rather than sort of a peaks and troughs element.

“Very few football clubs have linear success, where everything goes well all the time, and there’s always going to have to be some resilience against some of the bad moments.

“But I think what we’re trying to build is just consistency of success, and that comes from consistency of recruitment, consistency of coaching, some stability within the club.

“So all those things, we are seeing some elements to it and also continuing to drive hard the academy to try and produce as many good young players and create that proper pathway for them to come into the first team, and I think we’ve started to see green shoots of that.”