HOPE comes in many forms at Ayr United. It's present in the SPFL Championship league table, where the perennial underachievers sit top going into today's match at Arbroath. It can be found looking around the stadium, too, where chairman David Smith has made good on his promise to build a supporters hub. Then there is Dipo Akinyemi. Optimism can be heard in the cheers that greet another goal for Ayr's summer signing from Welling United, or in the excited voices of the children who form impatient queues to meet him whenever he turns up as the special guest at a club-run football camp or community outreach programme.
Akinyemi has been the early success story of the Championship season so far and his arrival at Ayr United is testament to the way they do things a little bit differently at Somerset Park. When managing director Graeme Mathie was appointed last December he promised to make Ayr a club for the area to be proud of. It wasn't just a call to arms on the pitch but off it, too, with the former Hibernian sporting director determined to place the club at the forefront of community activity. It is undeniably Ayr’s flying start to the season that has grabbed the attention of neutrals, though, and particularly the efforts of Akinyemi, who has come from the relative obscurity of the National League South to sit atop the Championship leading scorers charts on 11 goals, a haul that some strikers would be pleased with over the course of an entire campaign.
The telling of how Akinyemi arrived at Ayr in June is worth greater inspection. Shorn of talismanic striker Tomi Adeloye, who joined League 2 Swindon Town in the summer following a season in which he scored 14 goals, Ayr were in need of a front man. Keith Glendinning, the club's head of recruitment, had already been working on a replacement, scouring a market that could well be his specialist subject on Mastermind: the English Football Conference. Deep into his Wyscout research his gaze alighted upon Akinyemi, scorer of 16 goals in 34 games for Welling last season.
Akinyemi, 25, had been a full-time professional at Stevenage from 2015 to 2018 but struggled to make an impression and there followed a succession of loan moves and short term deals. The presence of so many destinations on Akinyemi’s CV might have sounded alarm bells for some but Ayr were confident in their due diligence and, in the face of interest from a number of other parties, moved swiftly to bring him north, conscious of the importance a full pre-season could have on the player.
“Sometimes, it's a bit of an amber flag,” says Mathie. “'Why has this player moved as often as he has?’ I think his agent [James King] was honest enough to say that maybe when he was younger, he didn't quite apply himself properly, that, in years gone by, Dipo had made some poor choices. But his last season proved that the penny had dropped, he was really dedicated, his body shape was excellent and that was why he contributed by scoring so many goals for Welling last year.”
“Keith Glendinng's knowledge of players in the non-League in England, of the levels that you're dealing with, of the costs and finances involved is good. [At the end of last season] we assumed we would need to be recruiting in the forward areas. Tomi Adeloye had had a terrific season. We made him some strong offers but we always felt it would be more likely that he would leave. Being proactive in trying to bring in a striker was a priority.”
Glendinning, the former Hamilton Academical recruitment head, who once plucked Mickel Miller from seventh-tier Carshalton Athletic admits there are rafts of players at that level who could conceivably do a job for someone in Scottish football but there is a caveat.
“The pool of players who would want to move – either financially or because it’s not the right time in their life or because of their family situation – is really small,” says Glendinning. “We have enquired about loads of non-league players but for one reason or another it just isn't right for them to move to Scotland.”
As part of the sales pitch, Glendinning was asked by Mathie to pull together a document that sold the benefits of the club to prospective new signings detailing the role Ayr had played in providing a springboard for those such as Adeloye, future Scotland strikers Lawrence Shankland (Hearts) and Kevin Nisbet (Hibernian), and those now plying their trade down south: Michael Rose (Coventry City) and Daniel Harvie (MK Dons).
“A lot of it is actually showcasing the work that Ayr United have done for some years, long before Graeme or I came in,” says Glendinning. “Dipo had loads of different offers and every single club would tell him the same thing 'come in, do well, and we'll move you on, and you'll go to a higher level'. It was a simple task for me in terms of just putting it on paper but Ayr have actually got proven success of doing it. So maybe doing something a wee bit different does help. Why the signing has been a success so far [comes down to] identifying the player, [having] really good coaching staff, good club staff around the club and sports science staff but the main reason why he has done well is the player himself. That's the top and bottom of it.”
After Glendinning presented the pros, cons, numbers and video footage to Mathie and Ayr head coach Lee Bullen, all that remained was for the latter to speak to the player. Bullen enjoys a strong relationship with Mathie and Glendinning but he wanted to look Akinyemi in the eyes and get a feel for what he was about.
“He was so hungry to come up and get involved in full time football, first and foremost, but also test himself in a different environment,” recalls Bullen of a video call chat over the summer. “Dipo ticked so many boxes but, ultimately, there's always a bit of a gamble when you're bringing somebody up that you don't particularly know. You've got to trust your instinct, trust your due diligence has been done and hopefully things fall into place.”
His intuition about the player proved to be sound when Akinyemi started turning heads in his earliest training sessions.
“Any player coming into that sort of scenario, at a new football club, the hardest thing is to earn the respect of your peers within that changing room. Within two or three training sessions, you could see the other lads suddenly turning to to me, and saying 'oh, my God, he's gonna cause defences problems up here.’”
And so it has proved. There were two goals in his first Championship start, then a further five in his next four matches then a perfect hat-trick in a 5-0 win against Queen’s Park in October.
Mathie says his tally could have been more but for some bad luck in the opening rounds of the Premier Sports Cup.
“He could have easily scored another 10 goals in the League Cup games. He hit the post, hit the bar, missed chances that he would have been disappointed he didn't score. But he was getting in the right areas, he was doing the right things. It was only going to be a matter of time.”
Mathie urges caution when it comes to speculating on how far Akinyemi can go. Ultimately, he would love that progression to take place at Ayr but also says having the confidence to sell players is evidence of a club’s maturity.
“Can Dipo move on to a higher level? What I would say to supporters is that clearly we want that to be with Ayr United, that he performs along with his team-mates to a level that can take us beyond where the club's been before. But I did say to the chairman and the board when I joined I look at a lot of clubs and even of a similar size at our level, Inverness have done a really good job of developing and moving on players for transfer income. Raith Rovers have done it as well. I do think that's a measure of how a club's grown, if they can produce and develop players and it ends up netting them a transfer fee. I think it's still very early for anybody to be saying that Dipo's ready to move on from Ayr United. He has had a great start to the league season, but not quite finished the calendar year yet; there's a long, long way to go.”
For Bullen, the hope is that his goal contributions will help lead to a promotion push and there is a plaintive appeal, then a chuckle when he says: “Just don't try and sell him too much, will you? I wouldn't mind holding him until the end of the season.”
Dipo – short for Oladipo – is of west African origin and means ‘wealth increases’. Whether that is measured in goals or by transfer value, hope abounds around Somerset Park.
