Beale reunited with Gerrard at Al-Ettifaq

However, the Londoner left Villa to become a manager in his own right for the first time at QPR and Gerrard was sacked by the Villains just four months later. During their time together at Rangers, Gerrard said it would take him 20 years to become as good a coach as Beale.

The Liverpool and England legend guided Al Ettifaq to a sixth-place finish in the Saudi Premier League last season, his first in charge, but they have struggled this term and are currently 12th in the table, with just 11 points from their opening 10 games. Assistant Dean Holden and Sporting Director Mark Allen were the fall guys when they were sacked by the club last week.

Beale has been out of work since February, when he was dismissed by Sunderland after just 12 games – the shortest managerial spell in Black Cats’ history. The Londoner, who managed QPR from June to November 2022 and Rangers from November 2022 to October 2023, first worked with Gerrard at Liverpool’s Academy. 

He had two spells with the Reds Academy and got to know Gerrard when he was a player and then U18s Head Coach.  Appearing on Episode #27 of the TGG Podcast, when he was Assistant at Rangers, Beale gave an insight into what it was like to work with Gerrard.

“What you find with a lot of successful people is that communication and clarity are huge and they have that personality to inspire, to get under people’s skin, to get them to believe in a vision,” he said.

“The best coaches in the world have that ability to keep people on that ‘you versus yourself’ journey and sell a vision that’s exciting. That’s the one thing I would say about all the coaches I’ve seen, be it Jurgen Klopp, Brendan Rodgers, that ability to inspire people with your personality and vision and Steven has that.

“He has been hugely experienced in his career, in terms of being the leader in the dressing room, and I could tell quite quickly from some of the conversations we had in big moments that he was different to the normal person. Steven is extremely positive, really open, really wants to have a relationship with his players and is really open to ideas from his staff.

“We came in with a huge responsibility to the club in terms of implementing a model and a vision and having some real positivity around it. We’re all really positive people (as a coaching staff) and that’s important, because it’s easy in a season to get negative. We’re good at zapping each other out of it.”