Wolves were relegated from the Premier League in 2011-12.
Mick McCarthy is remembered fondly among many of the Wolverhampton Wanderers faithful for his spell in charge at Molineux between 2006 and 2012, sealing a spot in the Championship playoffs in his first season despite an initially depleted squad.
In 2009, he succeeded in securing promotion to the Premier League as champions and kept Wolves in the top flight the following two seasons before parting company with the club in February 2012, and seven years on, he has been inducted into the Old Gold Club.
On Tuesday, the official Wolves website confirmed that McCarthy, who has also managed Millwall, Sunderland and Ipswich Town, was to become the 21st OGC inductee, joining podcast hosts Mikey Burrows and Chris Iwelumo on Wednesday’s episode, which premiered on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube at 6pm GMT.
The 60-year-old, who currently manages the Republic of Ireland, held his hands up and admitted that a number of signings made under his watch in 2011 did not improve the team at all.
“The recruitment turned out not to be great,” said McCarthy. “Roger Johnson, Nenad Milijas, Jelle Van Damme, Jamie O’Hara… I’m thinking we’re signing better players, we all thought it (at the time), but they weren’t better than Christophe Berra, David Jones (etc).
“Roger Johnson was nowhere near better than Berra, Jamie O’Hara was nowhere near the lads we’d already got… in some respects (the signings) made us worse because the dressing room lost a bit of the ethos we had for five years. That’s sad but it was all done for the right reasons. It didn’t work.”
McCarthy went on to manage Ipswich Town before returning to the job of ROI head coach, while Wolves rebounded from some difficult days in the early-mid-2010s to cruise to promotion from the Championship last term under Nuno Espirito Santo.
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