Blackpool have hired former West Ham assistant Neil McDonald as their new manager. The Seasiders, who will start next season in League One following their relegation out of the Championship, have handed Sam Allardyce's former number two McDonald a rolling one-year deal. The 49-year-old has also been on the staff at Preston, Bolton, Crystal Palace and Leeds and succeeds Lee Clark in the post after he walked away from Bloomfield Road following a chaotic campaign both on and off the pitch. "This is a great opportunity for me, it's a massive football club in my opinion and I'm really looking forward to the challenge," McDonald told the club's official website. "It's a challenge that's going to be difficult -- wherever you go it's always difficult -- but it's a challenge that I'm really up for and really excited about. "I've got to try and put my stamp on the football club and get it back to where it was. I've got to try and stabilise it first of all after what happened last year with relegation and change people's minds to try and get the confidence back and push the club on to pastures new." McDonald's appointment comes hours after Clark revealed he misjudged the severity of the problems at Blackpool when taking on the job back in October. At that point, a hastily pieced-together squad was propping up the second tier but the tension between chairman Karl Oyston and disgruntled supporters only increased, culminating in the pitch invasion on the final day of the season which forced the Seasiders' clash against Huddersfield to be abandoned. "I think 99.9 percent of people thought I shouldn't take the job, but managers need an ego and I thought I could be the miracle worker," Clark told the Mirror. "I did the due diligence, but I soon realised all those people warning me off were being proved right. I'd done due diligence but nothing prepares you for the reality." Those issues have not gone away and McDonald has little time to get his feet under the table given the factors he must address. He has only seven professionals under contract - with a further three, including AWOL striker Nile Ranger, having one-year options activated recently -- and there is no senior goalkeeper on the club's books. McDonald must therefore build a squad virtually from scratch, as Jose Riga did in the same role last summer, and the club currently only have one pre-season friendly lined up too. He may be taking on the rebuilding job without the aid of his chairman Oyston, who is facing a possible Football Association ban from football-related activities due to a text-message exchange in which he insulted a supporter. There is also the continued discord between Oyston and president Valeri Belokon -- a feud which the club claim prevented a potential takeover recently -- along with the supporters' fury at the owner's running of the club.
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