Lincoln City Appoints Joint Head Coaches Shaw and Cohen for Championship Return

Lincoln City have confirmed that former assistants Tom Shaw and Chris Cohen will take charge of the club’s Championship campaign as joint head coaches, following the departure of Michael Skubala. Skubala guided the Imps to 103 points and promotion to the second tier for the first time in 66 years before leaving for Bristol City. The appointment, announced after a summer of change, was made while the club’s training ground was briefly the centre of a light‑hearted incident when a lorry emblazoned with a KGB logo parked beside it, prompting staff to joke about Soviet spies studying their set‑pieces.

The move was described as a symbiotic promotion from within, with Shaw and Cohen stepping up while the club’s hierarchy was already planning a new coaching structure. Their goal is to avoid the pitfalls of past ill‑fated pairings, such as Liverpool’s Roy Evans‑Gérard Houllier experiment, and to build on the momentum that brought Lincoln to the Championship. Ahead of the season opener at the Riverside, the duo are finalising preparations for a clash with Middlesbrough, a club that has spent more than £20 million on summer signings – a figure that dwarfs Lincoln’s cumulative spend of a quarter of that amount over 142 years.

With the new partnership in place, Shaw and Cohen are focused on making the most of the club’s resources and the enthusiasm of a squad that has already tasted promotion. The Imps will face Middlesbrough on Saturday, a test that will showcase whether the joint‑coaching experiment can translate the club’s historic rise into sustained success at this higher level.