Bolton Wanderers Have Made An Official Approach For Dougie Freedman

The manager hunt continues. After rumor after rumor about people being offered the job, saying they had not been contacted, or simply turning it down, it seems that we finally have an official move towards appointing a new man.

News has broken that Bolton Wanderers have officially approached Crystal Palace in hopes of talking to manager Dougie Freedman into a Reebok Stadium move. Freedman, 36 years old, said just last week in the Croydon Advertiser:

"I'm in the middle of building Crystal Palace Football Club, and when I picked the club up, we were in a dark place.

"I think I'm halfway there in getting the club the way I want it to be, and I'm not the sort of guy to leave jobs half done."

The move apparently happened at the tail end of last week. We wrote about the Freedman rumors last week and provided some insight into the man:

Much like a lot of the other candidates, Freedman is a young manager who is in his first managerial job. Freedman spent the vast majority of his playing career in the lower divisions of England but made it to the Premier League on a few occasions. These, however, were either very short-lived or Freedman could not get a look in. Freedman spent the vast majority of his playing career with Crystal Palace. Freedman first started his coaching career as player/manager of the Crystal Palace reserves back in 2007. He then went on loan to Leeds and Southend United, where he was a player/coach of the latter.

Following his retirement in 2010, Freedman returned to Crystal Palace and took on the assistant manager role under Paul Hart. After Hart was sacked, George Burley was named manager but Freedman stayed as assistant. Burley only managed six months at Palace before being sacked and Freedman was named caretaker manager. Palace were dead in the Championship drop zone when he took over but Freedman managed to steer them to safety with a game to spare. Overall, Freedman has managed 89 matches for Crystal Palace with 36% of them wins. For the sake of comparison, Owen Coyle won 42% of his matches with Burnley in the Championship and Premier League and 33.33% with Bolton Wanderers.