Allison Kirkby, who has been appointed to lead BT, would have dropped an emerging career in telecoms had Manchester United’s owners not turned her down as chief financial officer of her favourite English Premier League club.

“The Glazers didn’t like me,” said the executive, a Glaswegian like the club’s former manager Sir Alex Ferguson.

After the setback Kirkby set off to Scandinavia, where she has spent most of the past decade turning around former state-owned telecoms monopolies unloved by investors and facing costly fibre optic rollouts. Now she is coming home to attempt the same with Britain’s own problem-stricken giant.

BT on Monday announced that Kirkby, one of its non-executive directors since 2019, would become its first female chief executive, replacing outgoing boss Philip Jansen by January next year at the latest.

Kirkby beat Marc Allera, the head of BT’s consumer division, who was tipped as the leading internal candidate, to the top job. But despite being drafted in from Sweden’s Telia, which she has run for the past four years, Kirkby is “very much a continuity candidate”, according to James Barford, an analyst at Enders Analysis.

Jansen, who joined BT from outside the industry in 2019, has set in motion plans to invest £12bn to push high-speed broadband out to 25mn homes by 2026. But cost-cutting is as much in focus: the group also plans to shed up to 55,000 jobs, or about 40 per cent of its workforce, by the end of the decade.

Kirkby’s job is “all about execution”, said Barford. The 56-year-old Scot is well acquainted with the sector and the need for big changes to combat its multiple challenges.

A prominent telecoms investor described her as “one of the best telecom executives in Europe . . . who’s not scared of changing things if it creates value”. He added: “She may not be well known in the UK but she’s seen as a star in the Nordics.”

Kirkby is the third female chief executive to take the helm at a European telecoms company in the past 18 months following the appointments of Christel Heydemann to run France’s Orange and Margherita Della Valle at Vodafone. She will be one of just nine FTSE 100 female chief executives.

Over the past decade, Kirkby has run three Nordic telecoms companies and on each occasion has been unafraid to push through big changes. At Sweden’s Tele2, she masterminded the $3.3bn takeover of local cable and broadband group Com Hem in 2018. In just a year at the helm of Denmark’s TDC Group, she split the company into two separate units.

At Telia, Sweden’s former state monopoly operator, Kirkby managed to offload international assets, which had proved difficult to sell. She pushed through a sale of its international telecoms carrier business to local pension funds for almost €1bn, and sold about half of its towers business in Sweden, Norway and Finland to Brookfield and Alecta.

“She’s very affable, very astute and — most importantly for this job — she understands capital allocation very well,” said Bruce Flatt, chief executive officer of $825bn alternatives manager Brookfield, where Kirkby now sits on the board. “BT is going to need capital and she’s going to have to make some of those same decisions that she made at Telia.”

Deutsche Bank analysts said her departure from Telia was “negative” for the group’s share price, which dropped by 4.5 per cent in Stockholm on Monday.

Kirkby said on Monday that she was “fully supportive” of BT’s existing turnaround plans. Robert Grindle, a telecoms analyst at Deutsche Bank, said Kirkby faced a bigger task at BT with the fibre optic rollout than she did at Telia. “She has to continue building fibre with ‘fury’ to fend off the threat from other big telcos and altnets,” he said.

BT has received much of the blame for the UK’s status in Europe as a laggard over its slow fibre optic rollout. As of February, 12.4mn UK homes, or about 42 per cent, had full-fibre broadband, according to regulator Ofcom. That compares with 89 per cent of Spanish households and 63 per cent of French homes, according to 2021 figures.

A former BT board director said Kirkby was “an extremely capable person” and the right candidate “not just to deliver the fibre optic rollout but to deal with the many operational things internally in the company that need to be strengthened”.

Ian Durant, the former chair of bakery chain Greggs, where Kirkby served as a non-executive director for six years, described her as “feisty, fun and fearless in equal measure”.

By the age of 14, Kirkby was already holding down two jobs: delivering fresh cartons of cream around her local neighbourhood in Glasgow and, as a door-to-door salesperson for the Avon cosmetics brand, colloquially known as an “Avon lady”.

In a 2020 TED Talk, Kirkby chalked up her success in business to a series of knock-backs during her youth, including being bullied at an inner-city school in Glasgow and opting not to go to university immediately after school and instead help care for her father after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “All of those experiences whilst tough really made me who I am today,” she recalled.

She will have to deploy those skills to face up to the other challenges that BT faces: it is being probed by Ofcom over information offered to new customers about mobile and broadband deals as well as over disruption to 999 emergency services on a single day in June. Last year, BT conceded to pay demands following an eight-day strike by 40,000 workers.

The group’s share price has fallen nearly 24 per cent to £1.21 over the past year.

Kirkby must also reconcile the positions of two big shareholders whose investments are under water: Patrick Drahi’s Altice owns almost 25 per cent of BT while Deutsche Telekom — whose chief executive earlier this year expressed dissatisfaction over the languishing share price — has 12 per cent. Despite the telecoms group being tipped as a possible takeover target, Drahi’s vehicle said in May it had no plans to bid for BT.

One investor said because of the state of the debt markets BT was “probably an unpurchaseable company” for the time being, whether by Drahi or anyone else. “So the good news is that [Kirkby will] have some time to be able to get her ship in order.”