Everton's new recruitment team is coming together. Transfers are next

New York Times

18-06-2025

Everton's recruitment operation has been in a state of flux.
Change has come quickly as key pillars of the old regime depart, including director of football Kevin Thelwell and head of recruitment Dan Purdy joining Scottish side Rangers, the latter after being offered a place in the revamped setup.
In their stead, three new figures have already arrived in the form of chief executive Angus Kinnear, head of trading Nick Hammond and strategy lead Chris Howarth.
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Further appointments will be made in due course, with James Smith, Manchester City's director of scouting and recruitment, set to replace Purdy in a similar role to the one he left behind.
A new head technical director is expected to be appointed shortly, with Manchester United academy director Nick Cox primed for that role.
The belief at Everton is that they are assembling a 'best in class' team that can rival any of their peers, and one that can be in situ for the long term.
Even at this stage, the pace and scope of the change should come as little surprise. For Kinnear, the former Leeds United CEO leading the process behind the scenes, there has been little time to waste.
With so many players out of contract this summer — the total, at one stage, was 15 — a squad rebuild is coming. While daunting in scope, it offers Everton a rare opportunity to kick on, backed by funding from the club's owner, the Friedkin Group (TFG).
The biggest change behind the scenes has been the move away from the director of football model. Thelwell was well regarded for his role in helping keep Everton afloat during countless financial pinch points, but new CEO Kinnear believes in a 'flatter structure' in which a director of football's usual responsibilities are divided among three or four individuals.
Negotiations with rival clubs and player representatives, for example, will be handled by Hammond, the former Reading and West Bromwich Albion director of football who held consultancy roles with Newcastle United and Leeds United. He is in the process of engaging in contract discussions with those Everton players whose deals expire this summer, including Idrissa Gueye and Seamus Coleman.
Hammond worked closely with Kinnear at Elland Road and was the No 1 target for the head of trading role. His focus will be on negotiating advantageous deals for Everton, but he is expected to offer insight on the market and specific players when needed.
A former goalkeeper at Swindon Town and Reading after coming through Arsenal's academy, Hammond was forced into early retirement due to persistent back injuries. He engaged in scouting duties for Arsene Wenger and initially moved into the role of goalkeeping coach at Reading, before taking on the position of academy director.
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At age 35, Hammond was appointed their first director of football in 2003 and was credited for helping Reading reach the Premier League. Kevin Doyle, Shane Long and others were signed during his spell and were excellent on the pitch before moving on for a profit.
'He deals in facts and gets things done,' former Reading manager Brian McDermott, who worked under Hammond, told The Athletic last year. 'He's an incredibly clear thinker and isn't driven by emotion. He never got distracted from the process.'
Spells with West Brom and Celtic followed before Newcastle hired Hammond in an advisory role after Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund took over the club. In January 2022, Hammond helped the new Newcastle owners navigate a tricky first window as they battled to avoid relegation.
In a 2023 interview with Training Ground Guru, he said his role was 'to advise the owners in relation to the players, the due diligence around the players and the financial aspects of the deals they were trying to complete'.
The window was chaotic but fruitful for Newcastle, with the additions of Kieran Trippier, Bruno Guimaraes, Dan Burn and Chris Wood helping them preserve their top-flight status.
Hammond joined Leeds as a freelance football consultant in 2023 and was seen as a quiet but influential figure in helping them achieve promotion back to the Premier League last season. The 57-year-old is well regarded in the industry, with a wide contacts book and savvy negotiating skills. He never had an agent during his professional career, instead choosing to represent himself.
New director of strategy Howarth is another with Leeds connections. An entrepreneur who has built and sold three analytics companies, he moved into sports data and analytics by founding Insight Sport, a company that worked with around a dozen clubs across Europe's top leagues. Insight Sport provided clubs with player and tactical evaluations using data and AI, while Howarth was seen as an early adopter of player tracking data.
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Insight Sport was sold to TFG this summer, with its bespoke data set to be used by Everton and Roma. The idea is that Howarth will build club-specific models based on key requirements per position, and scrutinise the data to find value for money, with manager David Moyes feeding in the technical profiles he is targeting.
Moyes is seen by many as the key figure in Everton's new transfer team, an old-school, hands-on manager who wants to be across the process.
He has taken in games at this summer's Club World Cup and no players will be signed without Moyes' say-so. Howarth will assess targets put forward by the scouting network to determine their suitability.
The impending arrival of Smith may be the biggest coup.
A sports science graduate who coached in the United States, he worked his way up from performance analyst to head of technical scouting during Moyes' first stint at Everton.
Smith joined Moyes at Old Trafford in 2013 when he got the Manchester United manager's job, before moving to rivals Manchester City a year later. He rose to the director of scouting and recruitment across the City Football Group (CFG), the group that has Manchester City at the top of its multi-club pyramid. He reported to director of football Txiki Begiristain and then his replacement, Hugo Viana, before being poached by Everton this summer.
One of his main duties at the CFG was putting in place its scouting framework and means of assessing players. Together with senior scouts, he would flag players to be discussed higher up the chain.
Smith is seen as an ambitious appointment, with his decision to leave City and rejoin Everton being viewed by some at the club that the new project is ambitious enough to attract top operators in the game.
The link to Moyes was key. In Michael Calvin's book on football scouts, The Nowhere Men, Smith detailed how he had learnt under the Scot at Everton.
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'I've got an idea of players from him,' he said. 'I kind of know what he's looking for, what he's thinking. My role is knitting it together, being a kind of link between the manager and the scouts.'
Smith will sit at the top of the scouting network and manage those below, while providing a bridge between recruitment and the manager. He is an organiser, another low-key presence behind the scenes who is not always a regular at games. Player identification and negotiating will be separated in the new setup, with Smith in charge of the former. Cox will handle other aspects of Thelwell's remit.
Smith is on gardening leave from City and not expected to officially join Everton until the end of the summer window.
The same is likely to be true for Cox who, as technical director, will be tasked with managing many of the other sporting departments, including medical, sports science and the academy.
A former academy manager at Watford and Sheffield United before moving to United, Cox holds a UEFA Pro Licence and a Masters in Sport Directorship. He is credited with helping overhaul an underperforming academy at United, having hired and supported the development of coaches like Ipswich Town manager Kieran McKenna and new Tottenham assistant manager Justin Cochrane.
Under his watch, United implemented an academy-specific recruitment drive. Youth graduates have accounted for 25 per cent of first-team minutes, which the Old Trafford club calculates to be the second-highest in top-five leagues behind Bayern Munich from 2019-2024.
United have sold around £100million worth of players in the last three seasons, including Anthony Elanga and Alvaro Fernandez Carreras, a figure expected to rise due to sell-on clauses.
Cox has had interest from clubs in the Premier League, Europe and governing bodies, but is believed to feel the prospect of working with Moyes, under new ownership as the club enters a new stadium, is an opportunity too good to turn down.
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Coming from a development background, Cox is likely to lead the search for a new academy director, with incumbent Gareth Prosser leaving to join Al Jazira in Abu Dhabi at the end of the month.
In the short term, Purdy's No 2 Lee Sargeson, formerly of Brighton & Hove Albion, has stepped up to help manage the scouting department until Smith can officially start.
Moyes will be key in this summer's window and the ones to follow, but Everton's aim has been to put in place a robust, talented structure for the long term — one that does not depend solely on any one manager or individual. They are close to having all the pieces in place.
Positive steps — but the first significant test for the new regime is just around the corner, as they gear up for a summer they simply have to get right.
Additional reporting: Jordan Campbell, Chris Waugh