Inside the world of sporting directors: What do they do? And what makes a good one?

New York Times

2 days ago

Players are the focus of any football transfer storyline.
Managers, agents and club owners add to the intrigue, of course, but it's a relatively new role which has been garnering increased attention with every transfer window — the sporting director.
Fundamentally, the remit of the sporting director is to be be a link between the coaching staff and the club's hierarchy, providing continuity, sustainability and a stable strategy in the club's football operations.
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'The sporting director is the safeguard of the culture of the club,' says Damien Comolli, Juventus' general manager and previously sporting or football director at Fenerbahce, Liverpool, Saint-Etienne and Tottenham. 'We need to make sure that short term, medium term and long term are looked at with the same level of interest.'
While sporting directors were scarce in the Premier League at the start of the 21st century, they have become the norm at top-level clubs, with many known among fans by name.
Last October, Txiki Begiristain announced that he is leaving Manchester City this summer after 12 years at the club, with Hugo Viana replacing him. On the other side of the city, controversy ran high when Dan Ashworth left his role as Manchester United sporting director after just five months in the role.
Former Atletico Madrid sporting director Andrea Berta was confirmed as Arsenal's new sporting director in March, replacing Edu after the Brazilian's shock resignation in November to join ​​Evangelos Marinakis' multi-club group.
Meanwhile, Richard Hughes arrived as Liverpool's sporting director last summer with a daunting in-tray that included crucial contract negotiations for star trio Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold.
The lens on the sporting director has never been sharper, yet what they do is still often misunderstood.
To gain a better understanding, The Athletic interviewed several sporting directors and collaborated with analytics company Traits Insights who collected data — including sporting background and experience — on over 300 sporting directors (or equivalents) across 15 major European competitions.
Crucially, what makes a successful one?
For all the attention it has garnered, there is still ambiguity about the role itself between different clubs. The title of 'director of football', 'sporting director', 'general manager', 'chief football officer' and 'technical director' are ultimately synonyms for the same job, though what clubs expect from that job does vary.
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While the role of a head coach or manager is clearly defined, a sporting director does not have a one-size-fits-all approach. Depending on the level of the club or league, the infrastructure built around the role can vary hugely. For some clubs, there will be a single director who sits at the centre of the system; for others, there will be shared responsibilities spanning multiple roles.
'In Germany, you might have a sporting director, a 'kaderplaner' (head of recruitment), a technical director, and then an executive only responsible for sport,' says Jonas Boldt, former sporting director at Hamburg and Bayer Leverkusen.
'When you also think about the coach too, this can have issues at times, because it is difficult to know who has the power or responsibility, and where to share those roles out clearly.'
The fact that football is developing so rapidly, not just the Premier League, has added to the uncertainty over exactly what the sporting director is responsible for. As Comolli says, 'The structure of clubs is changing.'
'These roles have existed for much longer in Germany, Italy and Spain than it has in England,' he continues, 'but I would not distinguish from country to country — I would say the industry is changing as a whole.
'In the last five years, I've seen the role evolve. For example, Manchester City were very successful with Txiki (Begiristain), and then they brought Simon Timson in as a performance director (in 2020), who gets involved in a lot of areas.
'Ten years ago, I would have told you that they are taking work from each other, but actually they complement each other really well — the job of one becomes two, and the industry is now going in that direction.'
Brentford is a good example of two roles dovetailing together in the Premier League.
Director of football, Phil Giles, is responsible for squad management, squad planning and contract renewals at the club while technical director, Lee Dykes is in charge of Brentford's recruitment department.
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The two work in tandem towards a shared goal of ensuring the best possible talent ends up on the pitch — or as Giles puts it, 'Mine and Lee's job is to do the nuts and bolts of the transfer.'
When looking through the number of sporting director (or equivalent) roles across Europe's major leagues, the contrast in structure starts to become clearer.
As Comolli said, sporting director roles have long been established in Italy, Germany and Spain, as well as in the Netherlands, with a minimum of one position filled within each club across each of those respective leagues. Ligue 1 had the lowest share of sporting directors within the league, with 15 of 18 clubs having a position filled.
With the Premier League catching up in recent years, 19 of the 20 clubs had at least one sporting director (or equivalent) in place last season — up from 13 out of 20 in 2016-17. Of the 20 clubs, eight (40 per cent) split the structure across two roles, akin to Giles and Dykes.
Previous experience among sporting directors can vary significantly.
Returning to Giles and Dykes as an example, the former gained a PhD in statistics before working his way up to head of quantitative research at Smartodds, which is owned by Brentford majority owner Matthew Benham.
Meanwhile, Dykes joined Brentford as head of recruitment after being sporting director at Bury FC — with a background in coaching having previously been assistant manager at Carlisle United.
Analysis by Traits outlined four 'archetypes' that best describe the most common pathways sporting directors follow prior to landing the role. They are:
Crucially, these archetypes are not mutually exclusive. Rather than pigeon-holing specific sporting directors to specific categories, it is better to think of the diverse pathways as a Venn diagram with plenty of crossover in the skills that are acquired from the respective backgrounds.
'I would add one other pathway, which is the academy pathway,' says Comolli. 'Dan Ashworth comes from an academy background, for example. Sassuolo have won promotion back to Serie A this season, and their sporting director, Francesco Palmieri, was the club's academy manager for nine years before he got this role. Incidentally, he was also a former player himself.'
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It is a sentiment shared by others across the industry, with a club's academy acting as an ideal breeding ground for a role within the senior set-up.
'I think working as an academy manager can be a useful step to prepare (to be a sporting director),' says Johannes Spors, sporting director at Southampton and formerly of multi-club 777 Partners, Genoa, and Vitesse Arnhem.
'You basically make the same decisions, just with less financial impact. At times, academy directors manage more staff members than I do, but the decisions simply become more impactful the higher you get.'
It is common for appointed sporting directors to arrive into their roles having had experience elsewhere within football clubs. For example, Norwich City's sporting director Ben Knapper was the loan and pathway manager at Arsenal before making the move to the Championship side.
However, Traits' analysis showed that 17 per cent came from non-technical roles or roles outside of football altogether. A notable example would be Tottenham Hotspur's recently departed chief football officer Scott Munn, who held roles in commercial operations of the National Rugby League and Australian Football League before later working as a CEO at Melbourne City and later ​​City Football Group.
His role at Spurs as chief football officer saw him focus more on football strategy, with the role created after an external review of the club's footballing activities.
The core management skills and business acumen required to fulfil the role are often separate from the football industry itself. There can often be a cyclical criticism between 'people who know the game' and 'those who know how to run a successful business' when discussing those within the boardroom, but the evidence shows that having a background within football is not always a precursor to working within the industry.
As a further example, Aston Villa's director of football operations, Damian Vidagany, worked as a journalist in his early career before taking a role as Valencia's chief media officer and later becoming chief executive of DV7, a media agency founded by former Spain international David Villa.
Working alongside Monchi, the renowned sporting director who is now Villa's president of football operations, Vidagany is regarded as one of Unai Emery's most trusted colleagues as the club aims to re-establish itself among Europe's elite.
'My role allows Monchi to be focused on the sporting and scouting side of football, creating and developing a strong network of scouts,' Vidagany said in 2023. 'We work as Batman and Robin because the structure of Villa needs to grow very fast.'
In his current role at Southampton, Spors is keen to highlight that a large part of being a good sporting director is about appointing the right people and developing the club's structure.
'I think it's getting more and more important that you are simply a good leader for the organisation,' says Spors. 'This is the most important thing. There is such a diversity of clubs and how they see their identity, but diversity is always the best — it is important to have people from every background.
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'For example, data is obviously becoming more important in this space — especially with the rise of American ownership. When I arrived at Southampton, the first thing I did was to hire my assistant (Elliott Stapley), who was the former head of data and analytics at 777, and the second thing I did was to change the whole recruitment structure to make sure the data and analytics team were reporting to me.'
Much like the role itself, measuring success depends on the context of the club. Silverware might be the ultimate physical representation of success, but victories can be just as important off the pitch as on it.
'This is a very technical job, so I need to innovate each department to make sure that we have a communication structure and a leadership structure with accountability in every department,' says Spors. 'The better we get there, the more we can increase the chance of on-pitch success.'
For Boldt, who was sporting director at Hamburg from 2019 to 2024, the club's finances impacted much of his tenure. The 2021-22 financial year was the first time the club posted a positive annual profit in 12 years.
'My job was to make the club more stable, to recreate the identity, to develop young players and to help the coaches to do their job,' Boldt said. 'I'm not there anymore, but it's the same team, and this project together was four years in the making — and we can now see the output from their efforts.'
Now, the structure of the club is in a far stronger position after securing a return to the Bundesliga this season following six seasons out of the top flight. Last year saw the club record a financial profit for the third year in a row, with its Volksparkstadion stadium debts paid off two years ahead of schedule.
While Boldt was not the one holding the purse strings, Hamburg's financial landscape meant he had to be skilful in ensuring the club operated within its means when buying and selling players.
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'To have success, you have to be one step ahead. Sometimes, you need to let young players go to another club and give them space to develop (elsewhere) — but in football, nobody sees this as success because you're often linked to how many titles you won,' he says.
'For a sporting director or executive, we are responsible for the strategy and the vision of the club. I understand that you need results, but Hamburg is more stable than ever before, with less debt than ever before. If we had been promoted immediately (back to the Bundesliga), it would have likely been a disaster because the club was unstable, but now the base is so much stronger than the years before. That is success for me.'
Stability should be synonymous with the role. It might sound obvious, but a sporting director needs to be in the position for the long term to implement such stability, which has not always been the case among some Premier League sides.
Ashworth left Newcastle United before his short-lived stint at Manchester United, with his replacement Paul Mitchell announced that he was also parting company with Newcastle last month after less than a year in the role — leaving the club with the task of appointing their third sporting director in rapid succession.
Liverpool's appointment of Hughes brought stability to the club last summer after a disruptive 18 months that saw Jorg Schmadtke hired on a short-term contract following the departure of previous sporting director Julian Ward — who had only replaced Michael Edwards a year before. Had a long-term sporting director been in place, the public contract sagas involving Van Dijk, Salah and Alexander-Arnold might have been handled differently.
The common thread is that nothing is ever guaranteed on the pitch, but the good sporting directors will find a way to control the controllable and give the club long-term improvement, regardless of short-term ups and downs.
'All I can do is try and increase the chance of success,' says Spors. 'As a sporting director, we can do much more than just sign players or a coach. We can build the culture. We can make sure every department is on the best level and is pushing to the next level.'
'Getting three points on a Saturday is just the result of all the work that sits behind it.'