How globalisation killed the old-school English football manager

“Michael Zorc stands for Borussia Dortmund like no one else.” It was the sort of acclamation that a football club would normally reserve for a club captain or, perhaps, a long-serving manager. But Borussia Dortmund’s chief executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke, instead used it to describe their sporting director when he signed a new contract in 2014. Dortmund have had five different managers since, but Zorc is still there.

It remains almost impossible to imagine a sporting director in the UK being similarly feted. But the role, once derided as a continental idiosyncrasy, is now accepted as a necessity of a modern club. Both Arsenal and Manchester United are in the midst of recruiting new directors, who will be afforded great powers and charged with modernising their clubs’ structures.

Traditionally English football thought of managers as autocrats, with unique powers to bend a club according to their will. The logic was simple. The manager was accountable for the team’s performance, so they should be solely responsible for buying and selling players.

Having a powerful sporting director was “a joke,” Harry Redknapp once said. “I’ve never been in favour of them or wanted to work under one. How can someone else select your players and not be accountable when you have to work with them and if they’re rubbish you get the blame?”

New model

The Redknapp view was the orthodoxy in England until under a decade ago. Now it has been swept away. Clubs are not mocked for having powerful sporting directors, as Tottenham were when Daniel Levy introduced one in 2004. Instead, like Manchester United under Jose Mourinho, they are attacked for not having them. “I think it’s time to put a more modern system in – sporting director,” Gary Neville said. Fifteen of the 20 Premier League clubs currently have sporting directors – or analogous figures with different titles, like director of football or technical director – according to the academic Daniel Parnell.

England is just catching up with the continent. There, sporting directors have long been entrusted to work alongside the manager, and the job has been taken seriously: Italy created a formal qualification for sporting directors as long ago as 1976. Like a general manager in US sports, a sporting director in European football oversees recruitment, player contracts, sports science and hiring and firing the coach. The coach’s job is squarely to focus upon the first team, and manage the players they are given.

Globalisation and changing job requirements killed the old-school English manager. Where once player recruitment was a matter of knowing the British market, today it demands global expertise. There is simply not enough time for any manager to monitor targets throughout the world while playing 60 games a season – especially as the surge in data and video analysis means sides prepare for opponents in forensic depth.

A new model of owner – running clubs unabashedly to make profit – “do not want one man with little or no business experience handling millions of pounds in funds,” a Premier League director told Parnell. Instead, the owners, many of whom have experience of US sports, mimic the US general manager structure, which seems to guard against crippling short-termism.

The average manager in English football now remains in their post for barely a year. “The English-style manager comes in and wants to get rid of half the players and bring in his own,” Daniel Levy once lamented, doubtless thinking of managers like Redknapp, with whom he worked at Tottenham. “So the club writes off millions, selling at a loss and buying all over again.” It is no way to run a modern business.

Confusion remains

English clubs are still grappling with the sporting director. Interviewing 25 figures at Premier League or Championship clubs with the sporting director title, or a close cousin, Parnell found that job descriptions were poorly-defined.

Directors’ powers vary considerably from one club to the next, for instance, in whether they have the final say over recruiting players and the manager. This creates uncertainty and confusion. Clubs sometimes don’t appear to take recruiting for the role seriously; in 2017, Crystal Palace appointed Dougie Freedman, a talismanic former player with no experience as a director. The sporting director needs both business and sporting expertise; too often, clubs neglect the business side.

Sporting directors are rarely on the board at a club, which Parnell recommends to facilitate communication with the chief executive and chairman.

“Clubs need to commit to that so you can do the job,” said one Premier League director interviewed by Parnell. “I don’t understand why anyone would take a director role in title and not insist on being on the board.”

Developing culture and philosophy

The most effective sporting directors operate like a sporting chief executive – as Les Reed did during eight years at Southampton, when he held the title vice chairman – says Omar Chaudhuri from the consultancy 21st Club. This means they supervise all sporting operations – including sports science and the academy, and creating a recruitment strategy but delegating the detail – and liaise between the board and the rest of the club.

As sporting directors last much longer than managers, they can develop a team culture and footballing philosophy – like Reed with the ‘Southampton DNA’ – that outlasts any sole head coach. And with such a structure in place, a new manager should have less need to try and transform the squad anyway.

Clubs with powerful sporting directors tend to be better run, Chaudhuri believes, and therefore perform better. European sides, where the sporting director is the norm, have long outperformed English teams on a points-per-pound-spent basis. Perhaps this is why the Football Association has launched a new pilot course for sporting directors last year.

As the demands on a football manager have snowballed, the role has effectively been broken down into two. The age of the autocratic manager is dead.