Of course it was always going to end this way. In 2001, a British club paid £20m for a footballer for the first time (clue: “Youse are all f**king idiots”). In 2022, a British club paid £20m to recruit a manager and his coaching staff (clue: Chelsea sacked him the next year).
In 2024, rumours of the first £20m sporting director. You can see it now: “Look, they make the best damn cup of tea in the land, so let’s call in £2.5m with bonuses if it wins you a trophy”.
In the case of a sporting director, intrigue is clearly merited. Elite clubs are increasingly obsessed with building from the top down. Many have a network of satellite clubs and vast hordes of academy graduates needing loan moves and this all takes a network of staff who must be overseen.
The limitations of profit and sustainability rules dictate that every transfer (and every transfer failure) matters. There still exists a gap between supply and demand and so those who gain kudos quickly gain a mystical, mythical force.
Dan Ashworth possesses that force. You may not know exactly what he does on a day-to-day basis, but that’s fine. This is a results-oriented position and business – at West Bromwich Albion, the Football Association, Brighton and Newcastle United (albeit only for a short while) – has been good.
If Manchester United want to appoint him now, it’s going to cost them. Let the messy, private-then-public-via-deliberate-media-leaks negotiations begin.
Ashworth is a special case because of where he will end up when this affair is eventually over. For the first time in far too long, United have a hierarchy who seem intent on appointing who they consider to be the best person in the industry for the job. That creates a tremor amongst supporters who can see their club being quickly rebuilt in the image of someone whose priority isn’t extracting wealth.
The sporting director role is viewed as kingmaker here. Get Ashworth and everything else falls into place in the sort-of-post Glazer era, or so the theory goes.
But this saga also reflects a movement within the game, a new transfer market based on those who organise the processes off the pitch rather than play on it. It roughly started with Chelsea picking off Brighton staff piece by piece.
In the last fortnight alone we have heard of United targeting Southampton’s director of football and City Football Group’s chief football operations officer, Chelsea signing Swansea’s head of football operations as their loans manager and Crystal Palace appointing QPR’s head of sports medicine because theirs is leaving for Arsenal soon.
When did this happen? At what point did we learn the names of set-piece coaches, loan managers, chief commercial officers and assistants to the regional sports director? Discovering the ways in which elite football clubs work can be fascinating, but this is clearly a new age of information and detail.
As one excellent parody tweet read, mocking the cardboard signs now held up at every Premier League game: “Ashworth, please can I have your tie?”
Its roots lie in desperation culture, most probably. It is not enough to play witness to results. Instead we must ask the “how” and “why”.
As supporters, particularly online, crave constant progress it inevitably throws the question forward.
Rather than analysing the past, we demand to know what is being done by the club to match our relentless demand for better. Fans are more obsessed with the minutiae than ever before. It becomes validation porn: our club is making moves so we can be sated.
That marries perfectly with the age of information, the rise in amateur data analysis that itself grew as a response to the transfer market obsession.
The growth of Football Manager (and the detail within the game) and the increase in data on non-elite world leagues provoked a cottage industry in home office scouting and recruitment processes that created a demand for knowledge of those processes in the real world.
Here, supply (media) and demand (supporters) play off against each other to form a spiral: more interest means more media coverage, more media coverage means more interest.
To which, inevitably, we must add tribalism. Again, Ashworth is the poster boy. Outside of player transfer windows, the recruitment of staff provides the dopamine hit for those searching to score points online.
Go through the replies to any Ashworth-related news story and you’ll see it instantly: “We’re cooking”; “Massive club > small club”. Who needs actual football matches when you can tell someone to cry more about losing a technical director?
But there’s an internal tribalism here too. A thirst for knowledge based on a fascination with a football club’s machinations is ostensibly harmless. But, increasingly, it is based on a rush of predication, a pretence that you know more than anyone else and somehow have the inside line on your club and are therefore a proper fan.
That started with transfer culture, but essentially boils down to this: nobody says “I don’t know” anymore because accepting a lack of expertise – on anything – is akin to saying “I am a fraud” or I am an insufficiently committed supporter. Fans have become foot soldiers of the regime.
None of this will go away. Football coverage and obsession is less an organic process of change and more a series of Pandora’s boxes. Once you start caring about this stuff – and getting people to care about it – they will want more and more and will drill down further for their validation.
“Announce Man In Suit” – the new transfer market is here and this time there are no windows to stem the flow of news.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/hgtCRwq
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