Man United's failure to appoint a technical director should be a major scandal
A new Ed Woodward profile infuriates and informs
As ever, before we start, a reminder that October is a free preview month before paid posts go up on November 1st. Read and enjoy, or if you want to:
Technical Director — the most difficult role to fill in football?
I’ve watched football most of my adult life, I’ve written about it professionally on and off for the past decade and change, I’ve even worked with companies and clubs at the very top of the European football pyramid at various stages—but I will tell you right now, I am completely unqualified to be a Director of Football.
I’m willing to bet about $10,000 that neither are you.
The reasons, if you think them through properly, become obvious.
To be an effective DoF or technical director, you need:
to have a deep understanding of the inner workings of a football club, from recruitment to training to the commercial side;
an existing relationship with player agents and/or experience in negotiating with them;
be able to answer to both the club board and chief executives while also maintaining an effective rapport with the manager and training staff;
be an effective negotiator, particularly in sensitive issues related to contracts and transfer fees;
have a good working knowledge of the benefits and drawbacks of football analytics, and be able to facilitate good communication between analysts and the rest of the football staff;
streamline or put into place an effective club workflow, integrating the academy, recruitment, on-pitch approach, management, training, and the commercial side;
have a strong, consistent, and realistic football philosophy that will serve your team for the mid- to long-term and help make decision-making coherent.
As you can see, it’s already an extraordinarily difficult job! That’s even before we get into how utterly thankless it is. How often have you heard Txiki Begiristain’s name chanted at the Etihad, or read op-eds praising Michael Edwards’ as the architect of Liverpool’s success since he was appointed sporting director in 2016 (actually, there are maybe one or two of those)?
This is all to say, finding a good DoF/technical director is very difficult, and yet it is critical for any big European club. And it should be an absolute scandal that a club with the global following and commercial revenues of Manchester United have yet to appoint one.
Beware the BWE: Bankers with Egos
Readers of this newsletter should know my view on Directors of Football and why they’re so important. The gist is that they provide a club a consistent approach, one that unites every aspect of a club’s football side of operations, and can survive the departure or sacking of any one player, and indeed, any one manager.
The DoF role was not always necessary to win in football—Man United’s long-running success under Sir Alex Ferguson is perhaps the best example. But, ironically, that same success also helped make European football a commercial juggernaut, and that shift has complicated, somewhat, the business of how clubs build winning teams in 2019.
The idea that you can still get away with tasking one person—a person who is the face of the club and whose tenure tends to last on average for two seasons—for preparing a team to play Sunderland this coming Saturday while also overseeing the academy system and the entire recruitment strategy is no longer just unrealistic—it’s irresponsible.
Equally irresponsible is leaving the DoF role to someone whose expertise lies entirely on the business side of the sport. And that is precisely what Man United are doing as vice-chairman Ed Woodward continues to, perhaps deliberately, drag his heels on hiring a DoF, while ceding a lot of the responsibility of the role to head of corporate development Matt Judge, another person whose experience lies mostly in the exciting world of, well, corporate finance.
We were treated to an intriguing inside perspective on Woodward’s lack of drive in filling the DoF role, though one typically threaded with off-the-record quotes, from the Athletic this past week.
Though there is a lot in the piece to digest, this quote, from ‘an intermediary,’ gets at the heart of the problem:
On this theme there is a suspicion among some agents that Woodward, for all his supposed intentions to appoint a “head of football”, enjoys the glamour of the game too much to ever truly relinquish involvement in transfers.
“When it comes to knowing football, knowing players and getting deals done, it isn’t his game,” says one respected intermediary. “It’s a power thing in my opinion. Woodward — or Judge (head of corporate finance Matt Judge, the club’s chief negotiator) — could do a deal with Chevrolet, for example, and it comes and goes without anybody really saying much about it. But when you land a big player you get the plaudits, that’s what they’re chasing. They’ve made mistakes and yet they’re still in charge.”
The crux of the article is that while Ed is a nice guy who is bright and very good at making money, he’s a bit shit on the football side. He’s learning on the job, which, for a club like Man United, should be completely unacceptable.
Most of the hall-of-fame DoFs have some fairly formative football experience. Begiristain was a former player, as is Michael Zorc at Dortmund. Lille’s Luis Campos played youth football and took physical education in Porto. Edwards was a performance analyst (*fist pumps all around*).
They were not glamour appointments (like the kind being floated at United), but solid functionaries who showed acumen and skill at their respective roles.
There is any number of candidates like these who would make good fits at United (don’t ask me to name names). It should be an absolute scandal that United isn’t procuring them because Woodward and maybe Judge want some of the credit for bagging big stars (which is only one function of the proper DoF role anyway).
In the old days, it used to be the old school English managers who resisted appointing proper DoFs. Now it’s the Bankers with Egos. Both need to stay in their lane. As long as United tolerates this state of affairs, no amount of managerial merry-go-round is going to fix the problem.