Daunté Crawford: Building a real strategy function

The weekly clock

Football runs on a seven-day loop: match, recovery, analysis, preparation, match. This calendar doesn’t pause for reflection. A Sporting Director’s week is consumed by what can’t wait, meaning strategy – the work that pays off in 18 months or three years rather than in a week’s time – is often the first thing to slide when the operational tide comes.

After all, nobody notices the absence of a plan in the same way they would notice an unfilled left-back slot in the first-team squad.

Matt Crocker, whose career has taken him from the Football Association and Southampton to US Soccer and now the Saudi Arabian Football Federation, described this trap on the Training Ground Guru podcast.

“I found the dealings with the emotions of the wins – or more so the losses – at Southampton very difficult,” Crocker explained. “At a Federation, you work on World Cup cycles of four years.

“So to be able to sit with (women’s national Head Coach) Emma Hayes and talk about a four-year cycle and all the amazing things that happen in that cycle, and building a strategy towards that, is how I believe I work best.

“At club level you might have had a great week, whether it be to do with the Academy or running your key project, and then you have a bad result on the Saturday, which means Saturday night you’re on the phone, you’re in Sunday morning, you look at the fixtures and realise you’ve got Man United away on the Tuesday night. There’s just no end to it.”

In short, football offers no buffer between results and emotion, meaning strategy can get crowded out.

McKinsey’s value frontier study of more than 100 European clubs put numbers to the problem. Building value through recruitment and development requires a planning horizon of at least three years, yet the pressure to win the next match routinely drives decisions that ignore it.

Strategy rarely fails because people disagree with it – it fails because nobody has the protected time to own it.

That pressure doesn’t come only from the fixture list. Sometimes it can come from the top, from an owner who wants results as quickly as possible, with little patience for the slow work that strategy depends on.

The structure can be right, yet still overruled by the person signing the cheques.

Where the new roles are coming from

Front offices across the NFL, NBA and MLB in the United States have carried Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy roles for years.

This is a layer with a remit for the long term, sitting alongside people who run day-to-day operations. Football is now building the same dedicated function and the people filling it are coming from two distinct routes:

• Technical: a former coach or Academy figure fluent in football and credible in the building, given the remit to think rather than react.
• Executives from management consultancy and commercial strategy, arriving with frameworks and financial discipline rather than a playing or coaching background.

Ross at Newcastle is the technical route in clear form. A former player and manager — St Mirren, Sunderland, Hibernian, Dundee United — he joined the Magpies as Head of Coach Development in 2023, moved through a technical-partnerships brief, and became Head of Football Strategy in 2025.

Looking at the second route, the “Big Four” accountancy and consulting giants (Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG) and the major strategy firms (McKinsey, BCG and Bain) all run sports practices. However, the more interesting movement is arguably among the smaller specialist firms.

These are a growing group of niche consultancies that sell clubs the same expertise as a sharp, time-limited project rather than a permanent hire.

This is squad due diligence, scenario planning and modelling that clubs can buy in when they cannot justify the headcount. The executives who come through this world arrive fluent in frameworks and structured problem solving — disciplines the strategic function needs yet few in football are formally trained in.

At the same time, clubs are increasingly recruiting directly from this talent pool, bringing in individuals with consultancy backgrounds.

Chiang, mentioned above, is the clearest current example. He joined Manchester United in 2017 as a Strategy Executive, having spent five years at the accountancy firm KPMG, and recently left Old Trafford after eight years for a newly-created role at Everton, Head of Football Planning, owning longer-term planning, projects and strategy.

He arrives with no coaching or playing background, and into a club built to receive him. Everton run a leadership team rather than a single Sporting Director, so Chiang reports into that structure rather than carrying the long view alone.

What the role actually involves is less glamorous than the title suggests. It is mapping where the club wants to be in three to five years and working backwards to the decisions that get it there. Squad age profile plotted against the curve, so the spine peaks together rather than ageing together. Contract expirations sequenced so leverage is never surrendered all at once. The cost of the current trajectory set against the cost of changing it.

And the part clubs most often miss: mapping the squad profiles of rivals and the tier above, reading where a competitor is about to rebuild or let a core age out, so the club can time a more ambitious window to leapfrog them rather than spending into the market at random. None of it produces a result on Saturday, which is exactly why it needs someone whose week is not hostage to Saturday.

Both routes carry a risk. The technical hire can lack the structured rigour the role demands. The consultant has to earn football credibility before anyone acts on the analysis. And the pattern I see most often — someone in a commercial or analytics seat quietly accreting football responsibility until they hold a remit nobody formally granted — is the most fragile of all. The moment results dip, the undefined role is the first one questioned.

Why Federations find this easier

Federations operate on a different clock to clubs, which changes everything about strategy ownership. A national association does not live week to week; it plans in tournament cycles. That rhythm gives strategy the protected time a club never has.

Crocker explained how a genuine strategy creates “more trust in the process when you hit a bump in the road”, and used the example of the US Soccer Federation holding its nerve about men’s Head Coach Mauricio Pochettino prior to last summer’s Gold Cup. The team had endured a dismal March international window and Pochettino was coming under external pressure.

“Data and information supports your decision-making, so if you do come to a situation where you hit a bump in the road, you can refer back to the manual to say, ‘Hey, let’s remember why we appointed this person, let’s remember the strategy, let’s remember the direction,'” Crocker said.

The English Football Association’s Time for Change plan ran from 2020 to 2024 with an explicit objective: a senior England team winning a major tournament. The Lionesses delivered it at Euro 2022, and that result did what strategy on paper often cannot: it created buy in.

Participation climbed, investment followed and the next cycle launched from proven credibility rather than hope. The FA’s 2024-2028 strategy, Inspiring Positive Change Through Football, is that next cycle, doubling down on a four-year horizon with targets built into the institution, from 12,000 high quality pitches to a clear set of stated priorities, rather than waiting on the next result to set the direction.

The same logic shows up in the FA of Ireland’s published targets and in FIFA’s four-year Forward funding cycles. The horizon is built into the institution rather than borrowed against the next result.

It is not frictionless – and I am honest about that, because I work in this world. Federations are coalitions of camps. Clubs release players reluctantly, regional bodies guard their patch and factions can stall a plan as effectively as any crisis.

But the cycle still gives strategy what a club rarely grants: a deadline everyone recognises and a moment at which results can convert the sceptics. For a club, the next match is the only cycle that truly counts, which is why the strategic function often gets squeezed.

A function, not an afterthought

In my first column for TGG I argued the case for distributed leadership teams over the single unicorn Sporting Director, on the grounds that no one person can credibly hold recruitment, coaching, analytics, contracts and long-term planning functions at once.

Strategy is where that argument bites hardest, because this is the function that’s most easily crowded out when one person carries everything. A club that’s serious about strategy should treat it as a distinct node within a distributed leadership model, not a brief bolted onto a Sporting Director’s remit.

Everton point in this direction. When they moved away from the single Sporting Director model toward a leadership team, they gave football strategy and analytics its own lead (led by Howarth).

This structure announces that strategy is something the club owns, rather than it being a task somebody might find an afternoon for.

Building it at your level

What this looks like in practice depends on where a club sits in the pyramid. The principle holds at every level; the resourcing does not.

Less resourced clubs, across the National League and lower divisions, have no business case for dedicated strategy headcount, and pretending otherwise wastes money the club does not have.

In this case, strategy will be a discipline rather than a department. It will sit with the Sporting Director (if there is one), or else the Chief Executive, and will be protected by process rather than people.

This might be a fixed annual planning rhythm and a standing review of the three-year direction that cannot be cancelled. When a question exceeds internal capacity, a time-bound engagement with a boutique specialist, offering a squad audit or scenario plan, could be the answer.

The output is a living document that the Board revisits, rather than a deck after the AGM.