Daunté Crawford: From the unicorn Sporting Director to leadership teams
Written by
Daunté Crawford
January 29, 2026
The average tenure of a Premier League Sporting Director is now 20 months, which may signal that something structural rather than individual is happening.
Is the all-encompassing Sporting Director, who oversees recruitment, performance, Academy, women’s, player trading, pathways and executive alignment reaching his or her operational limits?
For the last decade or more, football clubs have pursued the model of a ‘unicorn’ Sporting Director who is capable of managing vast operational breadth. This model may have become structurally fragile though.
As football operations have expanded in scale and complexity, cognitive load has increased significantly for this individual. Remit creep has also accelerated and the breadth of expertise required has perhaps become unrealistic.
Decision bottlenecks, blurred accountability and instability following leadership change are sometimes the result. The growing churn of Sporting Directors would certainly seem to be evidence of this.
Some clubs have realised the issue and into the breach have come leadership teams in which a number of executives share the functions of the ‘unicorn’ Sporting Director. This raises a new question: is distributing authority across multiple specialists a solution, or does it create new problems?
That’s what I intend to explore in this article.
Daunté Crawford is Domestic Football Club Development Manager for the Football Association of Wales. He also runs Sentinel Sports Group, which delivers strategic advisory and operational support to clubs, leagues & investors. In his monthly TGG column he will be exploring some of the challenges and issues facing Sporting Directors.
What does ‘distributed leadership’ look like?
Football leadership teams, as I understand them, represent a shift from personality-led governance toward system-led design. Rather than authority being concentrated, it is now distributed.
Responsibility is allocated across senior specialists with defined remits, operating within agreed principles and governance boundaries. The defining characteristic appears to be functional clarity: each role owns a domain and alignment is achieved through structure rather than hierarchy.
The system is designed, theoretically, to absorb personnel change without resetting strategic direction. This approach is now visible across several Premier League clubs. Let’s look at four examples:
Wolves
- Matt Jackson (Technical Director): Joined in 2021 as English football’s first Strategic Player Marketing Manager and progressed into senior football leadership. Oversees recruitment strategy, player development, and alignment across Academy and Wolves Women, linking pathway planning with long-term player value.
- Phil Hayward (Director of Performance): Leads an integrated performance ecosystem across sports science, psychology, medical services, and player wellbeing. After a previous spell at Wolves and a senior role at LA Galaxy, Hayward returned to the club in 2023 and owns performance delivery across the club.
- Matt Wild (Director of Football Operations and Administration): With more than eight years at the club, Wild owns football operations, governance, regulatory compliance and financial efficiency, providing organisational stability and operational discipline.
- Max Fitzgerald (PR and Communications Director): Operates a realigned remit covering media relations, internal communications and cross-club alignment, ensuring consistency between football operations, culture and external messaging.
Everton
- Nick Cox (Technical Director): Owns the football environment across first team and Academy, including performance support, medical services, player care, facilities and operations. Sets standards and ensures integration across departments and pathways.
- James Smith (Director of Scouting and Recruitment): Leads recruitment strategy and player identification, aligning profiling and scouting processes with the club’s football identity and long-term squad planning.
- Chris Howarth (Head of Football Strategy and Analytics): Owns analytics and strategic insight, integrating data across recruitment, performance analysis, and squad planning to support decision-making.
- Nick Hammond (Head of Player Trading): Responsible for transfer negotiations, contract strategy, and asset protection, ensuring value optimisation and disciplined market execution.
Chelsea
- Paul Winstanley & Laurence Stewart (Sporting Directors): Collectively oversee first-team squad strategy and recruitment alignment, operating as a leadership partnership rather than single authority. This is designed to provide balance and continuity.
- Joe Shields & Sam Jewell (Directors of Recruitment and Talent): In charge of recruitment strategy, talent identification, player profiling, and market intelligence. Oversee integration between academy, loans, and first-team recruitment pipelines.
- Dave Fallows: Joined in November 2025 from Liverpool, where he was Director of Scouting and Recruitment, and focuses on scouting and data, loans and player pathways, as well as “overall football staff development and evolution”.
Tottenham
- Johan Lange (Sporting Director): Joined in November 2023 with responsibility for recruitment, analytics and talent identification across senior and Academy teams. Has briefly shared the role with Fabio Paratici, but the Italian will shortly return to his homeland to work for Fiorentina.
- Andy Scoulding (Head of Loans & Pathways): Was Head of Scouting at Rangers before his appointment by Spurs in June 2022. Background in analysis, including time as England Men’s Performance Analysis Manager from 2012 to 2016.
- Carlos Raphael Moersen (Director of Football Operations): Joined recently after more than a decade with the City Football Group. At Spurs, he is in charge of football administration, player care and training ground operations and joins the club’s Executive Leadership Team.
What makes leadership teams function?
Structure alone may be insufficient for this. In order for football leadership teams to work effectively, they require explicit integration mechanisms to prevent fragmentation and to ensure collective decision-making. Based on the examples above, the following patterns appear:
- Decision-rights matrix: Formal documentation of who owns each decision category, who must be consulted and who has escalation authority. Without this, role overlap may create friction or even paralysis.
- Cadence of alignment forums: Regular leadership meetings with defined agendas – weekly on operational alignment, monthly on strategic review, quarterly on planning cycles. Ad-hoc communication is no substitute for structured co-ordination.
- Escalation protocols: Clear pathways for resolving disagreements between functional leads. Typical route is to CEO or Chief Football Officer for final adjudication.
- Shared operating principles: Documented agreements on recruitment philosophy, player profiling criteria, financial parameters and risk appetite. These can create alignment without requiring constant negotiation.
- CEO as integration point. The Chief Executive may need to actively shield football operations from short-term pressure and limit ownership involvement to strategic and capital decisions. They should also serve as the integration between football leadership and the Board.
Where this model might fail
Football leadership teams are not immune to failure. The following patterns can indicate structural dysfunction:
- Role overlap without clarity: When multiple executives believe they own the same decision then friction accumulates. This typically manifests as delayed decisions, contradictory messaging or parallel processes.
- Diffusion of accountability: Distributed authority can create gaps where no individual feels ownership. Poor outcomes may be attributed to ‘the process’ rather than specific decision-makers.
- Consensus paralysis: Teams that require unanimous agreement may struggle to act decisively. Effective models likely define when consensus is required versus when a functional lead has autonomy.
- Integration theatre: Meetings without outcomes, governance documents without enforcement, alignment forums that become status updates rather than decision-making bodies.
How might clubs transition?
For clubs considering switching to the leadership team approach, a phased transition could be worth exploring:
- Phase One – Separation of trading from recruitment: This is potentially the highest-impact separation. Player identification requires a different skill-set and incentives than contract negotiation. Separating the two can reduce cognitive load on the existing Sporting Director and create immediate clarity.
- Phase Two – Establish performance independence: Create a Director of Performance role that owns medical, performance and player welfare. This domain may be sufficiently technical to warrant dedicated leadership.
- Phase Three – Formalise integration mechanisms: Before adding further roles, document decision rights and establish alignment cadences. Structure without integration may create silos.
- Phase Four – Expand based on capacity gaps: Add further functional leads (analytics, operations, communications) as genuine capability gaps emerge, not as hierarchy expansion for the sake of it.
During transition, it could be worth maintaining the existing Sporting Director as an integration point until new decision-rights are embedded. This can avoid creating a leadership vacuum before the system is functional and is interim risk mitigation.
Does this scale beyond the elite?
Football leadership teams may be inherently scalable. At lower levels of the football pyramid, roles can be combined or externally supported. At elite level, leaders should oversee fully resourced departments, while the architecture should remain constant.
This could make leadership teams a more sustainable long-term solution than repeated attempts to appoint an all-encompassing Sporting Director.
A theory worth testing
Football leadership is evolving, as we can see with the examples of Wolves, Everton, Chelsea, and Tottenham. Whether this represents genuine structural improvement or simply rebranding remains an open question.
We will also have to wait to see whether these models can achieve long-term success on and off the pitch. My hypothesis is that the decline of the ‘unicorn’ Sporting Director reflects structural limitations rather than individual failures.
Modern football may no longer reward concentration of authority and instead reward clarity, separation and collective leadership.
The clubs that endure might be those that are designed to absorb change without resetting their identity, processes or decision logic. Football leadership teams could provide that architecture, replacing dependency with resilience, personality with process, and reaction with continuity.
This is a theory that requires testing against real-world outcomes. The competitive edge may now lie less in who leads, but more in how leadership is structured, protected and aligned over time.
- Daunté Crawford is Domestic Football Club Development Manager for the Football Association of Wales. He also runs Sentinel Sports Group, which delivers strategic advisory and operational support to clubs, leagues & investors. In his monthly TGG column he will be exploring some of the challenges and issues facing Sporting Directors.
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