Daunte Crawford: How do clubs hire Sporting Directors?

Who gets the job?

The profile of Sporting Director that emerges from the Football Benchmark data is narrower than you may expect.

Two thirds across the Big Five leagues had played professionally. In France’s Ligue 1, this accounted for 14 of the 18 Sporting Directors. In the case of both Ligue 1 and Germany’s Bundesliga, six of the Sporting Directors had actually played for the clubs they now served. 

The logic was obvious: credibility, an understanding of the player environment and of the networks across the game, though Football Benchmark did note the risk of ‘sentimental appointments’ bringing cultural alignment without necessarily meeting the management demands of the modern game.

The Premier League was the outlier on almost every measure. Fewer than half of its Sporting Directors had a professional playing background, which Football Benchmark attributed partly to England being a late adopter of the role, with the Head Coach traditionally holding primary responsibility for football matters. 

Where other leagues had tended to hire for sporting credentials, the Premier League had tended to hire for operational or strategic expertise. The Premier League is also the least domestic market in Europe in terms of Sporting Directors. 

There were only seven English Sporting Directors in the English top flight and Chelsea employed two, in Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley. Serie A, by contrast, had 18 Italian Sporting Directors.

Across the Big Five European leagues, 23% of the 88 Sporting Directors were Italian, 19% were Spanish, 17% were German, 15% were French and 8% were English. The average age was 48.6, with the lowest being 45.4 in Spain’s La Liga and the oldest 51.8 in Italy’s Serie A.

Four things stood out for me in the Premier League:

1. Diversity of titles. Sporting Director is the most common, held at nine clubs. Four use Director of Football, two use Director of Football Operations, two use President of Football Operations and one (Nottingham Forest) uses Chief Football Officer. At European level too, titles varied, responsibilities differed and the location of decision-making authority was not always consistent. This can make it difficult to benchmark performance in the role.
2. Leadership teams: Chelsea and Everton have decided one person cannot credibly hold recruitment, coaching, analytics, contracts and long-term planning on their own. Everton distribute the remit across four people covering technical direction, player trading, strategy, and scouting and recruitment. Chelsea employ two under a shared Sporting Director title. 
3. Internal promotion: Six of the 18 clubs promoted internally for Sporting Director, which sits broadly in line with the 30% Football Benchmark recorded across the Big Five leagues.
4. Routes into the role: Recruitment is the most common route into the job, ahead of Academy and operations. Only three clubs are led by someone who arrived primarily through a playing career (set against two thirds across the Big Five). Analytics now appears a route in its own right, which would not have been true a decade ago.

Internal or external?

La Liga promotes internally at a significant rate, especially at clubs with a strong focus on youth development. Spain’s top flight also had the longest average tenure of Sporting Directors in Europe, at 3.7 years.

The Premier League shows the clearest preference for buying the finished article, with Hugo Viana moving from Sporting CP to Manchester City and Andrea Berta from Atlético Madrid to Arsenal this year, for example. 

It also has the shortest average tenure in Europe at 1.8 years. Ligue 1 also leans externally, though Football Benchmark attributes this to leaner front offices and decision-making concentrated at ownership level, which leaves internal candidates fewer routes to develop.

There are signs that the English pipeline is building though. I spoke to Darren Simmons, the founder London-based executive search firm Executives in Sport Group (EISG), to find out more about this.

Darren arrived in search in 2012 after a scouting role at his hometown club Swindon Town. Now he runs Director and Board-level appointments across football and wider sport. He points to the Assistant Sporting Director role as a pathway into the top job, citing Mike Cave at Brighton as a prime example.

EISG helped place Cave as Assistant Technical Director supporting David Weir in November 2022. Cave was then promoted to Technical Director when Weir left in September 2025 became Sporting Director, in charge of all sporting areas of the club in June 2026.

“That is exactly the in-house development route English football has historically lacked – and it’s starting to work,” Simmons told me.

Cave stepped up after Jason Ayto, who had been appointed from Arsenal as Brighton’s first Sporting Director in September 2025, left after nine months and before his first summer window. The internal route worked because an external appointment had not lasted.

How a search starts

Simmons says structured searches are now the norm in the Premier League and upper half of the Championship, driven by institutional and multi-club ownership. Below that, network appointments are more common, sometimes without a written job specification.

Simmons stops short of calling this wrong, because at lower levels, speed matters. Cultural fit matters enormously too, while the fee and timeline of a full search do not always make sense. 

Networks can also carry real information. In a small industry, the judgement of someone who has watched a candidate work at close quarters can be valuable. There are risks, however. 

“The main risk is that it concentrates the decision in one person’s address book,” Simmons explains. “Network appointments favour the visible profile: the former player or the person who’s already held the title somewhere else. A structured search is often the only way an Academy Manager or Head of Recruitment gets seen.”

However, it’s worth adding that EISG recently ran a search for a club well down the pyramid that was as detailed as anything the firm has done at Premier League level, because that was what the ownership wanted.

Writing the specification

So why do appointments fail?

“Definition, most of the time,” Simmons explains. “Namely, they hired a capable person into a role nobody internally had actually agreed on. Genuine misjudgement of the individual is the rarest cause. 

“It’s the one that tends to get blamed publicly though, because it’s the only one with a name attached. The person gets sacked; the process almost never does.”

The sequence tends to be this: the ownership sets the ambition, the Chief Executive and HR Lead draft the job description, the incoming Sporting Director discovers where the boundaries sit around month three, when there is the first contested decision (usually a signing the owner wanted and the Sporting Director did not).

EISG’s response is a weighting exercise it calls SearchHQ, which puts every domain a Sporting Director could conceivably own in front of the client and forces the priorities to compete. 

When asked to prioritise these domains, Simmons says owners or CEOs normally answer “all of them.” The exercise is often the first time they discover they have been describing two different jobs. 

Simon Hallett is the Chairman and majority owner of Plymouth Argyle. He took over the club after three decades with the American asset manager Harding Loevner, where he had risen to become Chief Investment Officer, and appointed his first Director of Football in 2019. 

“Roles such as Sporting Director and Director of Football were only starting to be used in the EFL and the positions were quite rare outside the Championship,” Hallett tells me. “I don’t think it was clear at the time what was implied by either title, so we emphasised what the holder of the position was accountable for.”

Neil Dewsnip arrived in 2019 as a Technical Consultant and was made Director of Football that December, largely at the request of then-Head Coach Ryan Lowe. A mentoring remit and ownership of the Academy was attached.

Dewsnip had previously had 17 years as a coach at Everton’s Academy, working with a young Wayne Rooney, and then five with England’s Under-17s, U18s and U20s.

This type of approach, of building a ‘success profile’ before a search begins, articulating the skills and attributes a role requires from a strategy rather than market supply perspective, is commonplace outside football and made sense in this scenario.

Assessing candidates

There’s a lot of research about how different selection methods forecast how well someone will perform in a job.

Schmidt and Hunter (1998), the most cited work in the field, put the ‘predictive validity’ of structured interviews at about 0.51 against 0.38 for unstructured ones. 

Decision rights and terms

Remit is what you are accountable for. Decision rights are what you decide alone, what you recommend and what you are merely consulted on. 

In Simmons’ experience, job specifications cover the former in detail, yet tend to be silent on the latter. However, the EISG Chief says the strongest candidates interrogate the club at least as hard as the club interrogates them, raising decision rights and contract protection before salary. 

The context of the vacancy tends to shape the brief.

“The profile needed changes significantly depending on whether a club is replacing someone leaving on a high or a low,” Simmons explains. “If they leave on a high, the club normally wants to match up a similar profile and have continuity.

“If they leave on a low, they often deliberately go for an opposing profile to try to affect change.”

His caution: clubs that get burned often draw the wrong lesson, blaming personality for a failure that actually had nothing to do with it. This means they’re hiring for the last mistake, rather than for the current vacancy.

Why the tenure number matters

As we noted at the start, average Sporting Director tenure across the Big Five leagues is 2.6 years and 1.8 in the Premier League.

“You cannot build an Academy pathway or a trading model in 1.8 years,” Simmons says. “The mandate gets written on a five-year view and funded on an 18-month one. That gap between the horizon of the mandate and the horizon of the patience is where most of the disappointment lives.”

Football Benchmark noted that short tenures created misalignment between ownership and Sporting Director, and that youth development was the area  most often exposed, because it depended on sustained commitment to building a pipeline. 

Football is not uniquely bad at this. Russell Reynolds’ 2025 survey of 770 Board Directors found that only 8% of organisations planned CEO succession five years out, with half working to a one to three-year horizon. 

The gap between stated best practice and actual Board behaviour is a general executive problem. Football has less room to hide it, because results arrive weekly.

What good looks like

This is what good Sporting Director hiring practice could actually look like:

• Define accountability before you choose a title: The Premier League currently runs five different titles for what is broadly one function. The shape of the role should be club specific, but the mandate ought to be agreed before the title is settled.
• Get the job specification right: As Simmons says, misjudging the individual is the rarest cause of a failed appointment – hiring them into a role that hasn’t been agreed on is.
• Separate remit from decision rights, in writing: Remit is what the Sporting Director is accountable for. Decision rights are what they decide alone, what they recommend, and what they are merely consulted on. 
• Structure the interview and score it: According to selection research, this is the strongest single lever available and costs nothing beyond preparation. 
• Discount the signals that predict least: Experience alone predicts performance at around 0.18, and references sit lower still. Judge what someone achieved against the conditions they had to work with.
• Give the job as long as it’s designed to take: A five-year plan funded on eighteen months will struggle whoever holds the role.
• Agree how you will evaluate before you search: Milestones at 12, 24 and 36 months protect the club, which then knows what it is buying, and also the individual.

Simmons calls the last step the cheapest intervention available, yet also one of the rarest.

“If a club cannot tell me what good looks like at 12, 24 and 36 months, what they’re running isn’t a search, it’s a hope,” he says.

Hallett’s version comes from 30 years of judging investment decisions, and it is the sentence I would pin above the boardroom door:  “When judging anyone in activities where outcomes are a function of both luck and skill, it’s important to judge decisions by the quality of the process used, not by outcomes.”

He adds: “In football, that usually means looking at underlying performance on the pitch, not at results. It’s true that you can’t win matches with xG, only with Gs, but Gs are a poor guide as to how you played.”

Good outcomes can conceal poor process. A club that audits its appointments only when results turn has learned little about how it makes decisions.

Get the process right and the good hires stop being luck.