Daunté Crawford: How to fix the CEO-Sporting Director power gap

They told me that Sporting Directors needed three things to function effectively: autonomy within defined parameters, genuine trust from the CEO, and an operating environment that reflected what they were hired to do.

What undermined the relationship, they said, was structural ambiguity, unclear authority and a CEO who did not fully understand the role of Sporting Director.

This is why I read with particular interest a recent piece of research from Football Benchmark, which revealed that commercial expertise now surpassed football-specific knowledge as the dominant background of Chief Executives in European football, particularly in England.

Decisions about what a Sporting Director should own, where their authority begins and ends, and what they need in order to function, require domain knowledge. Yet a lot of CEOs arrive in their roles without it.

Polly Bancroft is the CEO of Grimsby Town and one of the few Chief Executives in English football to have come through football operations before taking the job. She was Head of Women’s Football at Manchester United for two years before joining Grimsby in June 2024.

Bancroft’s view is that the CEO’s role is “less about controlling decisions and more about creating the right framework, then consistently supporting it when challenges come.”

Bancroft understands the Sporting Director function from the inside and said it only worked “when there’s clarity around responsibilities, processes, parameters and approval limits from the outset.”

In English football, the CEO tends to hold formal authority, while the Sporting Director has delegated authority. The Head Coach often holds relational authority with the owner. When those three forces pull in different directions, the Sporting Director can be the one to lose ground.

There has been a trend of longer-serving Head Coaches accumulating influence that encroaches on what I believe should be Sporting Director territory. When a CEO lacks confidence in the Sporting Director role or the person in it, they can sometimes default to the Head Coach as the more legible authority.

After all, the Head Coach produces visible outputs – results, press conferences, squad selections, public narrative – and the Sporting Director produces less visible outputs – process, culture, pipeline, structural alignment. When pressure comes, CEOs can sometimes back what they can read.

This is not a Head Coach problem, it is a CEO literacy problem, and the effect is the slow erosion of the Sporting Director’s operating space.

Bancroft told me: “We probably over-communicate at times, but that’s intentional, because when you’re dealing with players, agents and clubs, it’s very easy for mixed messages to creep in.”

The cadence of communication increases around transfer windows, and the emphasis then is on making sure the leadership team is aligned before pressure arrives, rather than scrambling to catch up once it does.

Arsenal formalised the dynamic in September 2020, when Mikel Arteta’s job title changed from Head Coach to Manager. Then Chief Executive Vinai Venkatesham explained: “Right from the day he walked through the door, he was doing much more than being our head coach.”

The restructured model placed Arteta and Technical Director Edu as co-leads across recruitment, scouting, analytics, medical and high performance, disciplines that in a conventional structure sit firmly with the Sporting Director.

The scouting department was overhauled in the same window, with Head of Recruitment Francis Cagigao and several territory-based scouts being made redundant as the club shifted to a more centralised, data-driven approach.

The German model offers a different starting point. At Bayern Munich, Max Eberl sits on the Executive Board as Board Member for Sport, an equal of the CEO rather than a subordinate reporting into them.

There is no delegation problem to manage, because the authority gap does not exist. The structural question of who holds final say over football decisions is answered by the architecture, not by the relationship.

What would it mean for English clubs to move in that direction? There might not be a wholesale import of the German model, but a serious examination of whether a flat dual-executive structure, one that separates commercial and sporting functions at the same level of seniority, is worth considering.

In this care the commercial CEO owns revenue, investor relations, regulatory compliance, and the club’s business operations. The Sporting Director owns football strategy, recruitment philosophy, Head Coach alignment, Academy direction and performance culture. Neither reports to the other; both are accountable to the Board or owner.

Bancroft agreed that the two sides, sporting and commercial, were fundamentally intertwined.

“CEOs need to understand the business of football to run effective clubs, because the two sides are completely co-dependent,” she said. “At Grimsby’s level, whether a club needs a formal Sporting Director depends on the skillset already in the building.

“It’s less about titles and more about making sure there’s clear ownership of football strategy and the right people in place to deliver it.”

The model does not suit every club. It requires an owner who can hold the boundary between two senior functions, genuine peer capability on both sides and a Board structure that can absorb the complexity.

But it addresses the core structural problem that sits beneath most CEO-Sporting Director dysfunction in England: a hierarchy that places commercial authority over sporting decisions in an organisation whose primary product is sporting performance.

The instinct in English football has been to import the Sporting Director title while leaving the surrounding structure largely unchanged. The result is a role with a mandate that can outstrip the authority needed to fulfil it.

The executives from Sweden’s leading professional clubs who crossed over from Sporting Director to CEO were not offering abstract career advice when they told me ‘pick your boss before your club.’ They were describing something they had lived: the CEO as not only line manager, but operating environment.

The CEO defines the conditions within which a Sporting Director either has the authority to do the job they were hired for, or discovers they do not.

Bancroft’s advice to any CEO entering the football environment for the first time reinforces the point.

“Don’t rush it. Surround yourself with trusted people who really understand football, listen carefully, and make decisions over time rather than trying to reshape everything immediately.

“Be clear on responsibilities from the outset, but also recognise that trust has to be visible in practice. If people are given ownership, they need to genuinely feel supported in it, especially when pressure arrives.”

English football has spent several years debating the right profile for a Sporting Director. It has spent far less time asking whether the people hiring and managing them understand the role well enough to make it work.

A dual-executive model, with commercial and sporting functions separated at the highest level of club leadership, is worth serious consideration. Whether clubs are willing to interrogate their own leadership architecture is a different matter.

• COLUMN ONE (Feb 2026): From the ‘unicorn’ Sporting Director to leadership teams
• COLUMN TWO (March 2026): The case for Sporting Director visibility
• COLUMN THREE (April 2026): The structures behind winning teams
• COLUMN FOUR: (May 2026): How to fix the CEO-Sporting Director power gap