Daunté Crawford: Most Premier League Sporting Directors can’t sign a transfer. Does it matter?
Written by
Daunté Crawford
October 19, 2026
The Premier League keeps a public register that lists everyone authorised to sign a transfer or player contract on a club’s behalf.
Go through the most recent edition, published in May, and only three senior football executives appear: Brentford’s Phil Giles and Liverpool’s Richard Hughes (who has since left the club), as authorised signatories, and Bournemouth’s Tiago Pinto as a Director.
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.
Fulham’s Director of Football Operations Tony Khan is listed, but as an owner. The Chief Executive or Managing Director is almost always listed in the register, but the Sporting Director is not.
The register, kept under Rule F.37.1, records who may sign a player, which is not the same as who decides. So an executive may be missing but still drive every decision a club takes.
However, this is the Premier League’s only public record of who holds formal authority at a club and in almost every case the person who runs recruitment is not authorised to sign a transfer.
Does it matter? I put this question to Dr Mark Batey, Reader in Creativity and Innovation at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Business School and Director of its Master of Sport Directorship programme. His research spans Sporting Directors and elite sport organisations, and he has advised organisations and governments worldwide.
“There is and must be a chain of command, where ultimately someone will be accountable for making decisions,” Batey told me.
The complication, Batey explained, is that the person named in the register can defer to someone else in their absence, meaning the signature may not show where the decision was actually made.
Germany is different. There, the senior football executive usually holds a legal office. Where the club is run as a company, he or she is one of its Managing Directors; where it is a members’ association or, like Bayern Munich, a stock corporation, he or she sits on its Executive Board.
In either case, the person is named in the official register.
In England, the title of the senior football executive has no legal standing. This means clubs call the role whatever they like – Sporting Director, Director of Football, Chief Football Officer and many more.
In Germany, a club’s legal structure decides the title. In England, nothing does, and the result is a growing list of names for what is often the same job.
Different titles, different roles?
In 2020, Dan Ashworth, then Technical Director at Brighton, told TGG there was “a great deal of confusion” around the role, partly because of the many different titles used by clubs.
When the FA brought those executives together to compare job descriptions, he found them “so different”.
Little has changed. Nineteen of the 20 Premier League clubs now have a senior football executive, with seven different titles. Sporting Director is the most common, yet accounts for only seven of the roles.
At Everton, the function is split across a football leadership team, and Hull City’s post is currently vacant.
Roughly, the titles break down like this:
- Sporting Director/ Director of Football: in practice, one post under two names. This is the senior football executive, responsible for recruitment, squad building, contracts, player development, long-term planning and the relationship with the Head Coach.
- Technical Director: responsible for football methodology, coaching, Academy development and playing philosophy. No Premier League club uses it for its senior post any more, but it survives one rung down: Matt Ritchie was appointed Technical Director at Bournemouth in June 2026, reporting to President of Football Operations Tiago Pinto.
- Chief Football Officer: an executive rather than functional title, which tends to appear when a club wants a football voice in the boardroom.
- Director/ President of Football Operations: at some clubs, responsible for contracts, registration, logistics and compliance. At others, including Aston Villa and Bournemouth, the senior football post.
The same title often means different things at different clubs. Conversely, different titles can describe the same job.
Compared with more established industries such as pharmaceuticals or manufacturing, football resources its senior management in a “far more fluid and idiosyncratic way”, Batey told me.
“In short, there are so many variations because there is so little consistency in how best to structure a football club,” he explained.
At Bayern Munich, Board Member for Sport Max Eberl sits above Sporting Director Christoph Freund. At Borussia Dortmund, Managing Director for Sport Lars Ricken sits above Sporting Director Nils-Ole Book.
The Sporting Director, the German post that English football borrowed the title from, is the senior football post at only two of the 18 Bundesliga clubs.
No European standard
No league has settled on a single title. Even in Ligue 1, the most consistent, only 62% of senior football posts use the most common title, Sporting Director. In La Liga, the figure is 50%, in the Premier League 37%, and in the Bundesliga, where Managing Director for Sport is most common, 35%.
Spain is usually treated as the settled case: one title, one job. In fact, nine of the 18 La Liga clubs with a senior football post use Sporting Director, and there are seven titles in all, from Director of Football at Real Sociedad to CEO of Football at Valencia and Technical Secretary at Elche.
Some of Europe's biggest clubs have chosen not to have a Sporting Director at all.
Daunté Crawford
The consistency is largely a translation habit, because Spanish media tend to describe them all as Sporting Director. One list published in September rated all 20 La Liga ‘Sporting Directors’ – even an executive at one club that had publicly refused to create the post.
France is more consistent, but emptier than it looks. Sporting Director is used by eight of the 13 Ligue 1 clubs with a settled structure, yet four clubs have no such post at all, and five changed or lost their senior football executive between February and May 2026.
Some of Europe’s biggest clubs have chosen not to have a Sporting Director at all. In April, Real Madrid issued a statement denying reports it was considering appointing a Sporting Director and defended its structure by pointing to its European Cup record.
Valencia abolished the post in November 2025 and installed Ron Gourlay as CEO of Football. Paris Saint-Germain have had no club-level Sporting Director since 2022, with Luis Campos’s role as Group Sporting Advisor covering QSI’s sporting strategy rather than one club.
We have also seen the same people, doing pretty much the same job, having different titles at different clubs.
Roberto Olabe was Real Sociedad’s Director of Football and is now Aston Villa’s President of Football Operations. Ross Wilson was Nottingham Forest’s Chief Football Officer and is now Newcastle’s Sporting Director. Marco Neppe went from Technical Director at Bayern to Sporting Director at Paris FC.
Who decides?
Does this proliferation of titles matter?
Ashworth was not arguing that every club should use the same title when he spoke to TGG in 2020. What he wanted was for every club to be clear about what the title represented.
"It seems as if many clubs are making up management roles and reporting lines as they go along" - Dr Mark Batey
That means six things: title, remit, authority, accountability, reporting line and relationship with the Head Coach.
The title is the easiest thing to change, yet the least informative. Remit sometimes appears in an appointment announcement. Authority and accountability – the elements that actually separate one Sporting Director from another – are rarely public.
“It seems as if many clubs are making up management roles and reporting lines as they go along,” Batey said. “A simple scanning of job titles is unlikely to give much of a clue as to how the decision-making at the apex of a club is actually made.”
He stops short of wanting the role fixed in the rules, though.
“I fear that mandating that clubs must have a Sporting Director – and that they must make the final call in signing a contract – will enforce a rigid structure that may not mirror the realities of the management team the club needs.”
Clubs don’t all need to organise the job the same way, but each should be clear about what its own Sporting Director can decide. For the most part, they are not.
That may be starting to change though. The Independent Football Regulator was created by the Football Governance Act to oversee the financial sustainability of clubs in the top five tiers of the men’s game and has had powers over club owners and senior executives since December 2025.
Since May 5th 2026, clubs have needed IFR approval before appointing anyone to a senior management function. One of those functions, ‘Other Key Decision Maker’, covers people with executive authority over matters that could affect a club’s financial soundness, whether they sit on the board or not.
The IFR told TGG this can include Sporting Directors, citing “decision-making authority over transfers or player contracts”. The test is not the title, it is what the person can decide.
Batey expects the impact to be modest. Sporting Directors, he points out, normally have long track records in football operations and are rarely the appointments a fit and proper test is designed to catch.
The likelier effect is delay, which “could have knock on effects if a Sporting Director needs to be replaced with little time remaining in the transfer window”.
On October 1st, Matt Hancock, Chief Executive of League Two club Port Vale, told supporters the club’s Sporting Director appointment “will be subject to the Independent Football Regulator’s approval”.
Four days later, Vale appointed Micky Moore to the role – the first Sporting Director appointment a club has publicly put through the regulator. TGG understands Moore is not joining the club’s board.
Anyone in post before May 5th does not need approval, so most current Sporting Directors will never be assessed at their current club. And the IFR’s published register of its decisions lists each approved person only as an “Officer” at their club, without saying which function they hold or why.
But for new appointments, English football now has a body that asks the question the Premier League register cannot: not who signs, but who decides.
- This is the seventh of Daunté’s monthly columns on the challenges facing Sporting Directors. The previous six, on leadership teams, visibility, club structure, the CEO relationship, strategy and hiring, are available to TGG Members, who have also been sent all seven as a single PDF.
- Find out more about membership
Follow Us
For latest updates, follow us on X at @ground_guru
