Daunté Crawford: The case for Sporting Director visibility

The empowerment question

Supporter demand for transparency about recruitment has never been higher. Social media amplifies every transfer, every missed target, every perceived failure. Fans want to understand the logic behind decisions that shape their club’s future.

Yet in most English football clubs, the only voice explaining football strategy is that of the Head Coach, who usually doesn’t oversee football strategy and who may be gone within 18 months. This creates an accountability vacuum.

If clubs want supporters to understand what a Sporting Director does – and to accept a model that separates recruitment from coaching – then Sporting Directors need to be empowered to speak.

This empowerment must come from the top. Boards and ownership groups must decide that transparency serves the club’s interests and then create the conditions for it. A Sporting Director can only speak publicly if the Board, Chairman and ownership permit it.

The German benchmark

In Germany, Sporting Director is regarded as a public-facing role. When Eintracht Frankfurt sacked Dino Toppmöller in January 2026, Sporting Director Markus Krösche fronted the press conference to announce the news and respond to questions. This is standard practice across the Bundesliga.

Simon Rolfes, the Sporting Director at Bayer Leverkusen, has articulated the difference in approach between the UK and Germany.

“In the UK, the manager is everything and Sporting Directors are more behind the scenes,” he said. “The expectation in Germany is different. You are also the first spokesman for the clubs, the strategy and all things.

“I think that is important in building the brand of the club as well, so that people get to know the vision, the strategy of the club and the culture.”

Johan Lange, Tottenham’s Sporting Director, made a similar observation this month. “The role of the Sporting Director on the Continent is a little bit different than it is here,” he said.

“But, of course, it’s a role that is evolving more and more, gets more and more responsibilities. That is why I believe it’s important that we, as Sporting Directors, take the opportunity to communicate more directly to the fans through the media.”

Lange’s framing is significant. He is describing a structural evolution: as the Sporting Director’s responsibilities expand, so too does the obligation to explain them publicly.

Paul Fernie, the English Sporting Director at SV Darmstadt, described the same expectation on the Training Ground Guru Podcast in July 2024.

“My President said, ‘You are the face of sport, you need to be seen to be active and involved. You’re judging everything that goes on and matchday is a huge part of it, so you need to be present, you need to be active.'”

In Germany, absence is abnormal. “If I’m not there on the bench, if I’m not there active on game day, it’s seen as abnormal here,” Fernie added.

This expectation comes from ownership. The Sporting Director is empowered, indeed required, to be visible because the club’s leadership has decided that visibility best serves the institution.

Stuart Webber, now Head of Sports at RB Omiya Ardija in the Red Bull network, articulated the rationale towards the end of his time at Norwich City.

“I’m visible to the media and fans,” he told the TGG Podcast in March 2023. “I don’t hide, I will admit to mistakes, I take ownership on stuff and I think that’s how it should be.”

He also posed the accountability question.

“How can you be accountable for something if you haven’t got that autonomy? Really, then it’s like there’s someone who’s hiding who’s making those decisions.”

The English transition

The situation in England is changing, albeit in a different way to Germany. The medium for Sporting Directors to speak publicly tends to be through controlled channels: club media, local radio, podcasts and industry publications like TGG. The Sporting Director speaks, but on terms that reduce volatility.

This is not the full visibility of the German model, but signals a shift towards Sporting Directors treating communication as part of the job and Boards permitting them to do so.

At Middlesbrough, Kieran Scott has become a regular presence on BBC Radio Tees, discussing transfer strategy, managerial appointments and player departures with an openness unusual for English executives.

After the summer 2025 window, he reflected: “It was a very hectic summer. It was gruelling, I’m not going to lie.” He admitted the previous January had been “by far the worst window I’ve had at the club in terms of me doing my job.”

At Burton Albion, Sporting Director Richard Dorman gave a club media interview in January 2026 explaining why the club rejected a seven-figure bid for Tyrese Shade:

“We went into the window knowing we needed to strengthen the group, not sell somebody and have to replace them. We wanted crazy money if someone was going to change that plan.”

Supporters heard the logic directly. They could agree or disagree, but at least they understood the reasons for the decision.

At Tottenham, Lange has given extended interviews to the club’s website discussing transfer windows and recently did a round table with a group of journalists, explaining the reasons for Thomas Frank’s sacking and much more.

Dan Ashworth, during his time at both Brighton and Newcastle, gave interviews discussing the club’s ambitions and recruitment strategy, receiving positive reaction for his willingness to explain the project directly.

Ashworth, who is now Chief Football Officer for the Football Association, has seen himself as an ambassador for English Sporting Directors, eager to shed light on the importance of an often little-known role.

Ashworth has used interviews as an opportunity to articulate exactly what the Sporting Director role entails and how it benefits clubs to have one. You can watch one such example below, from an interview with BT Sport in 2019, ahead of a Brighton home match.

Ashworth is one of several Sporting Directors to have appeared on the TGG Podcast, where he came up with his famous quote about the Sporting Director being in the middle of a wheel, with seven spokes coming out to represent the different departments he oversaw.

Other Sporting Directors from English clubs to have appeared on the pod are Phil Giles, Webber, Kevin Thelwell, Simon Wilson, Andrew Nestor, Chris Markham and Leigh Bromby, while others have spoken at the annual TGG Live Conference, where the Sporting Director panel always proves one of the most popular sessions of the two days.

Success in silence

At this point, I do need to acknowledge that some of the most successful Sporting Directors in English football have operated almost entirely out of public view. 

Michael Edwards built Liverpool’s recruitment operation into arguably the best in European football while refusing every interview request and keeping his photograph off the club’s official website.

One profile described him as having “no Wikipedia page despite being one of the most influential figures in the English game.” His anonymity was deliberate. There are anecdotes of Edwards booking into opposing teams’ hotels during pre-season to observe players’ behaviour incognito.

Txiki Begiristain operated in a similar way at Manchester City during more than a decade of sustained success. The Sporting Director model can clearly function without visibility. The question is whether silence is optimal.

It is true that visibility carries risk: public statements can be scrutinised, quoted back and used against executives when results deteriorate. Silence, the traditional instinct for English Sporting Directors, exists for a reason.

Edwards and Begiristain succeeded because of their immense capabilities, but also because they had decade-long tenures, sustained investment and results that spoke for themselves. For Sporting Directors at clubs without those conditions, visibility may be a necessity.

What visibility delivers

I’d make four main cases for Sporting Director visibility.

1. Narrative control: When a club’s football strategy is only articulated through the Head Coach, then it will appear to have failed if and when he is sacked. A visible Sporting Director can articulate a long-term strategy and identity that survives managerial change.
2. Stakeholder alignment: Supporters, players and agents form views about a club’s direction. In the absence of direct communication from the Sporting Director, those views can be shaped by speculation and social media noise. Periodic communication offers a correction mechanism.
3. Recruitment signalling: Players considering a move want to understand who they will be working with. A Sporting Director who is visible and articulate about the club’s project becomes part of the recruitment pitch. Ghisolfi noted this explicitly: “We are not only a promoted team, we are Sunderland and we are so attractive.”
4. Role legitimacy: The Sporting Director model remains poorly understood by many supporters (and even media), particularly at clubs where it has only recently been introduced. Visibility helps explain the role, why it exists and how it relates to the Head Coach. Without this, supporters default to older mental models and blame the wrong people when things go wrong.

Social media

I would suggest there are good reasons why Sporting Directors – like players and Head Coaches – rarely engage on social media platforms like X. The risk profile is asymmetric: the downside of abuse, pile-ons and context collapse outweighs the upside of direct fan engagement.

Wigan’s Gregor Rioch was one of the few Sporting Directors to engage directly with supporters on social media. However, in February 2026 he stopped. “Being on there is not good for my wellbeing,” he explained.

“And it’s not good for my family’s wellbeing. I have got people who have sent me terrible abuse on Twitter that, when I’ve checked their profile, they say they are advocates of mental health.”

Visibility through structured media, where the Sporting Director controls the timing and can engage with serious questions, is different from presence on platforms designed to maximise engagement through conflict. The former builds accountability. The latter invites abuse.

The evidence from broader executive communication research supports this distinction. Harvard Business Review noted in 2022 that C-suite skills increasingly prioritise “adept communicators, relationship builders and people-oriented problem solvers.”

McKinsey’s research on transparent communication found that “organisations with transparent communication during times of change are 3.5 times more likely to successfully manage change initiatives.”

But that communication was formal and strategic, not reactive and informal. Executives who can articulate vision under questioning are more valuable than executives who can trade replies on social media.

More open dialogue

The examples of Sporting Director visibility that I’ve cited represent progress, but they were often conducted within comfortable and controlled environments. The Sporting Director chose when to appear, often controlled the framing and rarely faced follow-up questions that probed failure.

The next step will be harder: press rooms, broadcast interviews, independent media. Facing the music. Being uncomfortable.

Players and Head Coaches are contractually obliged to fulfil media duties as part of agreements between broadcasters and clubs. No such obligation exists for Sporting Directors. However, if a Sporting Director is responsible for a club’s football strategy, shouldn’t he or she face the same scrutiny as those who implement it out on the pitch?

Shouldn’t they be capable of explaining that strategy when it succeeds and defending it when it fails? Shouldn’t they be able to sit opposite a journalist and answer direct questions about recruitment mistakes, managerial appointments and players who were sold too early or kept too long?

If not, then perhaps the question is whether they should be in the role at all.

The ability to articulate a vision, defend a decision and acknowledge a mistake publicly should be part of the job.

McKinsey research from 2025 found that about six in 10 people said a CEO’s actions impacted their opinion of a company, meaning CEOs must now “set the tone for the organisation; serve as storyteller-in-chief while empowering others to do the same.”

Communication is a leadership function, not something to be delegated.

McKinsey’s research on stakeholder engagement found that “leaders who treat the ‘soft stuff’ as the ‘hard stuff’ more than double the odds of a strategy being successful.”

Transparent communication is not a secondary skill, it is a predictor of strategic execution.

For clubs seeking to build trust with supporters, attract players to a project, or establish legitimacy for a new structure, open dialogue can be a competitive advantage.

• COLUMN ONE (Feb 2026): From the ‘unicorn’ Sporting Director to leadership teams