Gary Bowyer: I have no direct link to Head of Recruitment

“No, no,” he said. “I just go straight to Richard Dorman. He sits above it all as the Sporting Director. My link is going to Richard, that’s it.

“I go to Richard, express my view. It’s fair to say my influence last season in the window was greater than it is this season.”

When asked whether Modeste was based at the club, Bowyer answered “no.” TGG understands the Head of Recruitment works mainly from London.

“The Sporting Director, Richard, pops down every now and again and that’s about it really, in that sense, on the training front,” Bowyer added.

“I think it’s the way the game is going now. I understand the format and the structure, but you’ll never convince me that [anybody] feels it or cares more than the Head Coach and the coaches.

“The people that really really really feel it are the managers, the Head Coaches, whatever you want to call us, and the coaches, because we’re involved with that group day to day, minute to minute. We live it, we’re on the touchline.”

Bowyer arrived at the Pirelli Stadium in December 2024, with Burton nine points adrift of safety in League One and with just two wins from 19 games. Nordic Football Group had taken over six months earlier and signed 23 players in their first transfer window – a British record.

Bowyer said the club was now reverting back to the data-driven recruitment model they had used before he arrived at the club – and that his influence had waned as a result.

“The club had an idea of how they wanted to do it when they first bought the club,” he said. “They made the record 23 signings.

“That didn’t quite go the way planned, hence I arrived. We had the January and me being in the building last year, knew the leagues more.

“This summer more so they want to revert back to a different model, the data model. I’m not a dinosaur to say you should ignore data.

“Data is there to guide, not to decide totally, in my opinion, because you’re dealing with humans and you’ve still got that human touch and the character.

“There’s no data to measure character and character is so important to me. The club have made a decision they want to go down a different process of recruiting and I have a choice, don’t I – I either work with it or I don’t.

“From our point of view, we just need players, it’s as simple as that. I can only tell the truth and tell them my side of it and what we need.”

“Twelve Football then built a manager scorecard, shaped around the 10 key metrics we’d agreed on, to help identify who was most likely to keep the club up,” Jordan wrote.

That meant “rejecting very good managers who weren’t right for the club at that time, and picking exactly the right person for the job at hand.”

Jordan was complimentary about how Bowyer had engaged with the material.

“He’d had limited exposure to football data of this kind before, but quickly immersed himself. He worked to understand what each metric meant, how they interacted, and how he could use them to motivate the squad.”

Two of Jordan’s conclusions sit close to Bowyer’s position now. On the limits of the method, he wrote: “One thing that’s harder to measure with data is character: how players respond under pressure, whether they’re ready to come in and hit the ground running.

“Credit to Gary and the management team – they brought in players who had both the skillset and the right mentality to deliver from day one.

“No club, no business, can use data well without long-term clarity and stable leadership. It’s that foundation that lets data guide decision-making, not the other way around.”

“We have some standard things in how we recruit a player,” O’Loughlin said, “and if we recruit every player the same way, it doesn’t matter what country they come from, what’s their background, religion, experiences, there’s a strong chance we can create a common denominator between the players.

“Not that they are all exactly the same, but they have something in their spirit, soul, that links them.”

For every prospective signing, Union produce what O’Loughlin calls a life story.

“If you saw one of the reports, it is very much like the life story of the player,” he said. “We are looking for examples, for tangible things where we can say, ‘That looks like our guy.’ The amount of effort that goes into it, it takes weeks and weeks of deep diving, research, it’s a lot of work that goes into it.”

The process is anchored in five defined club values – “integrity, commitment, courage, passion and humility” – and O’Loughlin is candid about its pitfalls.

Social media is used carefully, because “sometimes people wear hats for those things,” and so are conversations with former team-mates: “You can sometimes come across somebody that just didn’t get on with that person.”

His summary of why it matters would not sound out of place in Bowyer’s press conference: “You can have incredible players with mentality, football qualities, but if the culture is not right for them they won’t grow. So my thing was always to match the two.”