Montague relishes ‘coming home’ to ‘data-driven’ Notts County

However, his tenure in South Wales lasted just seven months, with his departure announced last month following an “internal review of football operations”. Now Montague has returned to League Two Notts County, filling a position vacated by Roberto Gagliardi, who recently stepped down after just five months.

Montague had previously worked for Notts County for five-and-a-half years, as Executive Director, although his association with owners Chris and Alex Reedtz goes back much further than that.

Montague worked for the brothers at their football predictions company Football Radar for 14 years, rising to become Head of Football Analysis. Football Radar are still heavily involved in the decision-making process at the League Two club. 

Montague told the club’s official website that a major part of his role as Director of Football would be “making sure we are sticking to our recruitment policy, which I would like to think has been made clear over the years.”

He added: “It is data-driven and our decision-making process is data driven, and I believe it is the most sophisticated out there, in terms of how much we pay players and which players we select.

“We make no secret that Football Radar drives a lot of our recruitment. The player recommendations come from data, from sophisticated models that have been worked and developed over time by Chris and his team at Football Radar.

“We are provided with lists of those players and then we have discussions between all of us about which are most suitable. That’s only half of the puzzle though.

“Even at this level, a lot of the players we are talking about are the same players that other clubs will be talking about. It’s not necessarily the case these days that you can find players nobody has seen before. That doesn’t really happen too much these days.

“What we need to be really good at is understanding how much impact he can have for Notts County and how much better he can make Notts County. 

“If we can do that, we believe we can establish what that player’s fair market value is and what their fair salary is. We believe that if we do that, it gives us a better opportunity to bring in players who are going to make us stronger within the budget we have set and make better use of that budget. 

“It’s a collaborative process but it’s driven completely by the intelligence and data at Football Radar.”

Even though his time at Swansea City was brief, Montague said he had learned a lot from his time there.

“It was an amazing experience in many ways,” he said. “It is a Championship club, so it comes with a lot of the really great things you expect of a club of that size – fantastic facilities, amazing fanbase. 

“It allowed me to see what an elite environment looks like and to learn an awful lot from some really excellent practitioners in their field about how certain departments need to run and how an elite environment can run. So I take an awful lot from that.”

Speaking about his return to County, Montague said: “It feels like coming home, as cheesy as that sounds. It feels like the right place for me to be at this time in my career.

“I wouldn’t have come back here if I didn’t think that ambition was still here to climb through the leagues and develop this club as a whole. There is still so much work to build on and I am really excited to get going again.”

County are currently 13th in League Two. They are in the process of redeveloping their Highfields Sports Complex, which will give them a permanent elite-level training base for the first time.