Andrew Nestor

(TGG arrive to do the interview the morning after West Brom’s 2-1 injury-time defeat at Bristol City)

Andrew Nestor: Yeah, it’s never a fun journey home after a finish like that, but we still have time in the season to continue working toward the play-offs and we’ll keep working at it.

I think the atmosphere is still very positive. We knew that this year was a year of transition, but we’re always going to have the ambition to be a play-off calibre team – despite having a lot of turnover in the squad and despite having to really make a lot of realignment and adjustments within the club as a whole since the takeover in February of ’24.

So I do think there’s good optimism, but of course there are high expectations both internally and externally, and we have to keep striving to do better.

It’s a difficult position that we’ve found ourselves in. We haven’t helped ourselves in certain moments. In other moments, I think some results have not been reflective of the match as a whole, but we are still within distance of the play-offs.

And we have to carry on to the next match like we would any other match, with an expectation to go out there and do our best and get three points.

We have plenty of experience within the squad. It’s a good mix of experience and young, hungry players that we’ve brought in recently.

And I think everyone, not just within the squad and the coaching staff, but throughout the organisation, just has to continue on trusting our process and over time, that will work in our favour. 

If we were to go up, we would certainly need to make some additions. As you’ve seen, the transition from Championship to Premier League these days is immensely difficult. We do have some really strong players at this club right now that can compete at that level, but of course, yeah, there’d have to be some investment into the squad to make that kind of jump.

(Shilen Patel bought the club in February 2024 and Nestor, the CEO of Patel’s Bilkul Football group, arrived with him at The Hawthorns).

The infrastructure is good. That was one of the things that struck me going back about a year-and-a-half, when I first came over here with Shilen Patel. We actually came here to the training ground first and saw this facility and then went over to the ground and had meetings there and walked across the street over to the Academy facilities, which are right by the ground.

And I was struck by the fact that everything was in very good condition. So, yeah, the facilities are good. You can always make improvements and we’ll continue to refresh things and make investment as we can. You know, I feel like players and staff are well looked after and it’s a nice place to spend your day.

Te staff, the employees, the people who look after these facilities, they’re here day in and day out and no matter what was going on around them and what they were hearing in the news about financial position of the club, everyone showed up to work every day and they put a lot of love and care into this place.

I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed the people that I’m working with and the culture around the club, despite the fact that the club, a little over a year ago, was in a very precarious financial situation.

One thing that’s been very evident is that this club is made up of employees, staff, members, supporters, all of whom really care very deeply about this club.

And so, stepping into the role that I’m in, you’re surrounded immediately by people who want to work hard, who want to see the club succeed, and instead of really asking for things, they’re saying, ‘What else can we do?’

And that’s really refreshing. Of course, we’ve needed to start to realign certain things within the club to help empower everyone and give them the resources that they really need to flourish and for the club to do well. So that’s been a major focus of mine.

I have a flat in Birmingham, but I have a home in the US as well. 

Decline might be harsh. I think just stagnation, because of an inability to continue to invest. But there is a lot of good brain power here in departments like Sports Science and Medical, in Performance, that has continued to improve despite lack of investment into certain equipment and modalities and those types of things.

And that’s been led by the individuals who have the knowledge and have been using that knowledge to the best of their ability to continue to allow our players to compete at a high level. 

But, yeah, it’s a challenge, it’s a massive challenge. But none of the challenges were unknown to me going in. You know, everything has pretty much been expected. It doesn’t make it easy, but there haven’t been any landmines, if you will.

There was a lot of kind of holdover from Premier League days and last year was the final year of parachute payments. So there had to be an adjustment financially within the squad.

Based off of minutes played (it was) the oldest squad in the league. In a competition that is so gruelling and physical, that can really take its toll over the months.

So (there were) two major goals for me – one, a necessity to really balance the books, both from a wage perspective, but also from a PSR perspective to ensure that the club didn’t breach, because it was on track to do so.

And in terms of squad age, it’s balancing. We’ve been investing recently in young players, but young players that are ready to perform at this level. And we’ve also reinvested in players who were here. We’ve signed new contracts with the likes of Darnell Furlong and Jason Molumby; last season we retained Kyle Bartley, (Alex) Mowatt, we brought (Karlan) Grant back who had been on loan.

So it’s striking a balance between experienced veteran players and the younger up-and-coming players to create the right balance that the team needs to sustain through an entire season, but then also have players pushing each other.

(Prior to the takeover, a number of West Brom Academy staff and players, including Academy Manager Mark Harrison, joined Aston Villa).

Before I arrived, I believe they got poached a bit – staff and coaches as well as players. But that said, the Academy continues to have a real impact in the first team.

So Alex Palmer, who we just sold to Ipswich, was an Academy product. Tom Fellows has been an outstanding player and came through the Academy. And we have some very promising players on the fringe of the first team, whether it’s (Oliver) Bostock or (Harry) Whitwell, (Michael) Parker, (Jamal) Muhammed – really promising talents.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months with Academy leadership, going over how we engage with these young players, what we’re presenting to them to show them a pathway through the Academy to the first team, so that one, they want to stay here, and two, we help enable them to reach the first team, their ultimate goal.

So we’ve put a heavy emphasis on re-engaging a number of young players now, 10 plus players that I can think of off the top of my head, that we see as top prospects. We’ve now ensured they will be here at least for the foreseeable future.

It all starts around a game model. So step number one was, ‘What is the model we feel can get this club promoted?’

And there’s a number of factors that go into that. One is the competition itself, two is what’s realistic to win within that competition financially, and then also what is a general philosophy that we want to build around.

We now have an understanding of that, so then you can get very, very granular on your scouting. We know within the type of system we want to play in each position, tactically and technically, what’s required of each player.

We also know physically what’s going to be required of that player within a match, training. And then over the course, extrapolate that over the course of a season and we take all of those factors into our modelling to evaluate potential signings.

And it’s really the only way I see to consistently plan your squad over a period of time to have sustained success. You’re going to certainly eliminate making costly mistakes and you’re going to be able to bring in complementary players that can play within a system that we feel can ultimately get this club promoted.

What Carlos Corberan had established here was an extremely well organised game model and I didn’t want to veer far away from that.

What we wanted to do was add a bit more of an attacking style to that organisation. And I mean, ultimately, pretty much every team is going to say that they want to control the match, they want to be sound defensively and then be able to hurt the opposition.

The question is, how do you hurt the opposition? What does that formation look like? Is it more controlling the ball in their half? Is it more counter attacking?

We’ve been doing a lot of analysis on our opponents, because fans have probably been frustrated with the low amount of goals scored at home. What we found is that organisation possession-based play that we have has led to teams coming to The Hawthorns and just playing in a low block.

And we’ve struggled a bit to break that. And you see a lot of nil, nil draws. And so we’ve been analysing how we can start to adapt that style a bit more and then build a system around that.

And the system’s a bit fluid. So we’ve built the squad around two key formations and that formation kind of changes during a match. Sometimes we’ll defend with four at the back, we’re attacking with three.

And that then leads from a scouting perspective to take a look at the type of full-backs, for example, or wing backs that you want to bring in that can slide into the midfield as that kind of new number six and then everyone else pushes forward.

So there’s a fluidity to it, but there’s a base philosophy underlying all of those decisions. 

Over the past year, behind the scenes, we’ve brought in a data team that was not here before, and that is to support our scouting process.

We believe in a balanced approach. So data is really our kind of first line of scouting. So taking all these various inputs around game model style, individual positional attributes that we look for, we take all of that.

We then layer in the financial piece, what are priority positions for signings? Are they loans? Are they perms? If they’re perms, what is the budget for this, both wage wise and fee wise.

And then taking input in from coaching staff as well in terms of what they feel needs are to improve. And then from there, using the tools that we’ve begun implementing, we can basically scour an entire database of players globally off of super granular metrics that we’re looking for and start to identify players that we feel could be the right fit.

So it’s a super efficient way of doing it. Of course, that means that your modelling has to be well developed, and we feel like it is. This is a database built over several years, taking into account pretty much every scouting tool most clubs use, plus others, and then starting to filter in all of our physical data and medical data, those types of things, and then being able to rank players essentially to look at them and say, how do these potential signings rank amongst themselves?

How do they stack up against what we already have? How do they stack up against others in the league, whether it’s an average player, best player? And a lot of that model also tries to take into account variations that help us feel like we’re comparing apples to apples.

And what I mean by that is a player’s performance in one league versus what that player’s performance in this league could be. So that really is our first line of scouting. That then goes to our scouting department, who then get to work on video.

And that’s where there’s more of the softer touch, more of the art of scouting. I don’t want to lose that. It’s very important. So our scouts are very adept at watching these players and it’s mainly done via video at first.

And then if a player progresses through our process, then we want to get physical eyes on them. Start to do background check, character, personality, cultural fit. All of that is extremely important as well.

Is it difficult to plan when you don’t know what league you’re going to be in next season with any certainty? Yeah, we’re running really kind of three models. One is Championship. One is promotion and stay up. The other is promotion and come back down. And you just have to be realistic about any scenario that can play out. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with going up, coming back down and going back up again stronger with a chance.

But of course you’d rather just go up and stay up. But yeah, it’s running three scenarios or three models at the same time and we just have to do it for a club like this.

We had a data-led approach on that as well. Through our networks, we know of good Head Coaches around that could have been available.

But we had our data team look at performances of coaches across every league and what we did there is a bit different to evaluating a player. It was more looking at the strength of a squad, both the individual players within the squad as well as the squad as a whole, and their expected performance.

And then we looked at whether their Head Coach created an uplift in performance. Because sometimes it can be hard to tell.

If you look at a Head Coach at some of the big clubs, they just have so many good players that you wonder are the players just really good and the coach makes sure he’s managing the guys in the locker room and it doesn’t blow up and they do fine. Or are they really actually creating positive uplift?

And that can be said for really any coach at any level. And so we did an evaluation of various candidates’ performance and how that translated into uplift of the squad that they had. And that way you know you’re really judging a coach fairly and taking into account all the various factors that go into a specific situation.

Tony ranked extremely high and therefore was immediately on the shortlist once Carlos left. We actually ran one model specifically on the Championship, just to look over the past 10 years historically who had created the most uplift given the squad that they had in circumstances around the club.

And he was third overall, behind (Vincent) Kompany and (Daniel) Farke. But then of course we have to look at whether this is someone who fits the game model, the style, (who) is going to come in and be able to work with the players we have and within the system and culture that we’re building.

That’s also very important. 

At Blackburn, Sunderland, Tony had a number of young players that he worked with and developed. That’s certainly important in the Championship. You need that mix, as I mentioned, of veterans and young players coming through and I think it’s important competitively. It’s important for your finances as well. And so that is a major focus.

It can be really hard to work young players in. A first team Head Coach’s job to win the next game. That’s where their mentality needs to be. So there’s a challenge to working young players into the first team.

He’s shown that he’s done that in the past and yeah, that is something that’s very important for any Head Coach we have here.

My job is to be the steady ship that balances short term and long term. You need to be able to effectively communicate with the Head Coach, who needs to be thinking about today’s training, the next match. That takes strong communication and co-operation.

I guess I feel a bit fortunate that I didn’t take the most linear path for your typical Sporting Director. Having a mix of both sporting knowledge and a finance background helps a lot, especially in the situation we find ourselves in here, where it’s how do you establish a game model and scouting and data tools to support that, but at the same time needing to very carefully trade players to ensure we’re okay from a PSR perspective.

So it’s a mix of squad planning and financial planning. My remit is overseeing men’s first team, women’s first team, Academy and then the various departments supporting those programmes.

That includes football operations, scouting and recruitment, data and analytics, medical, sports science. So it’s a wide remit. A big focus of mine since last summer has been realignment.

So how do you best position each of these departments to then delegate appropriate resources to men’s first team, women’s first team and Academy? Those are all very different programmes with different needs.

It’s a fun challenge for me to instil a culture and best practises across each of those departments and then have those experts really manage how they take those resources and consistently deploy them, but adapting them specifically for who they’re servicing, whether that’s men’s, women’s or Academy.

He oversees the Head of Scouting and is interacting daily with the men’s first team Head Coach and Women’s First Team Head Coach.

I probably speak more to him than any other human, including my wife. So, yeah, we communicate a lot. He’s very instrumental in scouting and on daily management with the coaches.

I wouldn’t say it was a shock. I had spoken to Carlos about it when I first came in. He was perceived, and rightly so, as this really bright up-and-coming Head Coach.

And there’s always going to be interest in someone like that. His name popped up every time there was a coaching change, whether it was teams in Championship or Premier League. We knew that there would eventually be real interest in him and it might be something that he feels is good for him.

Valencia makes a lot of sense given that he’s from the area. So it’s kind of hard to argue with wanting to coach your hometown team. It’s certainly difficult to go through a transition like that in the middle of a season though and the timing was difficult.

It was on Christmas Eve and you have a match on Boxing Day and then three matches very quickly thereafter, and then you’re heading into the January window. The timing could have been a lot better.

I played football until I was around 19, wasn’t going further in that and focused on my studies. I was in private equity for about a year-and-a-half, two years. I started a boutique merchant banking platform and was looking at different various sports deals, both on the media and club side.

And ultimately, first big project there was the Rowdies. It was a pretty volatile time, a fledgling time in US soccer. You had, I think 12 or 14 clubs in MLS at the time, and another 12 or 14 in the USL, the Second Division, and there was parity on the field between the two.

Within the USL you had clubs like Montreal, Portland, Vancouver, Seattle, Minnesota, Atlanta – so some of like the big MLS clubs now. I had played the sport, I wanted to be back in the sport, and was considering different investment opportunities across football in general.

And the US made a lot of sense for me. There was the opportunity to start a new club from scratch and I really looked at a few different cities to do it in. Ultimately I chose Tampa because I learned about the Rowdies’ history going back to the 70s and 80s, when there was the original NASL, where Pele and (Franz) Beckenbauer and Eusebio played for the New York Cosmos.

And you had George Best. I think he was in Fort Lauderdale. The Rowdies had Rodney Marsh, the Wegerle brothers. It was like all these guys just came to the US for 10 years, and then it kind of imploded. But the Rowdies had left a really incredible mark on that city.

So when I found out that we could get our hands on that IP and revive a brand, we went for it. I didn’t really have any personal ties there, I just moved there to launch the club from scratch.

It was a massive challenge. I mean, you’re building a club literally from scratch. I remember opening our first office, and I had hired Perry Van der Beck, a former Rowdie, to come in as Technical Director to help me build out a squad.

I had to build and hire every position within the club, as well as build a squad overnight. So that was quite the challenge. We went through our first Head Coach search and it came down to someone with a lot of experience and someone with very little coaching experience.

Paul Mariner had been Assistant to Steve Nicol at New England and Paul Daglish had just retired from playing in Houston. Paul ended up calling me up one day and saying, ‘There’s a new project going on at Plymouth Argyle and that club has a special place in my heart.’

I said, ‘Okay, good luck, go for it.’ And we hired Paul Duglish. It was his first head coaching job, so we had a really young staff. When we started this project, I was 23. When we kicked the first ball, I was 25. And Paul was probably around 32 and had just wrapped up his playing career.

As we were scouting players, we wanted to do a player combine and just bring a whole lot of players in to compete at a training camp for a few weeks. And Kenny Dalglish got us into Liverpool’s Academy grounds and opened the doors for us.

And so it was quite an interesting experience scouting players, stood next to Kenny.

In our third season (with the Rowdies), we won the league championship. Going into the fourth season, I was burnt out. We were thinking of selling the club. We had gotten it to a stable place from scratch and the league was evolving.

Valuations were going up and Major League Soccer was becoming something bigger, so I figured I would just step away and we would look to exit. We eventually sold the club to the owners of the Major League Baseball team in Tampa Bay.

During my time with the Rowdies, one thing that was really interesting for me was I was asked to be on the executive committee of the team owners and I served on the Pro Council for the US Soccer Federation and built really strong relationships with a lot of the other team owners and executives.

One of the people I built a good relationship with is Joey Saputo, who owns the MLS team in Montreal. I thought I was going to take a break in 2014, but then I learned of Bologna being in financial distress. They had just been relegated.

I called up Joey, who is of Italian descent, and we flew over and a couple months later owned the club. There was an investor group led by Joey and Shilen participates in that. Joey still owns the club today and right now they’re in fourth (in Serie A), hoping to get back in there (the Champions League) for next season.

So it’s been an amazing story over 10 years of taking that club back to where it should be.

He’s from Tampa and we just met through mutual contacts there and became friends over the years. We started to talk about his personal ambitions from a business perspective.

He’s a massive sports fan, but always looked at it from the business angle and was really intrigued by it. And so, yeah, that’s kind of how the whole conversation started. And then, when I led the Bologna transaction, he participated, became a partner in that, and we worked on a few other transactions since then.

Shilen is super down to earth, very involved, cares very much about it. He also trusts people to do their job. He wants the right experts in the room, whether that’s your Head of Commercial or your Head Coach – which I think is super important.

Sometimes the emotion gets the better of investors and they want to be doing everything. It’s good to make sure you surround yourself with the right people. So, yeah, very good character, cares very much about this club and the community and has been really focused on ensuring that there’s the right people around the club to help get it to where it should be.

We – Shilen Patel, Ashish Patel, myself – had been looking at potential club investment opportunities, not just specifically England, but more so just strategic opportunities where we can leverage our various skill sets across finance and investing, commercial media and sporting, to find an interesting opportunity where we could be not just (invest) capital into a club, but do something strategic for a club.

When West Brom came up, it was not a club necessarily on our radar, but once we realised the opportunity here, we very quickly started to do our homework.

The big difference was the loss of parachute money and then needing to adjust the cost structure. But we knew that going in. So we have a plan where we feel that we can spend appropriately on the player front as well as increase there’s opportunity to increase commercial revenue whilst maintaining the level of competitiveness that we need to.

And we feel like we can do that over time at a sustainable level where the club isn’t haemorrhaging cash, essentially, that that was. We wouldn’t have done that, this deal, frankly, if we didn’t believe that that was possible here.

This is an interesting club and that it should be in the Prem. You feel like it belongs in the Prem. It has the infrastructure for it, but it can be in championship and not have to solely rely on promotion to be financially sustainable.

That was super important. So step number one, be able to be in championship and sustainable. Step number two, be able to do that whilst being competitive. And when I say that I qualify that as meaning being able to compete for playoffs every year and doing that now without parachute payments.

And then if you’re able to go up to have the necessary infrastructure in place already so that you can stay up. And we feel like we have that. And what would you say to the fans about the, I suppose, short and medium term prospects of the club?

Well, one is consistency. We’re not making emotional decisions. There is a plan and process in place and we’re going to trust that.

That doesn’t mean you don’t pivot and learn, but you don’t lose your head and make rash decisions. And that goes hand in hand with scouting and player signings. There’s a model we’re building off of.

This year has been difficult because there’s a lot of turnover in the squad and so you kind of lack consistency and that makes it difficult for the coaches and the players. We did re-engage some of the veteran players that we feel are kind of like the spine of the team because you never want to lose that.

Then you become very vulnerable competitively. And we feel like we have a good spine in place. But now it’s adding the pieces that we need – getting younger players that fit the model and also creating a cycle of value.

So we have to be really smart on buying, we have to be really smart on selling. That’s really a key part that I think sometimes is missing with clubs. We can’t be afraid to hang on to a player for too long. The only reason any club would be afraid to hang onto a player for too long is if they’re afraid that they can’t replace them.

So that falls on myself to have the systems in place and be always be at the ready to have those replacements and hopefully it’s always an improvement. So, yeah, this year has been a process. Injuries don’t help, but, you know, everyone goes through that.

But I think we are through two out of a three-window transformation of this squad. 

That was very much driven by our position in terms of profitability and sustainability.

However, again, we had put a plan in place where we signed Josh Griffiths last year and Joe (Wildsmith) as well in the off season. Josh is an Academy product, but we signed him to a new long-term deal and we got him out on loan to make sure that he was playing competitive matches and would be ready to step up if necessary or when necessary.

We knew we had to make a sale, but we felt like it’s difficult, of course, to move on from an established number one. It’s really hard to replace that overnight, but we felt like we gave the head coach two very good options to do so.

And Josh, as an Academy product, he’s played meaningful time at this level and in League one did very well first half of the season on loan. So we felt very comfortable recalling him to come into the first team with the other moves that we made.

Those are very, I would say, indicative of our long-term strategy, bringing in a player like Isaac Price, Tammer Bany, and then supplementing with loans to ensure that we have the players, the quality of player, and doing so within our ability to spend.

So investing into young talent that we know can come and impact the first team straight away. Isaac’s already done that, Tammer’s starting to do that, and I think we’ll see more. And they’re the type of players that fit the profile we’re looking for.

And then, you know, with injuries to Josh Maja and others, we knew we had to bring in a striker and so that’s where you access the loan market.