What happens when a Sporting Director leaves? A 10-year count

That is a total of 113 spells, held by 97 people, and the full list, club by club, is at the end of this piece. Of the 75 departures where I could confirm what happened next, only 25 ended with a successor in the same job under the same title.

In the other 50, the club changed the title, restructured the role or appointed nobody at all. Half of everyone appointed had gone within about 33 months, and Nottingham Forest went through seven.

Sporting Director, Director of Football, Technical Director, Head of Football Operations, President of Football Operations: whatever the club called it, I counted it.

Each club’s whole decade is included, whatever division it was in at the time, which is why Wrexham and Lincoln are in and Leicester aren’t.

Twenty-odd years after English football started importing the role, the industry still hasn’t agreed what the job is, how much authority it should have against the Head Coach, or where it sits against the owner.

Dan Ashworth, who held the seat at three of the clubs in my count, found this when he helped write the FA’s Technical Director course and asked people what was in their job descriptions.

“It was so different,” he told the TGG Podcast in 2020. “Some are based on recruitment, some are involved in Academies, some have medical and sports science as well, some have training ground operations.”

Most people who leave the seat do so within four years. Of the 79 completed spells, 39 ended inside two years, 24 between two and four, and 16 after four years or more. The median completed tenure is 24 months: about 26 in the Premier League and 23 in the Championship.

Counting the people still in post matters – and it cuts both ways. Phil Giles has held the seat at Brentford since 2015, and Tony Khan has run football operations at Fulham since 2017. Neither appears in the figure built only on completed tenures.

However, 19 of the 34 people in post at the end of August had been there for fewer than two years, so adding everyone straight into the median pulls it down to about 22 months. The fair way to count them is the method medical researchers use for survival data, a Kaplan-Meier estimator, which credits each person still in post with the time served so far. 

On that basis, two in five holders were gone within two years, half within about 33 months, and seven in 10 within four years.

Why does the job keep changing? There are three ways to read it:

1. The appointments were poor. This deserves more weight than people who write about structure usually give it. Some hires are bad. Some clubs hire on a relationship. Some of it could be bad luck. What this doesn’t explain is why, on the way to a new hire, the club so often changes the shape of the job. If the problem is the person, the fix is a better person in the same job.
2. The role is young and hasn’t settled. This is the strongest of the ordinary explanations, and the move at several clubs towards splitting the remit across a leadership team is a reasonable answer to it. What it doesn’t cover is how often even the clubs with the most settled titles changed the job around them.
3. The job itself is the problem. The seat carries demands nobody wrote into the job description, and they weigh on whoever holds it. Appointment data can only take you to the edge of this one. To go further, you have to talk to the people in the seats and read the institution around them.

The third is the reading I find most convincing. Put simply, the seat is built so that whoever holds it struggles. It takes the responsibility for decisions other people carry out, it is judged on a season for work that takes years, and it becomes the place a club parks the problems nobody else wants to own.

When the holder fails, the club changes the person or the title, and the next holder inherits the same load.

The idea comes from the Tavistock Institute, set up in London in 1947 to study how organisations really work. Its best-known study is Isabel Menzies Lyth’s, in a London teaching hospital in 1959: brought in to help allocate student nurses to the wards, she found the working routines were organised around managing staff anxiety as much as around patient care. Almost no football club has been read this way.

Start with the decisions. The seat announces them and sends other people out to finish them. It signs the player, and somebody else has selected him. It appoints the Head Coach, and somebody else coaches. Then it is judged on whether the whole thing worked.

Then the timescale. The holder is reviewed against a season and judged, later, against an institution. So it’s rational to put first whatever can be shown inside six months. The structure that would have outlasted the incumbent never gets built, and afterwards they are described as having lacked long-term vision.

Then the blame. When a club can’t share a difficulty out, it tends to park it in one place. The holder becomes the site of the complaint: everyone names them in the first 10 minutes, and the group defends that account, because the alternative is handing the difficulty back to everyone else.

That one can be checked. When the last holder left, did the same complaint attach itself to their successor within a season? If that has now happened twice, the problem isn’t the person.

Clubs splitting the remit across a leadership team should run the same check in 18 months, because spreading a job across four people doesn’t tell you what the job was carrying.

And nobody holds the holder. The seat sits between the board and the Head Coach and takes the collision when their timelines don’t match, but nobody in the building is there for the person in it. People who have held it describe it the same way: the role is lonely, and nothing prepares you for it.

Surgeons have supervision and airline crews have the structured debrief. Football has punditry, which was built for an audience.