How Recruitment Specialists have become football's hottest properties
A frenetic day looms in what is already a record-breaking transfer window but, amid all the scrutiny that will be aimed in the familiar direction of the managers, an increasingly pivotal role is being played by staff who work out of the spotlight.
Forget the range of titles. It might be director of football, head of recruitment, sporting director, technical director or a good old-fashioned chief scout, but every Premier League club now has someone heading up a department dedicated to recruitment. The role may also extend to wider structures throughout the club but, as football gets more global and the financial stakes rise, the quality of their work is increasingly pivotal to a club’s success.
Steve Walsh
Steve Walsh played a vital role in Leicester's title-winning campaign with his recruitment policy CREDIT: REX
This realisation has been creating a transfer market within the transfer market that will surely only accelerate. Leicester City have attracted most jealous gazes from inside the industry in recent months and so, while only N’Golo Kanté has left of those players who won the Premier League, the departure of two key recruitment staff this year is even more instructive of how football is changing. Ben Wrigglesworth moved to Arsenal as their new first-team video scout while Steve Walsh, who is credited with the signings of Kanté, Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy, has become director of football at Everton.
Similarly, Paul Mitchell went from Southampton to Tottenham Hotspur as head of recruitment and analysis in 2014 and is again on the move this year.
“There is so much riding now on player trading that a lot of clubs are grappling with this sort of role – it is becoming the heartbeat of a football department,” says Stewart King, a senior consultant at SRi, a recruitment company that works extensively with Premier League clubs and across other sports. “I think it is an area that will continue to grow in football but which is still heavily underfunded at many clubs when you look at the return on the investment that it can provide. It is a drop in the ocean compared with what the best people in this area can bring both in terms of success and player trades.”
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There is no Premier League club that does not now operate without some variation on the ‘transfer committee’ model that was deemed so controversial at Liverpool. So how does it work in practice?
The most common process is that the needs of the squad are identified by the manager and communicated to his chief executive and the head of his recruitment operation. The manager inputs his suggestions but other targets are also subjected to the same evaluation process. The overwhelming majority of clubs will still allow a managerial veto but fewer and fewer are now leaving their transfer budget at the sole discretion of one man.
The rationale is largely twofold. The turnover of head coaches and managers is such that a more rounded recruitment process lessens the prospect of waste and a big turnover of players. It means that the appointments in the sort of director of football role of Les Reed at Southampton or Jon Rudkin at Leicester are made independent of the manager.
Walter Mazzarri
Walter Mazzarri works under a 'transfer committee' system at Watford, something with which he would be familiar from his long career in Italy CREDIT: EDDIE MULHOLLAND FOR THE TELEGRAPH
The additional input of a wider process of player evaluation should, in theory, also result in better decisions. The days of recruiting players simply from England are obviously long gone and, with it, those managers who would spend as much time travelling to watch players as they did on the training pitch.
“A lot of people in this country get a bit confused or scared by the role of a technical director, sporting director or director of football,” says Luke Dowling, Watford’s sporting director. “They think that person dumps players on the manager and says ‘get on with it’, but it is far from that. There is no point in signing someone unless the manager is aware and buys into it but what we don’t do is allow the head coach just to sign anyone he wants. We want them to have a wider spectrum and to have the time to coach and manage these players.
“This talk of a transfer committee makes me laugh. Every club has one – it’s just how you define a committee. Every club will have two, three or four people who discuss a signing and a team looking at players. It is never down to one person.”
There have also been big changes in the backgrounds of those staff working in the sporting director or director of football roles. They are generally not high-profile former players but specialists in an area that is becoming recognised as a distinct profession in its own right.
There is no point in signing someone unless the manager is aware and buys into it but what we don’t do is allow the head coach just to sign anyone he wants
Dowling is still in his thirties and, after playing at Tottenham and Reading between the ages of eight and 19, had various spells in non-League before becoming manager of Waltham Casuals. He then worked in recruitment for Wimbledon, Crystal Palace, Portsmouth, Blackburn and Leeds before joining Watford.
Tim Coe, the chief scout at Crystal Palace, also had his career shortened by injury and so, while studying for a law degree, worked in scouting at Reading, Aldershot, Huddersfield and Millwall before joining Palace.
Similarly, Ross Wilson did not play professionally at the highest level but, after working in senior operational roles at Falkirk, Watford and Huddersfield, is now the director of Southampton’s renowned scouting and recruitment department.
“I oversee the process and we have a team of scouts who are constantly looking at players within their territories,” says Wilson. “They know the attributes we’re looking for at Southampton, which is part of our identity, so they know what a player needs to be able to do in each position.
“But alongside that we’re speaking to agents, we’re doing due diligence into their background, finding out about their character, speaking to people who have worked with them before. So it’s just building that whole dossier, while the analysts are building a technical profile alongside that, looking at his statistics and comparing them with other targets.”
Data and analytics are playing an increasing role but it is also striking how scouting players with the eye remains critical to every club’s recruitment process. Dowling, for example, points out that data on pass completion could be skewed and lack any context if a player has been given a specific role for the team. Similarly, he says there are big limitations in analysing players simply by video because the camera invariably just follows the ball. Every prospective signing at Watford is watched in person.
Individual club structures clearly dictate the extent to which the process is ultimately also influenced by a manager, chief executive or chairman. At Arsenal, for example, Arsène Wenger is probably unique in having such influence on the valuations of players and their contracts but the manager was also very happy to sign people such as Mohamed Elneny and Gabriel who were primarily identified through the analytics departments.
Mohamed Elneny
Mohamed Elneny was identified as a target by Arsenal's analytics department CREDIT: JAMES MARSH/BPI/REX
No Premier League club now sits at either extreme of having an all-powerful manager making all the decisions or a sports director who constructs a squad for the head coach to work with.
“The way I see it moving forward is that the sporting director will be the recruitment guy who probably hasn’t coached and is all about blending data and analysis with more traditional scouting,” says King. “It is a myth that the manager doesn’t have a large say. The manager will always have players he likes but the recruitment department will look at them, put him into the machine and do the same research and due diligence to compare them with the players they are looking at.
“It is about having the manager contribute ideas and targets but having the same objective process in research and analysis. You just need a blend.”