For a football club to operate effectively and be successful, they need to get their management structure right.
I’m not talking about the manager of the team and his assistants and coaches, but the management of the club as a business and as a whole.
All clubs have their own unique structures, with different job roles created to take care of different aspects of the day to day running of the club in order to work towards a long term goal.
The bigger the club, the bigger the team required to manage it, and things can get pretty convoluted at the top.
With clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool, Man City and so on, gone are the days when the manager was essentially in charge of all the decision making. There is now a small army of scouts reporting to to a head of recruitment, a sporting director fielding questions from all departments, a technical director guiding the strategic vision of the club, and a chief executive running the overall business on behalf of the owners.
The sheer volume of people who don’t understand, or even try to understand, the role of a Sporting Director is absolutely laughable. https://t.co/0HpzTGWEbR
— David Thomas (@dvdthmsdt) July 23, 2024
All of these people have a voice at the table when it comes to recruitment, club philosophy, and many other decisions. In fact, they are essential to the club, and many fans have absolutely no idea that they exist, never mind who they are.
So, what exactly do each of them do?
That’s what I will attempt to answer here.
Job Titles Don’t Always Mean the Same Thing
The first thing you need to understand is that two people with the same job title could have different responsibilities depending on the club they work for.
For example, Darren Fletcher was the Technical Director at Manchester United until April 2024, but his role was very different to that of Jason Wilcox who replaced him. This is because the management structure went through significant changes after INEOS took charge of the club.
Fletcher was essentially the link between the academy and the first team in his role as technical director, also looking after player and quad development in a sort of support coach role. Jason Wilcox will keep an eye on these things, but despite having the same job title, he has a much broader role with an additional focus on internal and external recruitment, guiding strategy and maintaining the culture of the club.
Fletcher remained at the club despite the job title change, so really, United created an additional position above Fletcher that was more office based so that Fletcher could do what he was best at and work with the players directly.
Similarly, a job title might mean something very different at a company that owns lots of different clubs, like City Group, than it does at a single club operation like Manchester United.
Other times similar job roles are given different titles depending on the club, such as Sporting Director and Director of Football, which could be seen as interchangeable.
So it’s not possible to sum up these job roles in the same way that you could if you were explaining the role of a bricklayer or a web developer. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a go.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
This is the top position at any club after the owners and the board, although generally, owners don’t get heavily involved in the day to day running of the club. That’s what the CEO is for.
They own the overall business vision and strategy for the club, and are ultimately responsible for its success or failure. The vision might be to become a sustainable top 5 club.
The Chief Executive Officer can hire and fire people in top positions to achieve this vision, and although football success is high on their list of priorities, they don’t get involved in the sporting side of things in a hands on way. It is the financial health and smooth running of the business that they will be most preoccupied with.
For this reason, they don’t need to know a great deal about football from a playing perspective, although it certainly wouldn’t hurt since they would be involved in conversations about the overall philosophy of the club.
Most people at the club won’t need or have direct access to the CEO. They will speak most often to the Sporting Director, Technical Director, and the head of the finance department who are all directly below them in the hierarchy, as well as reporting back to the owners above them.
Sporting Director
The sporting director’s job is to make the vision of the board, owners and CEO a reality.
To this end, one of the reasons the role of a sporting director exists is to maintain strategic continuity, since managers tend to come and go every couple of years.
Therefore, the sporting director should be seen as a medium to longer term job. They need to have more knowledge of the game of football (as opposed to the business of football) than a CEO, but they don’t have a hand in running the team or tactics on a match by match basis.
They set the tone and direction of everything that happens behind the scenes and on the pitch, from negotiating transfers and contracts to ensuring a uniform playing style runs throughout the club so youth players have an open pathway to the first team.
This is why clubs must hire managers that align with their existing style and vision. The sporting director is the manager’s main point of contact.
Sporting director’s must also ensure the club’s money is being spent wisely, and although they will take big transfer decisions to the CEO for approval and sign off, they can carry out most tasks based on their own instincts and using their own expertise and decision making skills.
They will take ideas from the technical director and the manager in terms of how the club should recruit and play, and generally try to pull all the different departments together at the right time and in the right way to achieve the club’s overall goal.
Technical Director
I sort of already answered this in my examples above, but let’s drill down a little deeper.
The technical director is arguably the most diverse job title, as at some clubs the role of the sporting director and technical director are rolled into one and at others it essentially just means head of recruitment. Where it is its own distinct role though, the technical director could be seen as the sporting director’s right hand man or woman.
Their job is to make sure the sporting director’s strategy is being adhered to, and to provide a link between them and the staff on the ground. This stops the sporting director being overwhelmed and allows them to do their job set back slightly, giving them a better overview of everything.
The technical director often works their way up from being the academy director, so there is a real focus on developing young talent with this role, even if it isn’t their only focus. This means they also have direct access to the manager, who will want to know which youth prospects are ready for first team exposure.
Then there is the scouting network which all report up to the technical director, who might then work with the sporting director, the manager, and the sports science and analytics team to determine which players should be targets for the club.
Football Club Structure
Another way to understand these roles is to look at some example football club structures.
This structure is much more important than a lot of people realise. It’s how all the cogs fit together to make the machine work, and it is designed with a long term vision so that when staff members come and go it doesn’t disrupt the overall operation too much.
It used to be the case that the managers pretty much ran all aspects of the club. So when a manager left and a new manager came in wanting to change everything it was hugely disruptive. Not any more. Now a manager will come into a pre-existing structure with a philosophy and a culture that is well established. They have to fit into that setup, rather than the club needing to change to suit the wishes of the manager.
I used the example of Darren Fletcher and Jason Wilcox and Man Utd before, so I will continue with the set up at Manchester United to keep a consistent throughline.
Have a look at this:
This is Man United’s old structure when Ralf Rangnick was interim manager, but it won’t have changed much from then until when INEOS took over and changed everything.
You can see the management of the club splits off into the management side to the right and the playing side to the left. However, there are not enough people in upper management positions, so everything is falling to John Murtough.
Now look at the club’s structure in the break before the 24/25 season began:
It’s completely changed. Not only has the structure been redesigned, but there are more people in management positions who can assimilate information in their specific areas of expertise before feeding back to Dan Ashworth.
He has a small team of people he can work with directly rather than everyone coming to him with everything, so the hierarchy is more effective and he can run the club in a more efficient and productive way.
This hopefully demonstrates both how the structure at a football club can be adapted, but also how each job role at the club fits together.