Ex-Swindon Town chairman on new football transfer processes

Whether Director of Football, Technical or Sporting Director, they are responsible for all manner of football decisions, player identification and recruitment, youth policy, football academy, and for maintaining a list of promising and available managers and head coaches to recommend to the Board of Directors when the inevitable ‘parting of the ways’ happens. Is this power justified?

It is clear that football at all levels has become more professional and we celebrate that, but I fear that along the way some good old habits and practices have been lost.  Player welfare, medical treatment, and the demise of the ‘bucket & sponge’ physio are all positives but the additional layers of management have surely made the manager more remote from ‘his’ players on the one hand, and the Chairman and Board of Directors on the other. 

So, what is the role of the Director of Football and why has it become so important?

Our leading clubs are big businesses, to understand how big remember that even Bournemouth, the smallest Premier League club, has more income than all 24 clubs in League Two added together, and big businesses require structure to manage their resources - Manchester United has a total of 1,140 employees to manage!

At this rarefied level the manager has been re-named Head Coach and gone are the days of managers like Brian Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson who were involved in every aspect of running the club.  But has that separation of roles been a success? In the best cases it has been very successful but ask a Manchester United fan whether it has worked and they will point to countless so-called ‘stars’ who have cost a fortune, failed to deliver, and then left at a discount valuation.  Would that have happened in Ferguson’s reign?

The other change that has taken place is the obsession with data.  There can be little doubt that our ability to analyse everything has massively increased our understanding of the game and helped coaches to identify strategies and tactics.  I remember from my days in motor racing (a long time ago now the thing that first brought me to Swindon) how the data analysis left drivers with nowhere to hide – early braking, late braking, missed gearchanges and lifting off in the fastest corners were all clear for the team manager to see – the data became the ultimate excuse repellent. 

So too in football, the GPS trackers now on every player show distance covered, the number length and speed of sprints, and the effort expended.  I remember in 2010 the early days of this data frenzy when Town played Fulham in the FA Cup Third Round. Roy Hodgson, one of football’s true gentlemen and then-manager at Craven Cottage, came to me after the game to congratulate me that unexpectedly, in a Premier League versus League One clash, the player who had outrun everyone on the pitch and covered the most ground during the game was none other than young Simon Ferry.

Today we have all of this information and more - touch maps, heat maps, xG, etc. The post-match analysis by Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, et al on the ‘SkyPad’ is incessant, but we are all learning from it, and it improves our understanding of the game.

Nobody can fail to be impressed by the approach of teams such as Brentford and Brighton, both of whom were in the lower reaches of the EFL just a few years ago and have based their player acquisition strategy on rigorous data analysis, look how they have profited both on the pitch and in their bank balance from doing so.

The loser in this revolution has been the humble football scout and I’m not sure that this has been a good thing, particularly for the lower league clubs where resources are much more limited. Many clubs including Swindon have largely abandoned their scouting networks. Surely that makes them dependent on data that is available to everyone, or the truthfulness of the queue of agents plying their wares and presenting videos (often on YouTube or TikTok) of their finest clients. How many of those videos show anything other than their best moments? What do they tell anyone about the player’s attitude, effort or commitment, let alone how they might get on with his new teammates? 

When Tony Mowbray, whose honesty as a player and manager was as evident as his bluntness, scouted prospective signings, he always made a point of watching them in the warmup before the game to assess their aptitude for hard work – he could take their skill as read but he needed to see how they would match up to his required standards. 

And what about the players that a Director of Football would never get to see through these channels? Barry Fry of Peterborough used to spend hours on cold rainy evenings combing non-League games looking for undiscovered talent to great effect.

So maybe writing off the skill of the scouts is premature and unwise. They cover the ground, and they are very cost-effective – many do it for the love of the game and some travel expenses. 

To emphasise this point I’d ask readers this Christmas to take the time to watch two great sports movies: Moneyball and Trouble with the Curve. Both tell stories from the opposing ends of the ‘Data at the Desk’ versus ‘Scout at the Game’ argument. Make your own mind up, but maybe you’ll conclude as I have that there is room for both, in fact, it would probably be foolish to have a strategy that depends entirely on one or the other. 

Remember, Charlie Austin, Aden Flint, Sean Morrison and many more came from the hard work of travelling scouts while in the case of Simon Cox, it was the incessantly chirpy David ‘Budgie’ Byrne, then working with the youth teams, who was sent to watch one player at Reading but came back with Cox because he thought he might be a better bet!