There won’t be many things that modern-day football fans miss about the sport’s more formative years. The age of the game being incredibly slow, full of players who have handlebar moustaches and look like they’re 45 when they were really in their early 20s, is long gone.
One of the things that people might miss, though, is the sense of knowing what was involved in the running of a football club. There were owners, managers and players. Yet today, a role such as ‘Sporting Director’ gets bandied about, in spite of the fact that most supporters don’t know what it means. So what does it mean?
The Development of Football
As Bill Shankly once said, “At a football club, there’s a holy trinity: the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don’t come into it. They are only there to sign the checks.”
Shankly was lucky that he existed when he did, because the layout of a modern-day football club might well have made his head explode. It has become more and more common for the top clubs to have a Sporting Director, which might also be labelled as a Director of Sport or even a Director of Football. This is all part of the development of football and the manner in which it is now a huge business.
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Sure, there are still plenty of football clubs around that are much smaller in their nature. The likes of non-league football, League One and League Two are all going to be full of teams that don’t hire anyone other than the manager and his backroom staff to run the club. As a team starts to climb up the ranks, however, the need to become more professional is clear. If you look at a team such as Liverpool or Manchester United, they are as much billion-pound companies as they are football clubs, so the sheer number of people involved grows and grows with every passing success.
What the Role Entails
The role of Sporting Director will differ between football clubs, but the overall idea is that it is an executive position that focusses on the football side of the business. It is not a new thing when it comes to European clubs, where it is not uncommon for them to be ‘sports clubs’ that involve more than just one sport. They are a relatively new addition to the England game, however, largely because of the fact that managers used to be all-encompassing figures who would run almost every aspect of the club that they were in charge of. Think of how someone like Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger used to rule the roost, for example.
As always, it’s easier to fire the manager than the Sporting Director.
— Justin Horneker (@hornekerjustin.bsky.social) 10 July 2025 at 14:22
Nowadays, however, the biggest clubs have become so large that it makes a lot more sense for the manager to be asked to be in charge of nothing except the football side of things. That is even more relevant when you consider how often some clubs change managers. Someone needs to be in charge of the overall strategy of where the club is heading in the long term, which can’t be down to the manager given how precarious their position is. A bad run of results and they might be released, meaning the appointment of a new manager. Who is going to do that if the previous manager has been behind the decision-making?
Taking Things Off the Manager’s Plate
The main point of using a Sporting Director at a football club is to take many of the smaller factors off the desk of the manager. Yes, having a Sporting Director can allow for the future-proofing of the direction that a club is heading in, but it can also mean that the unimportant stuff isn’t having to be handled by the person responsible for trying to win football matches. The Sporting Director will look to lay out a 360-degree view of the club, focussing on the likes of how the Academy will gel with the first-team so as to ensure that the young players will be able to step into the first-team when called upon.
There is obviously an extent to which the people doing these jobs have always been doing them, just with a different job title. Now, though, football clubs are reducing the number of people that they employ and giving the job to just one person, whose entire raison d’être is to ensure that the club is heading in the right direction. It is becoming a more and more important position at the biggest English football clubs, thanks to the fact that contract negotiations, player recruitment and the overall budgeting and financial planning are their job, upon which success is often won or lost.
