Where Should The Sporting Director Sit? The Structural Challenge In The Premier League
Football has a stability problem. Sacking a head coach and their entire backroom team may buy a short-term bounce, but it rarely builds anything that lasts.
The Sporting Director is one answer clubs have reached for: a more permanent figure who owns the long-term football strategy while head coaches come and go. Yet, as more clubs recruit a Sporting Director we are currently seeing the tenure of Sporting Directors decrease especially in the Premier League.
Adoption, though, is not the same as effectiveness. The biggest challenge facing Sporting Directors is often not recruitment or tactics. It is structure.
A role defined but implemented differently
Our study in Soccer & Society interviewed 21 senior football stakeholders (Parnell et al., 2022). They saw the role as a clear strategic benefit, but found it clouded by ambiguity in three areas:
1. how the role is perceived,
2. how clearly the job is described, and
3. how it is communicated inside and outside the club.
Even the title shifts. Director of Football, Technical Director, Chief Football Officer: the label varies, and so do the powers. We define the role simply as the individual with strategic management responsibility for football operations. Where that person sits in the hierarchy decides how much of that responsibility they can actually exercise and how much influence the can assert, as such, its important.
Four club models in the Premier League
Four broad models recur across the Premier League. No two clubs are identical, and the shape often reflects club size, ownership and the owner's own preferences.
Four club structures · board, CEO, Sporting Director, head coach
1. CEO-led. The Sporting Director is one department head under the CEO, alongside finance, HR and marketing, with the head coach below. Lines are clear, but football strategy is filtered through the CEO.
2. Parallel. The Sporting Director, head coach and chief operating officer (some CEO) each report to the board. It works only if responsibilities are sharply demarcated.
3. Football-led. The Sporting Director reports to the board and oversees the head coach, head of recruitment and the rest of multi-disciplinary team, plus the academy, often owning recruitment directly. It gives one person a joined-up view of the whole pathway.
4. Board-level. The Sporting Director holds a board seat, shaping strategy and budget where those decisions are made.
Why the boardroom should be considered important
Sporting Directors we have interviewed are blunt: a director should sit on the board. Strategy and budgets are decided in the boardroom. Without a seat beside the CEO and finance director, you cannot make the football case or secure the backing to deliver it.
Yet board status is often negotiable, and many appointments are bolted onto old hierarchies. The alternative can be described as architectural innovation: changing the structure to fit the innovation, not the reverse. Without it, an incumbent board may read a new Sporting Director as a grab for power, and the role is set up to fail.
Turnover suggests the problem is unresolved. Premier League Sporting Directors last an average of just 1.8 years, the shortest of Europe's big five leagues (Football Benchmark, 2025).
Shape your career by studying the role
The role is still in its experimentation phase. Those who understand governance, power and organisational design, not just recruitment, will shape the model that eventually dominates. That makes now the time to study it.
The Alt Sporting Director MBA is the Association of Sporting Directors' flagshipleadership development programme: a 12-month executive course designed by elite Sporting Directors.
It is led by practitioners including Paul Mitchell, Rebecca Caplehorn and Julian Ward. It combines modules on strategy, governance, finance, recruitment, leadership and negotiation with a dedicated football mentor, executive coaching and an applied impact project. Places are limited.
If you want to influence how clubs are run, not just work within them, register your interest in the AltSD MBA.
References
• Football Benchmark (2025). Mapping Sporting Directors: football decision-maker trends across Europe's "Big Five" leagues.
• Parnell, D., Easton, B., Bond, A. & Kelly, S. (2022). Perceptions of role ambiguity for Sporting Directors in professional football. Soccer & Society, 23(4-5), 451-465.
• Parnell, D., Caplehorn, R., Thelwell, K., Asghar, T. & Batey, M. (2023). Working as a Sporting Director. In Williams, M., Ford, P. & Drust, B. (eds), Football and Society (4th ed.). Routledge.