TA: Can EPL's silent decision-makers learn from Bundesliga sporting directors?

The Premier League creates noise. It provokes comment, analysis, quotes and opinions from fans, journalists, coaches and sometimes even club owners.

It’s strange, then, that the quietest community within English football consists of its decision-makers — the sporting directors and transfer gurus, people whose names are well-known but whose voices are less so.

More curious still, that this should be the case during the game’s capitalist age. In the summer transfer window that just closed, Premier League clubs spent a combined £3.11billion ($4.bn) on new players. The market has become a source of unending fascination. And yet those who determine its direction, who are in charge of transfer strategy, rarely speak about the teams they build or defend the sporting departments they run.

When a signing fails, or a club finds themselves a midfielder short in November, it is the manager or head coach who is left explaining why. That’s normal in England, but not necessarily everywhere else.

In the United States, general managers across the various sports are not always made available, but are more so than in England. Some have agreements to appear on syndicated radio programmes or will make occasional press conference appearances.

In German football, sporting directors and those holding similar positions routinely pass through the mixed zones of stadiums following matches, where members of the media are free to ask questions. They are regularly interviewed by broadcasters before and after games, too.

Last weekend, following Bayern Munich’s 3-0 away win against Eintracht Frankfurt, Max Eberl, Bayern’s board member for sport, was asked about summer signing Luis Diaz’s two-goal performance. Eberl was glowing in his praise: “I find it remarkable how he puts himself at the service of the team and defends. He shows incredible commitment. That’s what we wanted: for him to bring his forward qualities, but also be a solid defensive asset.”

Eberl leads Bayern’s transfer activity and faced significant criticism during the recent window over their failure to sign Florian Wirtz and Nick Woltemade. The €70million (£60.8m; $81.2m at current rates) fee paid to Liverpool for Diaz also drew scrutiny, so it was interesting to hear a partial explanation for why the club were willing to spend so heavily on a 28-year-old who will turn 29 halfway through his debut season.

It’s a good system. It can be adversarial, but it creates accountability. Whether a team are playing well or not, it puts those who are truly responsible for the side’s construction under the spotlight. They are the people best equipped to answer most transfer-related questions.

In England, no such facility really exists. Once a season, a sporting director might sit for an interview with his club’s in-house media team, but rarely are the questions asked on those occasions penetrating or the answers given satisfactory. Tottenham Hotspur’s technical director Johan Lange recorded one of the better ones shortly after the summer window closed, but there is still a sense of a locked door through which the public must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to pass.

It seems out of step with the times. Given how much discourse a sporting director generates over the course of a season, it’s odd that they do not directly communicate more with their public — whether via traditional or fan media, podcasts or any other means.

This seems like a legacy issue in England. Go back to the 1970s, 1980s and even into the 1990s — ignoring outliers such as Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger — and there existed a strict line, with a club’s owner on one side and their manager on the other. Money and football, nothing in between.

In that era, a manager had true control. They decided where the club’s scouts went to look for new players. They chose the hotels the team stayed in before away games, and what time the buses left for those fixtures. They were kings. If a fan or journalist wanted to understand what was happening at their club, the manager alone had complete oversight and something nearing complete responsibility.

But in the years since, football has obviously become more layered, reducing the influence and lowering the vantage point of the guy in the dugout. And yet the old habits remain. The manager or head coach still gets trotted out as a proxy CEO, as if the previous era’s version of their role had not been disseminated into dozens of new areas.

While it’s not a shock that a journalist would ask for more access, clubs could find letting their talent recruiters speak for themselves to be useful.

If a big-money signing is struggling, this could add context as to why. It might be, for instance, that an adaptation period was factored into a transfer. Or that a deal was concluded for a young player despite the sporting director knowing certain parts of his game needed to be developed or retrained.

Expecting such transparency is optimistic, but conditioning how fans and media think about a player has value. The consequence of Eberl’s analysis of that Diaz performance last weekend, for example, will surely be even the most provocative sections of the German press paying greater attention to the Colombian’s defensive work rate and factoring that into their evaluation of Eberl’s work.

It might also be seen as a responsibility. Adjusting the lens through which a footballer is viewed can help alleviate pressure and expectation, particularly now, with even project players commanding vast sums in the market. Informing or even leading the discourse would help fans better understand their club’s way of working.

Former Germany international Stefan Kuntz is now Hamburg’s sporting director, and he recently spoke to the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper about the stress he and his staff were under during the final hours of the summer window.

“Sebastian Dirscherl practically lived here,” Kuntz said of his chief scout, referring to the club’s offices. “And on deadline day, our lawyer worked 20 hours straight because he had to read through all the contracts at the end — because every single word can cost money later on. It was truly a fantastic team effort.”

He talked, too, of being unable to sleep while waiting to find out whether he had been successful in signing Luka Vuskovic on loan from Tottenham, and was deeply fearful of being left without proper defensive cover until January that deal didn’t go through.

That detail benefits supporters, allowing them to grasp the realities of such a situation; there’s certainly no downside to Kuntz having been so forthcoming.

A sporting director is really the head of a department. In many instances, they will have made, or at least been heavily involved in, many of the strategic and hiring decisions that inform sporting performance. And yet, typically in the Premier League, the only person routinely held accountable for how that department functions is the manager/head coach, who is essentially just an employee. He will be asked to explain why a full-back’s troublesome hamstring is taking longer than expected to heal, or asked to talk about a recently-arrived goalkeeper’s inability to play out from the back.

It’s inadequate, because many clubs — especially those outside the true elite — are built in a way that allows them to withstand football’s transient nature. Today, coaches are just components to be replaced every 18 months, with someone of similar dimensions who can be dropped easily into the larger structure.

And therein lies the oddity of the situation in England and in many other European leagues: the coach, the temporary part, is never without a microphone in their face, while the architects rarely see one at all.