At the entrance to Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park, one of the more peculiar sights in English football emerged. As Tottenham Hotspur's staff made their way into the ground in September 2021, the club's travelling support heralded their managing director of football Fabio Paratici with admiring cries of “Fabio! Fabio!”
The majority of this sentence may now read as an illusion but Tottenham had won their first three games of the season under a manager named Nuno Espirito Santo, without conceding a goal, and supporters were excited by signings such as Cristian Romero, Bryan Gil, Emerson Royal, Pape Matar Sarr and Pierluigi Gollini. On social media, some supporters even started referring to him as “Don Fabio”.
Spurs lost 3-0 at Palace that day, the first of a run of five defeats in seven Premier League games which resulted in Nuno's sacking. A chain of events then transpired in which Tottenham hired and fired Antonio Conte, before, on Paratici's recommendation, instilling Conte's understudy Cristian Stellini as an interim manager, before Stellini turned out to be so inadequate he required an interim replacement of his own in Ryan Mason. Amid all that, Tottenham parted company with Paratici, who had been hired to bring Juventus standards to Tottenham, but instead of silverware, he transplanted from Turin the stain of investigations into financial malpractice.
Fabio Paratici arrives at Selhurst Park in 2021, where he was greeted by adoring Tottenham fans (Photo: Paul Harding/Getty Images)
Paratici was one of 11 former Juventus executives banned from Italian football earlier this year, before FIFA extended the 30-month ban and banned him from “any football-related activity” that, on appeal, was partially reduced.
On a rather less serious note, but maybe just as damning for its apparent incompetence, was the moment in January when Tottenham appeared to be negotiating a loan move out of the club for Matt Doherty to Atletico Madrid, only for them then to realise they had already exceeded the maximum number of outgoing loans, meaning Doherty's contract needed to be cancelled. The player was instead given away free of charge.
For Paratici, among the foremost celebrity sporting directors, it has been a humbling period. And he is not alone.
Recent times have seen a dramatic rise of football's technocrats. Variations of directors of football, football directors, technical directors, sporting directors, heads of recruitment and sporting advisors have appeared across the sport, some of whom have developed highly inflated public profiles, often with ever-broadening mythologies surrounding their talents and achievements. Clubs with prominent sporting directors have often been venerated, credited with having a plan, a structure and a long-term mission that brings stability. Yet the evidence of the past couple of years complicates this theory.
Take, for example, Victor Orta at Leeds United, who became one of the most talked-about sporting directors in English football. He was credited as the man who persuaded Marcelo Bielsa to join Leeds United in the summer of 2018 and as Leeds pursued transfer targets in the Premier League, Orta's every flight and meeting became the source of breathless tracking on social media. His eye for young talent drew praise, most notably identifying Ben White as a young centre-half of huge potential, and he also recruited the Brazilian winger Raphinha from Rennes for £17million ($21.2m) — the player was sold for more than triple that sum to Barcelona two years later.
Raphinha was instrumental in keeping Leeds United in the top flight before he was sold to Barcelona (Photo: Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
Leeds should also expect handsome returns on goalkeeper Illan Meslier, signed for £5million from French club Lorient, and Wilfried Gnonto, purchased for an even smaller fee from Zurich. Orta's talent had been appreciated across Europe, with clubs such as Monaco and Chelsea at various times considering the Spaniard for positions at their club.
Yet by the end of his reign, confirmed by a club statement on Tuesday, his era and the club's identity had disintegrated to the extent that Leeds were reaching for Sam Allardyce to rescue the campaign and supporters have regularly sung for his departure. Leeds fans express a multitude of reasons for discontent; most notably the failure to recruit a left-back to challenge Junior Firpo or a competent centre-forward, as well as the porous quality of centre-halves signed over several years, in addition to the hiring of and backing given to the American coach Jesse Marsch. Supporters have also been left scratching their heads about the decision to spend £35.5million ($44.3m) in January on a then-20-year-old striker in Georginio Rutter from Hoffenheim, only for him to play under three head coaches since signing but make only one Premier League start.
Orta also thrust himself into the public consciousness with some unrestrained demonstrations of emotion in the club's directors' box, where he squabbled with opposing clubs and his own supporters, while he also made his way onto the pitch to celebrate with the players when the club stayed up by the skin of their teeth at Brentford on the final day of last season. As with all divisive characters, idiosyncrasies were lapped up in the good times and chastised in the bad.
Orta went onto the pitch to celebrate Leeds' survival with head coach Jesse Marsch (Photo: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
Stuart Webber, meanwhile, became venerated at Norwich City after he was perceived by some to have masterminded the club's promotion to the Premier League. He started to be linked with big jobs, most notably Manchester United. He conducted interviews on television, where his vision for the club was praised, and he put himself front and centre of the club's communication in print and podcast interviews.
But the success could not be sustained. Transfers started to go awry, Dean Smith replaced Daniel Farke as head coach but to no avail when it came to either preventing relegation from the Premier League or securing an immediate promotion this season. Some of the criticism turned more personal, with some Norwich supporters suggesting that Webber should not have spent part of last season's January transfer window scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, a charge he defended by pointing out the club had no money to spend that month.
Luis Campos, meanwhile, had been praised for his squad-building talents at French clubs Lille and Monaco before he arrived at Paris Saint-Germain this season, apparently at the behest of striker Kylian Mbappe as part of the French striker's decision to stay at the club last summer. Yet Campos went on to hire Christophe Galtier, who is flirting with the nigh-on impossible task of failing to win the French title at PSG, while Campos himself attracted ridicule when he ventured pitchside to shout instructions at players and argue with the fourth official in the 4-3 win over Lille in February.
All of which brings us to the self-appointment of the Premier League's first interim sporting director Todd Boehly last summer, who demonstrated his credentials by suggesting Thomas Tuchel operate with a 4-4-3 formation (yes, you read that correctly), before later firing the club's Champions League-winning manager, buying Graham Potter out of his Brighton & Hove Albion contract for £21.5million, handing him a five-year contract, sacking him six months later and spending £600m on players who currently have the club on course for a trophyless season and a bottom-half finish in the Premier League.
(Photo: Alex Broadway/Getty Images)
Somewhere along that journey he also deemed the role of sporting director so challenging that Chelsea require two men for the job, with Paul Winstanley, hired from Brighton, and Laurence Stewart, poached from Monaco, heading up a department as “co-sporting directors” that also includes Christopher Vivell, taken from RB Leipzig, as technical director, and Joe Shields, taken from Southampton, as “co-director of talent and recruitment”. Between them all, they hired Frank Lampard to replace Potter; he has lost all six matches in charge of the club.
Shields, by the way, was part of the Southampton recruitment team, alongside Rasmus Ankerson (another one previously praised for work at Brentford), that signed a slate of players last summer. The club are now bottom of the Premier League and supporters have been left asking questions about a recruitment strategy that appeared to excessively prioritise young talent with future resale value over the immediate needs of the team.
This is not to say there is nothing to be gained from a sporting director model. Indeed, it remains the norm across Europe and there are examples where it can bring success, such as Michael Edwards recruiting smartly at Liverpool or Dan Ashworth, who was formerly in place at Brighton and now operates at Newcastle United. At Manchester City, Txiki Begiristain has proved a useful foil for Pep Guardiola, but he, too, has not been without his mishaps.
Yet increasingly, these figures do not appear to be the most significant men in the building, no matter the hype that surrounds them. For this, the media ought to take some responsibility. The workings of 24-7 news turn every victory into a vindication or a turning point but every defeat is a shambles or an embarrassment. Every newly hired manager is a saviour and every sacked manager has left a broken dressing room and a toxic legacy.
Perhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that the sporting directors are treated to the same cycle of boom and bust, where every good signing is the work of 100 bar charts and shrewd negotiations, but every bad one is evidence of a man out of his depth and playing real-life Football Manager.
Maybe the truth is that recruitment can never be an exact science, no matter the level of analytics or character background checks. And perhaps the reality is that the success of a football club weighs far more heavily on those above and below the sporting director — in other words, the owner (who sanctions the level of investment and sets out the culture of a football club), and the head coach/manager (whose job it is to work with the players every day). Or at the very least, it necessitates a harmony of all three parts that Leeds, for example, possessed for a while, when Andrea Radrizzani, Orta and Bielsa dovetailed perfectly.
These moments of alignment are rarified. Ashworth, for example, is praised to the hilt for his work yet Brighton's world has continued to turn without him, because of the consistency of the operation run by chief executive Paul Barber, owner-chairman Tony Bloom and the club's head coach Roberto De Zerbi. Newcastle's smart purchases were led by Eddie Howe before the club even had a sporting director in place.
For the sporting directors, their ascension has been fast, which has yielded vast returns financially for these individuals. Yet football supporters are continuously more engaged with the running of their clubs, meaning every layer of a Premier League outfit is now scrutinised, and the endorphins of transfer windows trigger hype and despair. The celebrity sporting director should beware.