The cult of the sporting director: Inside the Premier League’s unseen power struggles

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The Independent

·9 gennaio 2026

The cult of the sporting director: Inside the Premier League’s unseen power struggles

The situations at Manchester United and Chelsea have brought renewed focus on how clubs are run, and on the tensions between the key roles above the manager – or, despite Ruben Amorim’s protestations, the head coach.

The Premier League may indeed have an issue here.

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There’s a particular Costa Coffee, in a town just outside one of England’s major cities, where anyone with a more immersive knowledge of football might get quite a surprise if they popped in for a latte. Regularly setting up camp upstairs is a Premier League figure responsible for a great deal of high-profile business.

It is almost hilarious to think how many people utterly obsessed with his club will have walked past him none the wiser, often as he composes emails related to some of the biggest stories in football.

The point of this small detail is simple: the executive can do this because many fans might know his name, but not what he looks like.

Welcome to the new world of the “faceless sporting director”.

The phrase has been used frequently in football this week, often delivered with a degree of spite, which perhaps tells its own story.

At the very least, it captures a long-standing tension that has suddenly come under intense scrutiny: the precise balance of power and responsibility between very public head coaches, who are required to be the faces of clubs, and sporting directors, who are not.

This was touched on in Monday’s newsletter, but it is worth digging deeper now, because it is going to define what many major clubs look like. It certainly shaped what this most frenzied of Premier League weeks became.

Put bluntly, a major reason both Chelsea and United have made changes is that Enzo Maresca and Amorim attempted to shift those structures.

They wanted more power than their clubs are currently set up to give. As a result, they were always likely to lose.

It should be acknowledged that there are many figures across top clubs who believe head coaches – and, yes, it is mostly head coaches – should simply accept the new reality and get with the programme. This is how clubs are run now, and it is designed to limit disruption when coaches inevitably move on.

In that sense, it is clubs protecting themselves, even if the growing question is whether this approach is becoming self-defeating, given that the view is far from universally shared.

One prominent figure who has worked in numerous senior roles across the game describes it as “the cult of the sporting director”, a world which they say “has crept up from nowhere”.

“When has one been held accountable?”

It is that lack of accountability – or even the difficulty in clearly defining the parameters of the role – that has fuelled so much of the debate this week.