Sir Jim Ratcliffe's takeover of Manchester United looks to be complete, and he's already made moves towards his first signing at the club. But rather than a player, it looks likely to be Newcastle United's Sporting Director Dan Ashworth, the man credited with building both Brighton and England in recent years.
But why him? Adam Clery examines what it is Man United have identified that makes him so vital to their new project.
But why him? Adam Clery examines what it is Man United have identified that makes him so vital to their new project.
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00:00 scoring centre forward or game-changing centre back
00:02 rather than Newcastle United's sporting director.
00:06 Yes, hello there everybody.
00:07 My name is Adam Cleary.
00:08 You are watching 442 and I am here on my actual day off
00:12 to explain to you precisely who Dan Ashworth is,
00:15 why people think he's such a big deal
00:17 and why specifically Man United are desperate,
00:20 desperate to get him in.
00:22 Okay, so this is Dan Ashworth.
00:27 Any questions?
00:28 Actually, I will say before I start,
00:29 I'm just going to have an assumption here
00:30 of you having like zero working knowledge
00:32 of this guy or the situation.
00:34 Now, if you're already a Man United fan
00:36 or you've been following this story closely,
00:38 the first few minutes might seem a little basic
00:40 and surface level, but I'm just going to make sure
00:42 we've got all our bases covered
00:43 and then we'll get into why this particular three-course meal
00:46 is incredibly meaty and even more juicy.
00:49 So as we mentioned at the start,
00:51 Dan Ashworth is Newcastle United's
00:52 current sporting director.
00:54 He was like a youth team player at Norwich City,
00:56 got released when he was 17,
00:57 so he never made it in the game itself.
00:59 But since then, he's worked his way up
01:02 through various clubs in England
01:04 to become considered, genuinely,
01:06 one of the most important men in the game in this country.
01:09 He's the man credited with being the mastermind
01:11 behind the England DNA Project,
01:13 which of course has seen all the England youth teams
01:16 go on to dominate pretty much every single tournament
01:19 they've been in over the last five years.
01:21 We'll talk about this more in a little bit,
01:22 but if England do go on to win the Euros this summer,
01:25 they'll do so with a pool of young players
01:28 who almost all come through that project.
01:30 But away from England, though,
01:32 Ashworth is probably best known for being the man credited
01:35 for turning Brighton into one of the most well-run clubs
01:38 in the entire world.
01:40 He took over as their technical director in 2019,
01:43 completely revolutionized how the club operated
01:46 all of its footballing business,
01:48 and within a year of that appointment,
01:49 they'd gone from finishing 15th and 17th
01:52 to finishing 9th and 6th.
01:53 Now, as I'm sure you no doubt got slightly sick
01:55 of hearing last season,
01:57 one of the main things behind Brighton's success
01:59 was this incredible model they had off the pitch
02:01 where they had this fantastic scouting network,
02:03 they had clear pathways for these players
02:05 to get into the first team,
02:06 they knew precisely how they were gonna develop them,
02:08 and then they were excellent at selling them off
02:11 for an absolutely enormous profit.
02:12 Now, it is a massive oversimplification to say this,
02:16 and I will unpack it better in a little bit,
02:18 but Dan Ashworth is the reason they ran that way.
02:21 He is one of the main reasons they had that success.
02:24 And in fact, so successful was it
02:26 that when Newcastle United were purchased by PIF
02:28 in Saudi Arabia,
02:29 and they had their choice of anybody in the world
02:32 to come in and take over the footballing operations,
02:35 Dan Ashworth was their top and only target.
02:38 They paid quite the pretty penny
02:40 to prize him away from the Seagulls,
02:41 paid a prettier penny still
02:43 to get him off the gardening leave,
02:45 or notice as normal people would have to call it,
02:47 and he has been masterminding the development of Newcastle
02:50 ever since then.
02:51 That is until,
02:52 if reports in the Athletic last night
02:53 from David Ornstein are to be believed, now.
02:56 Now, as Manchester United fans will know,
02:58 Sir Jim Ratcliffe is not buying the club outright.
03:01 He's getting a 25% stake in it,
03:02 but with that comes the burden of footballing operations.
03:06 He will be overseeing the football club
03:08 from the perspective of the on-field results,
03:10 the recruitment, the coaching, the talent acquisition,
03:13 the physiotherapy,
03:14 basically all the stuff you're allowed to do
03:16 on Football Manager,
03:17 all the stuff that directly relates to football.
03:19 Now, of course, while he will be setting out
03:21 the vision for all this,
03:22 Jim Ratcliffe is not gonna go around the world
03:24 and scout players and sign them
03:26 and tell Eric Tenhag who should be playing
03:28 here, there, and everywhere.
03:29 He is going to build a structure at the club
03:32 that will allow them to succeed in this way.
03:34 And just as happened with Newcastle after their takeover,
03:37 the man he really wants to do this is Dan Ashworth.
03:40 So what exactly is a sporting director, right?
03:43 Well, in Dan Ashworth's own words,
03:45 every single footballing department at a club
03:47 is a spoke on a wheel,
03:49 and the sporting director is...
03:51 Uh...
03:53 I don't...
03:54 I don't know what the word for the middle of a wheel is.
03:56 The middle of the wheel.
03:57 The...
03:58 The hub?
04:00 That's not right.
04:01 Is there even a word for this?
04:02 All right, never mind that.
04:03 We're all visual learners, aren't we?
04:04 So here is something I have really, really badly made,
04:07 and it sort of represents all the departments
04:09 at a football club.
04:10 And as you, of course, know,
04:11 the rollercoaster of being a football club
04:13 means that this wheel will rotate
04:16 with different departments being more important
04:18 than others as different things are happening.
04:20 Might have a really intense runner game,
04:21 so the manager's probably the most important person
04:23 at the club.
04:24 It might be the summer transfer window,
04:25 so your recruitment department
04:26 are the most important people at the club.
04:27 You might have loads of injuries,
04:28 so you want to make sure you're well stocked in that.
04:30 You get how it works.
04:32 Well, the job of a sporting director,
04:33 and indeed what Dan Ashworth is considered
04:35 the best in the country at,
04:37 is being here, at the very centre of it all.
04:40 He is not physically doing any of these jobs
04:43 that go around him,
04:44 but he is making sure the people in those positions
04:46 are A, the right people to be doing those jobs,
04:49 and B, are sufficiently well supported
04:52 that they can do them well.
04:53 And this is why I said the way he gets credited
04:55 for what happened at Brighton
04:56 is a little bit of an oversimplification, right?
04:58 Dan Ashworth does not go out and scout players.
05:01 He did not find Karu Matoma or Alexis McAllister
05:04 or Moises Quesada or any of these great bargains
05:07 Brighton have turned into their entire business model.
05:09 He did not randomly stumble across them
05:12 when watching a game of football one day.
05:13 He did not recommend to the club
05:15 that they go and buy them.
05:16 He did not develop them as footballers
05:18 or organise their loans
05:20 or devise a pathway to get them into the first team.
05:23 He did not pick them for any matches
05:25 or praise them when they did well.
05:26 And he did not even go out and sell them
05:29 when they reached the peak of their value.
05:30 But what Dan Ashworth did do
05:32 is build a structure at Brighton
05:35 that enabled all of those things to happen.
05:38 Every single person involved in those journeys,
05:40 he more or less handpicked and instructed.
05:43 And when he did that, magic happened.
05:45 And while obviously the workings of the national side
05:47 are very different to the workings of a club side,
05:50 the way he built the England DNA system
05:52 from the youth levels right up to the senior team
05:55 has a lot of the same principles.
05:56 After England built St. George's Park,
05:58 there still wasn't really much of a plan
06:00 for how you identify players at their youngest
06:02 and you coach them into being
06:04 full internationals for their country.
06:06 It was basically just a system of
06:07 we'll have different things in different places
06:09 and the cream will always rise to the top
06:11 and then we'll have a elite level manager
06:13 like a Capello or a Roy Hodgson or somebody in place
06:17 who will pick them and then we'll go and win tournaments.
06:19 And then lo and behold,
06:20 not only did England not win any tournaments,
06:23 but they were just (beep) hopeless in all of them
06:26 and getting worse.
06:27 So this whole England DNA structure,
06:29 which if you've got like half an hour spare,
06:30 the presentation is still available
06:32 on the FA website for free.
06:33 You can just go and download it.
06:36 Talks about how you then have consistency
06:38 all the way through the national side
06:40 so that when you do identify players at a young age,
06:42 there's a clear pathway to developing them
06:45 into elite footballers.
06:47 And essentially the very core of this idea
06:49 was sort of thinking, right, okay,
06:50 how is football gonna be played, not now,
06:52 but in five years, 10 years, 15 years,
06:55 and can we start to instill some of those core attributes
06:58 in players from a young age?
06:59 Now tactics and systems and formations,
07:01 they will change loads over time.
07:02 You haven't got to worry about having them all play
07:04 the exact same system,
07:06 but things like working hard off the ball,
07:08 being alert to transitions,
07:09 basically breeding smarter footballers
07:12 was what this was all about.
07:14 By case in point, when, as what I assume is a normal person,
07:17 was the first time you ever heard people
07:19 really talk about a press.
07:21 Maybe like three or four years ago,
07:23 possibly like five, six, or seven,
07:25 if you're a big nerd like me
07:26 and you sort of follow this stuff.
07:28 Well, the word press is in Dan Ashworth's
07:30 England DNA proposal from 2012, 12 years ago.
07:34 So he came into England,
07:35 they made sure that coaches at every single level
07:37 were all singing off the same hymn sheet,
07:39 and lo and behold, within about five years,
07:41 something insane started to happen.
07:44 In 2014, England won the under 17 European championships,
07:48 only their second win of any tournament since about 1993.
07:52 And then in the next cycle, three years later,
07:54 they won both the under 19 European championship
07:56 and the World Youth Cup for the under 20s.
07:59 And then the following summer,
08:00 they won the under 17 World Cup.
08:02 And then as you probably remember,
08:04 on the most recent cycle of tournaments,
08:06 they won the under 19 UEFA championship again,
08:08 as well as the under 21 Euros in the summer just gone.
08:12 Just to clarify here, right, between 1993 and 2017,
08:16 England won one tournament at youth level.
08:19 But then just a few short years
08:20 after Ashworth's England DNA policy was brought in,
08:23 they won five in five years.
08:25 So why do Man United want him so badly then?
08:27 Well, the easiest way of putting this
08:30 is that while they still do get good results on the pitch
08:32 and they do have good players
08:33 and good things do occasionally happen,
08:35 in terms of their overall footballing operations,
08:38 they are a (beep) show.
08:40 Now, if you are a Man United fan,
08:42 or even if you're not, to be honest,
08:43 you probably caught the report at the end of last year
08:45 about just what a circus it was
08:47 behind the scenes at Old Trafford.
08:48 They had a deal to sign Frankie de Jong all sorted out,
08:51 but simply couldn't get enough players off the books.
08:53 They'd identified Anthony
08:54 at being worth about 25 million pounds,
08:57 and then in a panic ended up paying 86 for him.
09:00 Ten Hag had apparently greenlit the transfer of Casemiro
09:03 on the understanding that it wouldn't impact his ability
09:05 to get a striker, and then was told,
09:07 "Oh, sorry, that was all the money for the striker."
09:09 Fundamentally, not a single footballing department
09:12 at Manchester United feels
09:13 like it's being particularly well run at the minute,
09:16 and worse still, none of them appear
09:18 to communicate with each other ever.
09:20 Up until Chelsea spent all that money on La Vida,
09:22 Man United had the highest net spend in the Premier League
09:25 over the last five years,
09:27 and had bought virtually zero success with it.
09:29 It hadn't looked like challenging
09:31 either Liverpool or Manchester City for forever.
09:34 But the problem at Man United is not the recruitment.
09:37 They do occasionally buy pretty well,
09:39 so they don't often buy for the manager
09:41 or the system he's currently playing.
09:43 And likewise, when the manager identifies players
09:45 and that gets passed on to the recruitment department,
09:47 they often don't do a particularly good job
09:49 in getting good value for that player.
09:51 So to put it in its most simplest terms,
09:53 Manchester United want Dan Ashworth to come in,
09:56 sit at the very center of that wheel,
09:58 and fix every single spoke.
10:00 And of course, what makes Man United confident
10:02 that they might actually get him is that, firstly,
10:04 the club has a much bigger operation
10:06 than Newcastle United currently is.
10:07 So under the FFPPSR rules,
10:11 he'll have his hands tied considerably less
10:13 than he does at St. James' Park.
10:14 And also, he's really good mates with Sir David Brailsford,
10:19 who's involved in the operation there,
10:20 and the chance to just go and work with your pals,
10:23 even for millions of pounds, is a bit of a draw.
10:26 So there you go, that is who Dan Ashworth is,
10:29 why Man United want him,
10:30 and why Newcastle desperately not want to lose him.
10:32 But I'm sure you have thoughts, feelings,
10:34 things in your heart all your own
10:36 on this, so please do get them
10:37 in the comment section below,
10:38 'cause we do like to read them.
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11:00 So until next time, dear friends,
11:03 which is tomorrow, 'cause we publish every day,
11:05 I should have mentioned that before.
11:06 I'll see you soon.
11:07 Bye!