Tottenham Hotspur have had a number of football operations models over the past 20 years, ranging from managers having the primary responsibility for identifying talent to various Directors of Football who oversaw all behind the scenes operations and everything that didn’t involve kicking a ball around a football field. But up until now, they’ve all had one thing in common — former chairman Daniel Levy was the man primarily responsible for negotiating player transfers and sales and for Doing the Deals™, even when men like Fabio Paratici lined them all up first.
Levy of course had a reputation for being a hard-nosed negotiator and one of the toughest chairmen in the Premier League. Who can forget Sir Alex Ferguson quipping that dealing with Levy was “more painful than my hip replacement,” or an unnamed league chairman, saying about Levy’s negotiating style that “Daniel likes to squeeze your balls until your eyes start to water.” That was, as we Spurs fans know intimately, a double-edged sword — Levy pulled off some amazing deals on both the buying and selling style, but it was just as likely to backfire, leaving Spurs holding the metaphorical bag.
Well, Levy is now gone, forced out in a palace coup by Joe Lewis’ adult children, and replaced by former Arsenal executive and CEO Vinai Venkatesham who is overseeing all football related activities, while non-executive chairman Peter Charrington handles all of the non-football and board-related business. And it’s led to some fans wondering just what the heck is happening now — who’s in charge of the transfers? Is Johan Lange the guy? What about Paratici? Is Venkatesham going to be the face of the club in negotiations?
Tottenham have released a new video that explains most of that. Posted on YouTube on Spurs’ official channel, the video explains that what used to be Daniel Levy’s job will be split between Lange and Paratici, with the men working together as Co-Sporting Directors to create a smooth process. This is also confirmation that Paratici, once Tottenham’s Director of Football but reduced to that of a consultant during his multi-year ban on football related to the plusvalenza scandals at Juventus, has been offered and accepted a new major role at Spurs.
The video is worth watching, but here’s a summary of the main points.
The two describe their jobs as “complementary,” with each person having specific areas of responsibility while collaborating on major decisions.
Johan Lange’s new role at the club is a promotion, and his responsibilities are in infrastructure and operations, with emphasis on scouting, performance (medical, sports science, nutrition), data analytics, and the academy. Lange is also effectively a chief of staff for the hundreds of workers at the training ground and stadium, with an emphasis on empowering section heads to do their jobs and fostering a culture of collaboration.
Fabio Paratici’s responsibilities include the “immediate, player-focused, and market-facing aspects of the football operation.” He’ll manage current players, player loans, and pathways from the academy and reserves to the first team, and during transfer windows he will take care of the negotiations and executions of player deals, both incoming and outgoing.
Both Lange and Paratici will work together on the identification and recommendation of player talent, in close collaboration with both Venkatesham and of course Thomas Frank as head coach; it was also noted that the dual-Sporting Director model was one employed at Brentford so Frank would be quite familiar and comfortable with how it works.
This would seem to put each man in the position of greatest strength — Lange oversees the technical side of recruitment and will continue to work with his small army of nerds to find data-driven approaches to talent identification, while the outgoing and charismatic Paratici will take care of the actual negotiations and get the signings over the line. Lange will be the one behind the laptop looking at WyScout profiles, while Paratici will continue to be spotted at the games with wired earbuds connected to his phone schmoozing with various club executives and player agents. The implication is that the role of Sporting Director at a club the size of Tottenham is too large for just one person — it takes a village, apparently comprised of Danish and Italian Sports Guys™.
This structure would appear to address what some perceived as a weakness in the previous model — Lange is very good at finding players, but perhaps not so good at the art of closing deals. Paratici, meanwhile, was born with a phone on his ear and an eye for negotiations. It’s what Double Pivot podcaster Michael Caley called “a Cyrano de Bergerac” front office, and a process former Carty Free writer Joel Wertheimer hilariously summed up in a meme last August.
I’m curious to see how this is going to work, and we won’t have that long to wait — the January transfer window is swiftly coming, and while that’s a weird window it should give us a pretty good idea of how this new system will work. The real test will come this coming summer — there are hints that Tottenham will have money to spend with the club announcing an injection of cash by the Lewis family, and it’s the first major test on how effective this new model will be.
It’s a new era at Tottenham Hotspur, but the club will be managed by familiar faces in elevated roles.
