Newcastle fans are filled with excitement at the thought of Dan Ashworth becoming our new director of football after and old interview with BT Sport resurfaced.
The ex-Brighton chief is expected take the job at St James’ Park after resigning from his post on the south coast yesterday.
Ashworth’s background includes a five-year stint at the FA – where he became one of the key players behind the successful ”England DNA” programme – followed by him helping transform Brighton from relegation contenders to top 10 hopefuls.
Speaking back in October 2019, Joe Cole and Jermaine Jenas were intrigued by his career when interviewing the 50-year-old alongside Jake Humphrey.
Ashworth’s role would see Eddie Howe still have full control of the coaching and day-to-day management of the playing squad, contrary to what some may believe, however this chat with BT Sport helps explain what he will offer to NUFC:
“The technical director’s role is best described as looking after the interests of the club in a medium to long term.
“My job is not at 12.30 today (matchday), tactical systems or anything like that. That’s Graham’s (Potter) job.
“There’s six things that come to me. The men’s first team, women’s first team, player recruitment, the academy, medical and sports science and the player loan department.
“All of those are medium to long term things such as medical, player loans, the academy, player recruitment, in order to make sure the club is sustainable.
“We spend our money wisely and open up pathways for young players to come through the system. And that’s one of the things that was really important to Brighton.”
Ashworth also spoke about how a modern-day club should operate, with our new owners likely to follow a similar structure.
“What you do is you hire a coach that matches the philosophy the club wants to go.
“What Tony (Bloom, Brighton chairman) wouldn’t do is hire a coach that was totally against the philosophy. My job, as you say, is to stitch that together.
“Then, it is about making sure the U23s, the 18s and the academy put the right plans around the young players, we get them out on loan in the right places, to give them every chance of being able to play for Brighton and play for Graham.”
“Our views is if you keep changing the head coach every sort of 14 months or so, which I think is about the average lifespan of a manager unfortunately nowadays, and then you go from one philosophy to the other, you’ve got no chance of joining up your loans, your academy, your development programme and your player recruitment.
“You end up having to change 16, 17, 18 players in order to change the philosophy.
“It’s about long term planning in order to get the best out of the resources.”
What you seem to have overlooked is that the owners determine the vision – the Technical Director just carries out their demands, plus, the responsibilities of the Tech Dir at one club could be different to his responsibilities at another.
Responsibilities can pass between the the owners, the tech dir. and the manager/head coach depending on how its all agreed at the club.
The role of the Technical Director is still pretty much in it’s infancy in Premier League clubs and the “job description” is very fluid. This is shown straight away when Jenas was under the assumption that the Technical Director made the decision to sack the manager.
BykerBill(Quote)