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