Last summer,
Tottenham Hotspurwere left in a strange situation.
They were forced to navigate that transfer window without a director of football after Fabio Paratici was banned by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) for alleged false accounting and market manipulation while working for previous employers
Juventus. The scope of the suspension was reduced on appeal, but Paratici resigned from his post at Spurs in the April.
Scott Munn’s appointment to the newly-created position of chief football officer (CFO) had already been confirmed by that point, but his start date was pushed back two months until the September. Then, at the end of last June, Gretar Steinsson left his role as performance director after less than 12 months.
It meant Ange Postecoglou, during his first few weeks as the head coach, played a bigger role in recruitment than anticipated along with chairman Daniel Levy while Paratici remained in the background to assist on a consultancy basis. Postecoglou admitted it was an “unusual” dynamic.
Despite these challenges, it proved a successful window as
James Maddison,
Guglielmo Vicario,
Brennan Johnson and
Micky van de Ven arrived for a combined outlay of around £150million ($191m) while
Harry Kane — who had less than a year left on his contract — joined Bayern Munich for €100m.
A year on, everything is completely different. Spurs have transformed their recruitment department in the intervening period and the 2024 summer window, which officially opens today (Friday), will be the first test of this new setup.
Paratici and Steinsson were not the only senior figures to leave Tottenham last year. Chief scout Leonardo Gabbanini inherited some of Paratici’s responsibilities and worked alongside Levy and Postecoglou on signings. It was a streamlined operation which produced positive results (Gabbanini pushed hard for Van de Ven), but the Italian departed in September after the window closed.
“The plan of the club was to have more people and more positions,” Gabbanini told
The Athletic a couple of months on from his departure. “In this world, now we have the ‘head of’ and the ‘chief of’. You have seven steps before you speak with the owner.
“We did an amazing job. Now tell me why I need to step back. Why do I need to be (working) under one or two other people? I want to be in direct communication with the ownership of a club — this is where I can make the difference.
“If I continue speaking directly with the owner, we can do something good. I don’t want to repeat the same (responsibilities) as when I was a chief scout, bringing a list of players for others to sign. I want to be active, like I was in this summer’s market. Sometimes, when you try something you cannot go back.”
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One of Munn’s first tasks as CFO was to pick up the pieces and rebuild. He searched the market for a technical director to replace Paratici and Johan Lange emerged as the top target. Lange had joined fellow
Premier League side
Aston Villa in the summer of 2020 as sporting director and introduced a data-led approach to transfers. He hired Rob Mackenzie, who had previously worked at
Leicester City and Spurs, to lead their recruitment and appointed Frederik Leth as head of football research.
They created a Villa squad which was capable of challenging in the top half of the Premier League, with Lange playing a key role in the signings of
Emiliano Martinez,
Ollie Watkins,
Boubacar Kamara and
Leon Bailey.
After three years as sporting director, Lange became Villa’s global director of football development and international academies following Monchi’s arrival as president of football operations. Within a few months, the opportunity to join Tottenham came up, and Mackenzie and Leth then followed him to north London at the end of 2023.
One distinction between Lange and Paratici is that he reports to Munn, while his predecessor reported to Levy.
Watkins was among the players signed by Villa under Lange (Neville Williams/Getty Images)
Lange and Mackenzie had a limited amount of time to prepare for the winter window that began at New Year but they worked hard to secure the permanent signings of Lucas Bergvall and
Radu Dragusin, while
Timo Werner arrived on loan. Lange’s drive and personal touch were key to completing these deals.
Bayern Munich offered Genoa and Dragusin more money in a last-minute attempt to hijack that move, but Lange and Levy stayed up until 3am to convince the Romania international to turn the Germans down.
Also, Lange flew to Stockholm to pitch directly to Bergvall and then invited him to their training ground, where he met Postecoglou and Levy.
Barcelona also liked Bergvall but their pursuit attracted a lot of attention. The young Sweden international and his family were followed by paparazzi when they went out for dinner with the Spanish club’s sporting director Deco.
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Bergvall appreciated how Lange quietly went about his business and his parents were impressed by the detailed presentation on where he would fit into Tottenham’s first-team plans. The midfielder signed a five-year contract with Spurs on his 18th birthday in February and, to top things off, Lange and Mackenzie took the family to a restaurant in London to celebrate.
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Werner had played for teams with a similar style to the one Spurs use under Postecoglou. The theory was he would only need a short period of adaptation before performing at a high level. After signing on loan from Germany’s
RB Leipzig, Werner directly contributed to five goals in 14 appearances, including setting up
Rodrigo Bentancur’s equaliser in a 2-2 draw with
Manchester United, before suffering the hamstring injury which has ruled the 28-year-old
Germanyforward out of this summer’s
European Championship.
The next stage of Spurs’ recruitment evolution came in February and March.
The club parted company with six of their longest-serving scouts including Ian Broomfield, Augusto Benito and Colin Jackson. Broomfield had been chief scout when Harry Redknapp was manager, then left in January 2013 before returning as a senior scout. Alessandro Sbrizzo, David Butler and Jeff Vetere moved on from their roles too.
Mackenzie oversees the scouting department and plans to bring in up to five new members to flesh out his team. Leth leads a separate group and is in the process of hiring a lead data scientist and data engineer. They will use services from different platforms, including Wyscout, Scout7, Opta and StatsBomb, to analyse players.
Scouts will compile reports of targets and send them to Mackenzie, who then holds discussions with Lange, Leth and Postecoglou. Potential signings need approval from the head coach and Levy before they are pursued.
Data was used under Paratici, but there is now a separate department dedicated to it with extra staff.
Spurs signed some exceptional talent through Paratici’s connections, including
Destiny Udogie and
Dejan Kulusevski, while Vicario and Dragusin were on his radar, but this new structure provides greater stability and should not be impacted by personnel changes. There are checks and balances throughout the process, which should minimise risk.
The counter-argument to that is there are more layers to go through for a deal to be approved, when sometimes in the transfer market you need to act quickly to land a player.
Paratici continued working for Spurs on a consultancy basis last summer (Simon Stacpoole/Getty Images)
During Antonio Conte’s recent reign as the previous head coach, relationships became strained because of his public criticism of the transfer policy. The Italian’s infamous comments about Djed Spence being “a club signing”, rather than one he wanted, are just one example. Mauricio Pochettino also became frustrated towards the end of his time as manager due to Spurs’ reluctance to sell players to fund a needed squad overhaul.
There are always going to be disagreements over transfer plans at any club — that is only natural and it can even be healthy for staff to challenge each other to make sure the right decision is reached. Yet there is clearly far more harmony and trust than in the past at Spurs now. A couple of weeks after the winter window closed on February 1, Lange spoke to the club’s media team about everybody sharing the same vision.
“It’s very important, when we are watching players, that they fit stylistically, but also with the personality of the group that we want to build here,” he said.
“When the scouting team and myself are out watching players, we know exactly what we are looking for. We are completely aligned as a club on how we want to build the squad, which is hugely important. This is not only about Ange or myself: this is a club strategy. This is club alignment.”
The importance of a player’s personality should not be underestimated.
Gabbanini may no longer work for Spurs but he can still offer valuable insight from his brief time collaborating with Postecoglou.
“Knowing the background, the history and education of the player was fundamental in saying, ‘This is the player for us’,” Gabbanini said. “Ange is the same; he wants to know the person, he wants to know the man behind the player. So it was a high level of scouting with a focus on the player as a person.”
There have been other changes, too.
The emerging talent department has been merged into the first-team recruitment setup. Andy Scoulding, the head of football strategy, now focuses more on loans and contracts for youth-team players.
Last week,
The Athletic reported Jack Chapman is set to be appointed as the new head of academy recruitment. Chapman has performed a similar role at
Southampton for the last 12 months having moved from fellow Championship club
Swansea City.
Lange has said Tottenham “want to be a destination for the best young talent out there”. Making sure the academy is stocked with players capable of breaking into the first team is crucial. It saves money by making sure they are not reliant on spending to fix their squad issues.
Multiple players from the academy are on the fringes of Postecoglou’s senior squad, including
Dane Scarlett, 20, and
16-year-old Mikey Moore, who is attracting a lot of attention after his performances for England at this summer’s Under-19 European Championship.
Oliver Skipp, now 23, made 21 top-flight appearances in the season just gone but the last graduates to truly cement themselves in the starting XI were Kane and
Harry Winks. Chapman and academy director Simon Davies will be tasked with finding and supporting the next generation.
Tottenham’s recruitment department has gone through a dizzying amount of change in a short period. There has been a high turnover of staff and there is a new model in place.
It would be unfair to judge Munn, Lange, Mackenzie and Leth on what happens in the next couple of months. The success of the changes they have implemented will only become apparent in a couple of
years when, hopefully, Postecoglou’s squad are closer to competing for trophies.
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