The Sporting CEO football model challenges the assumption that club chief executives must come from commercial or finance backgrounds. While financial stewardship matters, this default bias overlooks a structural reality: the core product of any football club is sporting performance. Consequently, clubs that misalign leadership with their primary function invite decision-making friction, strategic incoherence, and organisational instability.
This article examines the case for Sporting CEOs in football. Additionally, it explores three emerging roles that could become widely adopted across clubs operating within the right structural context: Head of Sporting Strategy, Assistant Sporting Director, and Women’s Team CEO.
Why Football Needs Sporting CEO Leadership
Most football clubs operate with a CEO whose expertise lies in revenue generation, cost control, or investor relations. However, these competencies are necessary but insufficient. The commercial function exists to serve the sporting mission, not the reverse. Therefore, when leadership lacks fluency in football operations, recruitment cycles, performance dynamics, and coaching frameworks, strategic misalignment follows.
The German model provides instructive contrast. At Bayern Munich, Max Eberl holds the position of Board Member for Sport, sitting on the executive board alongside the CEO and CFO. Importantly, this is not a subordinate sporting director role reporting into a commercially-oriented CEO. Instead, Eberl operates as a co-equal executive with direct responsibility for football strategy, squad construction, and sporting performance. As a result, the structure ensures that football decisions are made by someone with football expertise at the highest governance level.
Bayern Munich’s Sporting CEO Structure
Bayern’s three-person executive board comprises Jan-Christian Dreesen (CEO), Michael Diederich (CFO), and Max Eberl (Sport). This configuration reflects a clear design philosophy: strategic decisions affecting the sporting product should be owned by someone with the knowledge and credibility to make them well. Furthermore, Eberl’s track record at Borussia Mönchengladbach and RB Leipzig demonstrates precisely the kind of market intelligence, talent identification, and organisational development capability that distinguishes elite sporting operators. For more detail on how German clubs structure these roles, see the Bundesliga’s explainer on sporting directors.
The underlying principle is straightforward. Football clubs are not generic businesses with interchangeable leadership requirements. Because their primary value driver is competitive performance, they require domain expertise at the executive level. This Sporting CEO model ensures football logic drives strategy rather than being filtered through commercial intermediaries.
Head of Sporting Strategy
The Head of Sporting Strategy is an emerging role designed to bridge performance operations and long-term strategic planning. Typically, this position reports into the Sporting Director and exists to insulate leadership from short-term volatility while ensuring alignment across football departments.
Newcastle United appointed Jack Ross to this role in July 2025. He reports into Sporting Director Ross Wilson, who joined from Nottingham Forest in October 2025. In this capacity, Jack Ross develops a consistent sporting philosophy across men’s, women’s, and academy football. Moreover, the role encompasses loan and emerging talent strategy, strategic club partnerships, and cross-departmental coordination.
The logic behind this role is clear. Sporting Directors face increasing demands from transfer windows, contract negotiations, and immediate squad management. Meanwhile, the Head of Sporting Strategy absorbs the medium-to-long-term planning function. This separation ensures that data, analytics, and trend analysis inform direction without being subordinated to short-cycle pressures.
Core Functions of Sporting Strategy Roles
First, the role supports leadership with strategies that use data, analytics, and trends to inform long-term success and insulate the organisation from short-term changes.
Second, it provides expert facilitation across coaching, scouting, medical, and performance teams to develop and maintain alignment with strategic objectives.
Third, it coordinates cross-functional planning to ensure recruitment, development, and performance systems operate as an integrated whole.
Ultimately, this role makes particular sense for clubs seeking to professionalise decision-making without overloading existing Sporting Director capacity. By creating this layer, clubs ensure that strategic insight is not lost to operational urgency.
Assistant Sporting Director
The Assistant Sporting Director role has evolved from administrative support into a critical layer of institutional resilience. As examined in detail in The Rise of Assistant Sporting Directors, this position now functions as the connective tissue between strategic direction and operational execution.
Modern football operations are too multifaceted for a single Sporting Director to own every function. As a result, Assistant Sporting Directors absorb day-to-day responsibilities that are fundamental to competitive edge but require sustained attention. Typical remits include analytics coordination, loan management, academy integration, and recruitment logistics.
Premier League Examples
Examples across the Premier League illustrate this pattern clearly. At Crystal Palace, Ben Stevens earned promotion to Assistant Sporting Director after excelling as Head of Performance and Recruitment Analysis. Similarly, at Liverpool, David Woodfine returned as Assistant Sporting Director following his tenure as Director of Loan Management. At Norwich City, Neil Adams transitioned into the role from Loans Manager, where he now aligns recruitment, player pathway management, and academy development.
These appointments share a common logic. Each individual brings deep operational knowledge and institutional memory. Consequently, the Assistant Sporting Director role ensures continuity through leadership transitions, protects process integrity, and prepares future executives through structured succession planning.
Structural Benefits
The role delivers distributed workload that prevents Sporting Director overload. Additionally, it preserves institutional memory that survives personnel changes. It also creates a clear succession pathway for emerging football executives while providing operational depth in functions that require sustained attention.
The most progressive clubs no longer view Assistant Sporting Directors as transitional figures. Rather, they embed them within the architecture of sustainable high performance.
Women’s Team CEO
Whether a women’s team requires a dedicated CEO depends on structural context. Where a women’s team operates alongside a men’s team under common ownership, the case for a separate Women’s Team CEO becomes compelling under specific conditions.
The Women’s Super League has undergone significant governance transformation in recent years. WSL Football (formerly Women’s Professional Leagues Limited) now operates as an independent, club-owned entity. Under CEO Nikki Doucet, the organisation secured substantially increased broadcast and sponsorship revenue, including a £65 million five-year deal with Sky Sports and the BBC announced in October 2024. This milestone signals the commercial maturation of the women’s game.
When a Dedicated CEO Makes Sense
This maturation creates organisational complexity that shared leadership structures struggle to absorb. Women’s football increasingly operates on a distinct commercial cycle, with different broadcast partners, sponsor portfolios, and fan engagement dynamics. Furthermore, player welfare, facilities, and squad management require dedicated executive attention. Regulatory requirements and governance expectations are also diverging from the men’s game.
A Women’s Team CEO provides dedicated executive ownership of these functions. Specifically, the role ensures that the women’s operation is not subordinated to men’s team priorities. It also guarantees that commercial opportunities specific to women’s football are fully exploited. Finally, it ensures that strategic direction reflects the distinct competitive and market dynamics of the women’s game.
Several conditions favour a dedicated Women’s Team CEO. The women’s team should operate at a level (WSL or equivalent top tier) where commercial scale justifies dedicated leadership. The parent club structure should risk priority dilution, with women’s operations potentially treated as secondary. Revenue streams, broadcast relationships, and sponsor portfolios should be sufficiently distinct to require separate commercial strategy. Additionally, regulatory and governance requirements should warrant dedicated executive accountability.
However, where these conditions are not met—for instance at clubs with women’s teams operating at lower tiers or with limited commercial infrastructure—a dedicated CEO may introduce unnecessary overhead. The role makes sense only where scale, complexity, and strategic distinctiveness justify the separation.
Sporting CEO Football: Core Structural Principles
These roles—Sporting CEO, Head of Sporting Strategy, Assistant Sporting Director, and Women’s Team CEO—share a common design logic. Each represents a response to the limitations of concentrated authority.
Football clubs have historically relied on singular figures to absorb impossible breadth of responsibility. Consider the all-encompassing manager who controlled every sporting decision. Or the unicorn Sporting Director who owned recruitment, performance, academy, women’s football, and governance alignment simultaneously. Or the commercial CEO who oversaw football operations without football expertise.
These models are structurally fragile because they concentrate risk in individual capability, create decision bottlenecks, and fail when leadership transitions occur. In contrast, the Sporting CEO approach distributes authority across defined domains. This method ensures that institutional knowledge, process integrity, and strategic alignment survive personnel change.
Ultimately, the clubs that endure are those designed to absorb change without resetting their identity, processes, or decision logic. Football leadership teams built around Sporting CEO principles, not hero figures, provide that architecture.
This article builds on previous analysis of football leadership structures. See also: Technical Director, Sporting Director, and Directors of Football, Football Leadership Teams Replacing the Unicorn Sporting Director, and The Rise of Assistant Sporting Directors.
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