Dan Ashworth – the sporting director Manchester United want to lure ...

Newcastle United’s owners lauded him as a “key hire”. Industry insiders say he provides immediate “executive credibility”. Kevin Thelwell, Everton’s director of football, has described him to aspiring administrators as “the best director of football this country has produced”.

Dan Ashworth is no stranger to being hunted for big jobs and now less than two years after being appointed Newcastle’s sporting director, he has been identified by Manchester United as their main target for the same role.

In 2022, Ashworth assumed responsibility for Newcastle’s “overarching sporting strategy, football development and recruitment at all ages”, a key position as they rebuilt post-takeover. He has fulfilled similar all-encompassing roles at Brighton, the FA — where he helped construct the “England DNA” but also became engulfed in a scandal that saw him hauled in front of MPs — and, firstly, at West Bromwich Albion.

Tony Mowbray, the West Brom manager at that time, says Ashworth was “the glue that made everything else at the club stick together”.

No agreement has been reached for the 52-year-old to embark upon the potential switch and any move for him will not be straightforward given he is contracted to Newcastle United. A significant period of gardening leave is anticipated if Ashworth does agree to the switch, while Newcastle are expected to demand seven-figure compensation for their sporting director if Manchester United attempt to release him from his notice period early.

Sir Dave Brailsford, INEOS’ director of sport who is playing a key role in their reshaping of Manchester United, has known Dan Ashworth for several years. The pair both worked at the FA in 2016 and have kept in touch since.

Manchester United’s interest is also longstanding. When Ashworth was leaving Brighton for Newcastle in 2022, Sir Alex Ferguson advised new chief executive Richard Arnold to make an approach. Arnold contacted Ashworth to sound him out, but when it became clear the role would have been working under football director John Murtough rather than as his superior, Ashworth declined to enter proper talks.

Murtough’s future is now in doubt as INEOS begins reshaping Manchester United’s football operations after Sir Jim Ratcliffe agreed a $1.3billion (£1.03m) purchase of 25 per cent of the club and the situation is expected to develop rapidly, with Ashworth thought to be open to the opportunity of playing a part in the new era.

This is the story of the man Manchester United are pursuing and what he has achieved in football so far.

“Dan took a lot of the burden off me,” Mowbray says. “I’d even call Jeremy Peace a bit of a visionary for appointing him.”

When Ashworth was approached by Peace, then West Brom’s chairman, in late 2007 and offered a promotion from running their academy to sporting and technical director, he was bemused. Although commonplace in the structure of continental clubs, particularly in France and Italy, the executive footballing position between the boardroom and manager was rare in England then.

“I didn’t really know what it was,” Ashworth told the Coaches Voice.

Essentially, he was being given overall responsibility for the day-to-day running of the whole football side of the operation.

At West Brom, he oversaw four departments; at Brighton, who he joined in early 2019, that swelled to seven — the men’s first team, the women’s first team, recruitment, loans, academy, medical and sports science, and psychology and mental wellbeing. At Newcastle, he has assumed an even wider-ranging role.

“I always draw that I sit in the middle of the wheel and on the outside is the head of each department,” Ashworth told The Athletic in February 2020. “The job of the technical director is to just keep that wheel spinning by connecting all those spokes together and, when one of those heads of department leaves, recruit them.”

The way Mowbray describes Ashworth is as someone “who fills in the gaps that need filling to make everything run smoothly”. Alex Horne, who was FA general secretary when Ashworth was at the English game’s governing body, refers to the role as the “conduit between otherwise separate departments”.

“He’s a delegator and a strategist, which is where football is heading,” says a former colleague who worked closely with Ashworth, speaking anonymously to protect relationships. “He hires good people and he manages them, laying the groundwork and putting the processes in place to let people get on with their jobs.”

The position requires a “unique skill set”, believes Adrian Bevington, the former Club England managing director who is now director of football strategy with CRED Investments. “And Dan’s background makes him perfect.”

Ashworth’s career trajectory is certainly distinctive.

He was a speedy and athletic, if technically limited, right-back in Norwich City’s academy but was released aged 17.

Having worked as a PE teacher, Ashworth combined coaching — studying for his badges as a teenager and eventually achieving the UEFA Pro Licence — with playing semi-professionally for St Leonards and Wisbech Town in England and West Florida Fury in the U.S.

Then came his first full-time opportunity at Peterborough United, where he rose from education and welfare office to academy director by 2000. He coached every age group, drove the minibus, washed kits and brought through players including Matthew Etherington, who would go on to make almost 300 Premier League appearances, and 58-cap Wales international Simon Davies.

“Even then, Dan made an impression,” says Barry Fry, then Peterborough’s first-team manager. “The lads always found his sessions stimulating, different. It was never, ‘Do it this way’. He’d encourage them to problem-solve. He was always a very deep thinker, looking at ways to improve the whole club.”

Following a three-year stint as director of Cambridge United’s centre of excellence, he was reunited with Aidy Boothroyd, a former Peterborough academy colleague, at West Brom in March 2004. The pair established the West Midlands club’s academy and, when Boothroyd left for Leeds later that year, Ashworth became academy director.

Ashworth bought a house near Wolverhampton and, although he lived on the same street as Paul Barber, the chief executive, and Graham Potter, the head coach, while with Brighton, he retained his West Midlands base — something he has done during his time at Newcastle, splitting his time between there and Tyneside.

It was Ashworth’s “exceptional work” developing young players that so endeared him to Peace, believes Mowbray, and is why, when Simon Hunt left after just six months as West Brom’s first technical director, the chairman turned to him.

With the role still ill-defined when he took it on, Ashworth was able to hone it to suit his strengths. He helped secure plans for a new training ground with underwater cameras, an anti-gravity treadmill and a hydrotherapy pool, while data became central to training, with GPS tracking and injury rehabilitation software.

While he watched more than 300 matches a season searching for transfer-market bargains, Ashworth told the Training Ground Guru Podcast it is a “misconception” that sporting directors “just do recruitment”. At the FA, he established a course for club-level sporting directors and 20 executives attended the initial session. All had varying titles and held differing remits — with some specialising in recruitment, others in youth development and others in coaching.

Ashworth sees his role as being wide-ranging but with a focus on overseeing appointments for a club’s long-term interest.

“Historically, certainly in this country, it was more the manager who would choose the head coach, youth-team coach, reserves coach, head of recruitment, physio,” Ashworth said. “Consequently, if and when the head coach or manager leaves, you’ve got wholesale changes rather than just tweaking and changing one or two heads of departments, which is what you would do in any other business.”

Of course, Eddie Howe, the head coach, was already in situ at Newcastle when he arrived, as was Steve Nickson, their head of recruitment.

Ashworth has been in post for almost two years and has retained most departmental heads below him at Newcastle, as well as appointing or promoting others to lead the new departments he has overseen the creation of. Nickson remains the head of recruitment, while Howe, who transformed Newcastle’s on-field fortunes after being appointed in November 2021, was identified by Ashworth in his days at the FA as a potential future England manager. Howe was given an improved “long-term contract” during the summer of 2022, which Ashworth ratified.

At Newcastle, Ashworth’s job is to shape the overall vision. He has modernised Newcastle from top to bottom, upgrading the academy, integrating the women’s team into the club and making them a professional outfit, bolstering previous skeleton staff levels across the board, and introducing new departments and fresh roles, such as recruiting Dr Ian Mitchell, their first head of psychology, last October. Ashworth also oversaw the £10million ($12.5m) upgrade of Newcastle’s training ground, while he has been central to the search for a site to build a state-of-the-art facility in the future that could hold the men’s and women’s team, as well as the academy.

“Dan’s very good at bringing people together and getting the maximum out of everything and everyone,” Mowbray says. “He dilutes conflict and oils the machine to make it run seamlessly.”

Bevington says: “He is at the heart of the grand design and putting it into place.”

Being labelled a “very good football politician” may not seem the most flattering assessment of Ashworth, but Stuart White, West Brom’s former head of UK recruitment, does mean it as a compliment.

“Dan has the full-360 skill set — which is rare,” Bevington says. “He’s been a coach before and so has credibility on the training ground, in the academy, but he has also developed the ability to walk into boardrooms and be taken seriously. That is why he can operate at all levels.”

Horne likens Ashworth to a “chameleon” due to his ability to fit in at all levels, while Mowbray believes that adaptability comes from his varied background and his “emotional intelligence”.

“Dan’s just got a lovely manner about him, no matter who he is talking to,” Fry says.

At the FA, Ashworth spoke to coaches and oversaw training courses, while also presenting to the board and building relations with the Premier League and EFL, having succeeded Sir Trevor Brooking, the former England international.

“Dan often led executive-level pitches and was persuasive,” Horne says. “Trevor was so passionate that the Premier League found him hard to pin down, whereas when Dan arrived, he was more diplomatic. He was a game-changer for our relationship with the clubs.”

Crucially, Ashworth has also managed to liaise effectively with head coaches at club level. Howe spoke at Newcastle about the need for a positive working relationship with a sporting director, something neither Alan Pardew nor Kevin Keegan enjoyed with Kinnear and Wise at Newcastle respectively.

Whereas Ashworth was a leading advocate for appointing Potter at Brighton and struck up what was termed a “triangle of trust”, at West Brom he arrived with Mowbray already in place, as Howe was on Tyneside.

Howe arguably has a wider power base than Ashworth, having established it before the sporting director arrived. The head coach enjoys a close relationship with the owners, who regularly visit the dressing room after matches and who rate Howe so highly they told The Athletic in February 2022 that they hope he will be “the next Alex Ferguson”. Andy Howe, the head of first-team technical scouting, followed his uncle from Bournemouth before Ashworth joined and is another prominent voice in recruitment.

At West Brom, Mowbray was even involved in the unsuccessful interview process with external candidates that eventually led to Ashworth’s promotion, but, critically, he “never felt threatened by Dan”.

“You need a technical director and a manager to be on the same wavelength,” Mowbray says. “Jeremy Peace was a bright businessman, but he could be a bit cold on the footballing side if we didn’t win — he didn’t understand why. Dan needed his people skills to keep him calm.

“Rather than me being annoyed by being asked a stupid question by Jeremy, Dan would know how to manage the situation, to be the go-between. You need football people in those positions rather than someone in a suit who is the owner’s man and knows which side his bread is buttered.”

Ashworth listened to all Newcastle’s heads of department to find out what they believed needed to change before acting, having conducted a six-month club audit before presenting his findings to the board. In Nickson and Steve Harper, the former Newcastle goalkeeper who is the club’s academy manager, Ashworth found two like-minded administrators, with both having studied for master’s degrees in sport directorship.

“He’s open to fresh ideas and adopts a unified approach. It’s quite an ability to be able to talk to an 11-year-old academy lad just as easily as you can to the club’s owners, but Dan can do it,” Bevington says of Ashworth.

Interestingly, some who have worked with Ashworth before suggest his knack for talent-spotting is often overstated. He is not at Newcastle to scout players but to aid with negotiating deals.

Nickson leads Newcastle’s recruitment department, while Andy Howe also identifies players and offers an opinion during transfer meetings, and both speak to agents and clubs, as does Ashworth. Eddie Howe retains the final say on all senior incomings, yet it is Ashworth who ratifies and concludes deals.

Ashworth informed Newcastle staff that it would take three summer transfer windows to remodel the squad and he has overseen two of those so far.

At his previous clubs, Ashworth has operated using a three-pronged ‘traffic-light’ system regarding transfers.

The recruitment department would have a vote, while the financial package behind a deal had to make sense, and then the final call was given to the head coach/manager; if all three returned green lights, the club would proceed.

Importantly, this way, the head coach does not have players forced upon him or the autonomy to sign whoever he likes.

“The manager always has to have the final say in my view,” Mowbray says. “Dan would do the deals, but only ever if I had pushed the button on a player I liked.”

At West Brom, Ashworth’s video room became known as The Shire after the Lord of the Rings book and film series, having taken on an almost-mythical status.

Dozens of DVD machines recorded matches played in leagues across the world, which Ashworth and his team watched from cinema-style seats to catalogue individual players by position and style, long before the arrival of Wyscout and other such tools.

Ashworth hosted meetings with more than 20 scouts at a time, entitled Going From Good to Great, to encourage the sharing of information and collaboration. Youssouf Mulumbu, Somen Tchoyi and Pablo Ibanez are three players they discovered for West Brom.

But Ashworth is not as directly involved on that front anymore.

“He doesn’t do a lot of scouting players,” says the same former colleague quoted above. “He does do negotiations but he’ll rely on people he trusts to find good players and then on himself to negotiate well. If people underneath him recommend bad players, he will not be vetoing deals.”

For Ashworth, developing young players is what he sees as his primary role, and that fits with the Newcastle owners’ desire to become self-sustainable.

Under Ashworth, Newcastle have focused on bolstering their youth recruitment. Although he has not led the identification of youngsters such as Garang Kuol, Yankuba Minteh and Alfie Harrison, Ashworth has tried to raise the quality of player at academy level, which is why the scouting department has been bolstered with the additions of Paul Midgley, the head of youth recruitment; Marcel Bout, a senior scout; and introduced new roles such as position-specific analysts. “We have to find ways of investing in potential, not performance,” Ashworth said in October 2022. “That’s the key difference.”

Many at Brighton believe Ashworth’s biggest influence was on accentuating pathways from the academy and loan development for young players. He had a depth chart, by position, for all age groups and would consult it before dipping into the transfer market.

In 2020-21, Brighton achieved their aim of ensuring 30 per cent of their Premier League minutes were played by those nurtured in the club’s academy. Robert Sanchez, Aaron Connolly and Ben White all made the transition from the youth ranks to the first team, with the trio bringing in more than £75m in transfer fees collectively.

“Bringing through players is something he has always been passionate about,” Fry says. “He always got the greatest satisfaction when we were able to produce our own.”

Like Newcastle, and potentially now Manchester United, the FA were willing to wait for Ashworth.

He had a year-long notice period in his West Brom contract and, although he was appointed in September 2012, he did not take up the role until six months later. But, like Newcastle, the governing body was keen to have an experienced figure to oversee the entire footballing operation.

“It was about improving the culture and developing a clear plan,” Bevington says.

“We had this amazing facility in St George’s Park, with all this amazing equipment, but we weren’t really equipped to deliver on a technical side,” Horne says. “Dan came in and just made the whole thing more professional and joined up.”

Ashworth and his team introduced a playing ethos for all English national teams — with an emphasis on playing out from the back and keeping possession — but the England DNA concept also covered the personality traits desired in players and staff members.

A variation of this holistic philosophy also appeared at Brighton.

When Ashworth joined them just over three years ago, the club already possessed an academy document called “The Brighton Way”, but he made tweaks to it to ensure uniformity of approach. Having consistency in playing style, psychology, medical treatment and nutrition was deemed essential.

“Player identification for a national team is difficult, but Dan revolutionised it,” Horne says. “Dan called a meeting of the scouts and it was the first time some had met in 20 years. He found out they all filed their reports differently; there was no continuity in terms of tracking, measuring and storing, and that affected selection and grading. That was one of Dan’s many key tasks as he modernised and future-proofed the FA’s footballing setup.”

An online resource for coaches, including videos of recommended training-session drills, was created, while education programmes were introduced which saw coaches invited to watch England youth teams train and receive lectures in an auditorium.

Ashworth is viewed as one of the architects behind England’s improvement in men’s and women’s football over the past five years, with teams at all levels now regularly challenging at major tournaments.

Yet there is one stain on his CV that will always be hard to wash out, as it involves one of the biggest scandals to hit the FA in the modern era.

Indeed, many observers might argue that Ashworth was fortunate to keep his job with the governing body after being heavily implicated in the alleged cover-up that led to four FA executives being hauled in front of a parliamentary inquiry and issuing a full apology to Eniola Aluko, the former England women’s international.

Aluko had alleged that Mark Sampson, while manager of England Women, had asked her to make sure her Nigerian relatives did not bring the Ebola virus, which caused an epidemic in west Africa in the mid-2010s, to a game at Wembley. Sampson had also been accused of making discriminatory remarks to Drew Spence, a mixed-race player, after her first England call-up, by asking how many times she had been arrested.

Yet the FA’s initial inquiry, overseen by Ashworth, cleared Sampson of any wrongdoing and Aluko was paid £80,000 to sign an agreement that she would not disclose what was alleged.

When the details were eventually reported, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) complained to the FA that the process involving Ashworth was “not a genuine search for the truth”, but rather “designed to close down the complaint and absolve Mark Sampson”.

The case against Sampson was eventually proven after two further inquiries (conducted by an independent barrister), leading him to apologise for what he described as poor attempts at humour. Ashworth subsequently had to explain himself, as did FA chairman Greg Clarke, chief executive Martin Glenn and head of human resources Rachel Brace, in front of the government’s digital, culture, sport and media committee.

At least Ashworth did not humiliate himself in the manner of Clarke, who described allegations of institutional racism as “fluff”, but it was a dismal episode for the FA and it has been surprising, and disappointing, for many of the people who were caught up in the scandal that it is rarely mentioned these days.

It was Ashworth, after all, who told Aluko it was a mere coincidence when, within two weeks of her raising her grievances, her 11-year, 102-cap England career was effectively ended for what manager Sampson called “un-Lioness behaviour”.

Ashworth was the man who appointed Sampson in 2013, who championed him, who exonerated him from Aluko’s complaints and is one of the people the PFA was referring to when it complained of a “sham not designed to establish the truth but intended to protect Mark Sampson”. Aluko accused him of wanting to “protect his recruit”.

Ashworth said he was “trying to put in a measured and balanced view” when he gave personal evidence supporting Sampson to the inquiry he was running, but that “in hindsight it was wrong”.

Later in the year, he wrote on the FA’s website that “lessons have to be learned and I personally am aware of the distress caused to the players involved and of course the negative impact on the rest of the squad and the wider women’s game. It’s something that we all take seriously”.

While Ashworth has been employed by two different Premier League clubs and is now wanted by a third, it largely seems to have been forgotten or overlooked that his fingerprints were all over the Sampson scandal.

If Ashworth found himself somewhat out of the public eye at Brighton, still one of the Premier League’s lesser lights despite reaching the division in 2017, he was thrust back into the foreground with Newcastle.

Newcastle’s new-found status and controversial ownership model — Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) holds an 80 per cent majority stake — placed Ashworth into unfamiliar territory.

“He has lived his life at nicely-run teams that people like. Now he’s gone to possibly the most-hated club within football and it will be hard for him to get cheap deals done,” the former colleague said before he joined Newcastle. “Everyone knows how much money they have and everyone will want to do him over; it’s not somewhere he’s been before.”

Regardless, Newcastle’s owners certainly saw Ashworth as the sporting director they needed to mastermind their St James’ Park revolution, and now Manchester United’s do too.

Additional reporting: Laurie Whitwell. This is an updated version of an article which was first published in 2022

(Top photo: Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images)