When Arsenal announced changes to their hierarchy 18 months ago, many inside the club felt the concrete was setting on a modern football structure.
After some rudderless years, they finally had all the right people in all the right places. The sense was that, with everyone in it for the long haul, Arsenal could move forward from a position of strength.
But after the recent resignation of sporting director Edu, which followed chief executive Vinai Venkatesham stepping down in August and the departure of women’s first-team head coach Jonas Eidevall last month, those foundations are suddenly in need of reinforcing.
For a club to lose two executives of such stature in quick succession is a blow given they have been so stable since Mikel Arteta took control of the men’s first team as head coach, now manager, in December 2019.
Edu, hired earlier in 2019 after six years as sporting director at leading Brazilian club Corinthians and then two as general coordinator of the Brazil national team, provided know-how on football matters. He was a unique profile in that he only retired from playing in 2010 and could relate to today’s footballers. His standing as a member of Arsenal’s Invincibles side from 2003-04 and a 15-cap Brazil international meant he could speak to Arteta on his level and empathise with the pressures that come with top-level football.
Venkatesham, who had worked his way up the ranks at the club since 2010, understood Arsenal inside-out. In his case, there was a year’s notice period before he left so Arsenal could transition smoothly and prepare the ground for Richard Garlick to take over. That process worked well, but with Edu’s sudden exit comes the departure of a wealth of football expertise.
Garlick, as managing director, is widely respected as a capable and well-connected operator, but he was promoted from his post as head of football operations to fill the void created by Venkatesham’s exit. Tim Lewis remains the trusted conduit of the Kroenke family, the club’s American owners, but, like Garlick, he started his career in the legal profession.
The return of James King from the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA — the trade union for players in England) as head of football operations, stepping into Garlick’s previous role, adds a familiar face.
King is credited with playing an important role in progressing women’s football during his time on the Football Association’s (FA) legal and governance group, as well as in the PFA’s work on fixture congestion, but he is another who is moving into a relatively new role. In his previous four-year stint at Arsenal he started in a commercial capacity dealing with areas including partnerships, retail, marketing and ticketing before transitioning into the role as senior legal counsel which led to him subsequently heading up the football operations legal unit, working across the men’s women’s and academy teams.
Garlick had a stint as sporting director at West Bromwich Albion in the previous decade, but his rise to managing director at Arsenal was supposed to lessen his day-to-day involvement on the footballing side.
However, what should help Arsenal is that they are owned by Kroenke Sport & Entertainment — which Forbes magazine ranks as the world’s largest privately-held sports group — whose stewardship of five other teams in a variety of top-flight leagues has delivered widespread success using similar templates: last year, basketball’s Denver Nuggets celebrated the first NBA title in the club’s 56-year history, following a run of triumphs during 2022 where, in just over four months, the Los Angeles Rams won the NFL Super Bowl, the Colorado Mammoth became National Lacrosse League champions, and ice hockey’s Colorado Avalanche lifted the NHL’s Stanley Cup.
“The benefit of the organisation my dad (Stan Kroenke) has built has given us the ability to cross-pollinate certain concepts and ideas across similar but different businesses, and those are our teams,” Arsenal co-chair Josh Kroenke told broadcaster ESPN this summer.
Stan Kroenke lifts the trophy after the Los Angeles Rams’ Super Bowl win (Rob Carr/Getty Images)
“When you go through your hiring process, whether that’s your technical director/general manager-type role, a head coaching role, or you’re getting into new commercial enterprise driving the business, there are a lot of similarities, but they are all very different at times. With Sean (McVay, the Rams’ head coach) and Mikel in particular, there is a relative template to putting good people in positions, giving them time and resources to succeed.”
The nature of Arsenal’s hierarchy has evolved numerous times in the nearly five years since Arteta was brought in from Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City staff.
The former Arsenal captain’s job title was changed from head coach to manager in September 2020, weeks after he won the FA Cup to cap his debut season. It was a sign of the power the club were willing to give him, which was not a surprise to some staff who were there when he first got the job.
Some were shocked by just how wide-ranging his knowledge base was when he arrived from City given his only coaching experience was the previous three and a half years he had spent on the blue side of Manchester. It went beyond only coaching. Arteta did not just possess strong opinions on subjects including player value and squad planning, he came armed with research — and lessons on the latter.
At City, he was insatiable when it came to learning how an elite club functions. The move north after retiring as an Arsenal player in the summer of 2016 served as the perfect grounding for him and one of his big learning moments came from the work he did with their analysis department on which kinds of squad blends establish periods of sustained dominance, which he championed and helped become a part of transfer policy.
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The next evolution involved Edu being named sporting director in November 2022. It was a promotion from the original role of technical director he had been hired for in 2019. Both positions were firsts for a club that had revolved around previous manager Arsene Wenger for almost two decades.
Arteta and Edu forged a strong relationship with Venkatesham. Arteta reported directly to him, a relationship between manager and chief executive that does not tend to exist at other clubs. It was felt to be the right dynamic for the club at the time, given all three were in relatively new roles and Edu was not overly established having only joined five months prior.
Practically, it was never a problem as the trio had a healthy perspective on each other’s remits and Edu’s people skills complemented Arteta’s drive and demanding nature. While power dynamics can shift over time, it was felt that they developed together and grew into each of their roles.
Lewis’ appointment as vice-chair in March 2023 has created a better connection between management and the ownership as he sits at the top of the hierarchy when it comes to those on the ground and is very involved in the day-to-day activities of the club.
As he is both a board member and executive vice-chair, he was on the football committee alongside Arteta and Edu, which means they both had a direct route to the board for some time. Even outside the committee, Lewis has had personal relationships and dialogue with both as, occasionally, has Josh Kroenke.
Whether Arsenal now review that structure remains to be seen, but will Arteta reporting straight to the top rather than the new sporting director be palatable for whoever Edu’s successor turns out to be? It would certainly remain an outlier, but it speaks to the power the 42-year-old Spaniard holds despite this being his first job in senior management.
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Jason Ayto has served as assistant sporting director since those structural changes 18 months ago. He started at the club in 2014 as an analyst before moving into scouting and working his way up the ranks.
In summer 2020, there was a major cull of scouts, with the three most senior figures in that area — head of international scouting Francis Cagigao, head of UK scouting Peter Clark, and former Reading and Leeds United manager Brian McDermott — all being let go, along with head of football Raul Sanllehi. Within a few months, director of football operations Huss Fahmy had also left.
Edu, left, and Arteta delivered the FA Cup to Arsenal fans in 2020 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Ayto was one of the beneficiaries of this reset. He quickly developed a strong relationship with Edu following the Brazilian’s arrival and with the chain of command gutted, was able to climb the ladder to become chief scout in 2021. His expedited rise means some of those who were ousted do not think fondly of him, but inside the club, he developed a strong reputation as Edu’s right-hand man.
Last March, Ayto moved into the role of assistant sporting director and is said to have been Edu’s eyes and ears. He is a talent-spotter at heart, but his remit has grown. One of his strongest skill sets, according to those who have worked with him, is his knowledge of different elements of the club. He understands data, scouting and the academy on a granular level, a result of his 10 years at Arsenal in a variety of positions, which means he can have an in-depth conversation with staff about any part of the jigsaw.
Ayto’s role was to filter Edu’s workload and allow him to handle the big-picture strategy by taking a lot of the day-to-day activities off his plate. He was the buffer. One player’s agent says that on a trip to the club’s London Colney training ground, if you saw one of the two men, you would usually see the other soon after. Likened to the vice-president’s role in American politics, Ayto was the running mate who stayed invisible in the shadows.
When it came to targeting potential signings, Ayto was often the first point of contact for the player’s agent and would bring both parties together to begin the discussions. Edu was the one with the interpersonal ‘soft skills’ to bring deals to life and Ayto would put them into practice on the player side, with Garlick often doing the negotiating. Ayto is the face and mouthpiece; the relationships guy. Having the ability to switch between English, Spanish and Portuguese means he should be able to take over the communication part of Edu’s job in the short term, but he is not seen as someone likely to step into a figurehead role yet.
Head of recruitment James Ellis is another senior figure whose rise over the past three years should be noted. He joined from fellow London side Fulham in 2021 as a UK scout, having been hired by club-appointed headhunters, and was promoted to his present position in March last year.
Those who have worked with Ellis praise his scouting knowledge and point to his widened remit across the men’s, women’s and academy teams as testament to how well-regarded he is internally at the club.
After his arrival from Fulham, Arsenal’s signing policy switched to a Premier League-centric one, with Aaron Ramsdale, Ben White, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesus, Leandro Trossard, Jorginho, Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and David Raya all joining from other clubs in the division. It was a change in the performance plan to deliver players with less risk attached to them and it returned favourable results.
Ellis is said to be a straight talker able to challenge when necessary and, even though the deals to make them Arsenal players were not completed, he has brought some top youth talents to the club’s premises, including Jude Bellingham.
He also worked alongside future Brighton and Chelsea manager Graham Potter at Ostersund in Sweden, where he was in charge of recruitment but functioned as more of a de facto sporting director. It could be the case that Ellis progresses into that role later in his career.
Sporting directors, Edu included, tend to be viewed through the narrow prism of what happens in transfer windows, but people at Arsenal point to the holistic changes he enacted in 2020 as the most important piece of work during his tenure.
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It was the final iteration of the club’s structure, which saw the streamlining of the recruitment and analytics departments. Edu changed the model from having a number of scouts on the ground to a more centralised operation based at London Colney, on the city’s northern outskirts. Everything was brought in-house, with more emphasis on data and an increase in the number of video analysts on the recruitment side.
This was an overhaul of a setup which had become bloated and had a clear separation of power between the recruitment and analytics departments, which had evolved from the club’s 2012 purchase of data provider StatDNA. Edu sought to make that line invisible, to bring alignment between analytics and recruitment. Rather than the two separate processes existing on different wavelengths and producing different findings, they were merged into one entity.
It was known as the football intelligence unit. It may not generate headlines in the way a mega-signing does, but for the people operating within the new structures Edu created and built over time, it gave them a unified way of working that had been sorely lacking.
Arsenal have one of the most well-resourced departments in football and their work has been refined as it has moved closer under Edu, but it has been very much at the forefront for the past decade, with previous work on the academy pre-dating the Brazilian’s arrival.
The efficiency of the new-look department improved and it helped fine-tune Arsenal’s recruitment. Their success rate has subsequently been very strong, but part of that was moving away from the idea that the football intelligence unit only serves to aid individual signings. Its function was to use data to underpin squad planning, ascertain where the team were on an envisioned five-year journey and understand what their peak performance looked like. From that, the club could better understand whether they had to enter into the transfer market, but they had a broader impact on the first team with bespoke research.
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Edu is described as infectiously warm, with a personality that brought people together and helped them become more than the sum of their parts.
The analytics section started small, but its remit grew to encompass the academy as Edu drove a one-club policy in which the heads of department run the men’s, women’s and academy teams in parallel.
The challenge for Arsenal now is to find a replacement who can fit into this structure.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
