Why Man United Want Dan Ashworth So Badly

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.

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Sir Jim ratcliff’s long awaited partial takeover of Manchester United has finally been waved through by the Premier League and looks set to go ahead the first order of business though is potentially one of the most exciting signings in the club’s recent history but it’s not a goal scoring Center

Forward or game-changing Center back rather Newcastle United’s sporting director yes hello there everybody my name is Adam cley you are watching 442 and I here on my actual day off to explain to you precisely who Dan Ashworth is why people think he’s such a big deal and why specifically man united

Are desperate desperate to get him in okay so this is Dan Ashworth any questions actually I will say before I start I’m just going to have an assumption here of you having like zero working knowledge of this guy or the situation now if you’re already a man

United fan or you’ve been following this story closely the first few minutes might seem a little basic and service level but I’m just going to make sure we got all our bases covered and then we’ll get into why this particular three course meal is incredibly meaty and even

More juicy so as we mentioned at the start Dan Ashworth is Newcastle United’s current sporting director he was like a youth team player at Norwich City got released when he was 17 so he never made it in the game itself but since then he’s worked his way up through various

Clubs in England to become considered genuinely one of the most important men in the game in this country he’s the man credited with being The Mastermind behind the England DNA project which of course has seen all the England youth teams go on to dominate pretty much every single tournament they’ve been in

Over the Last 5 Years we’ll talk about this more in a little bit but if england do go on to win the Euros this summer they’ll do so with a pool of young players who’ve almost all come through that project but away from England though Ashworth is probably best known

For being the man credited for turning Brighton into one of the most well-run clubs in the entire world he took over as their technical director in 2019 completely revolutionized how the club operated all of its footballing business and within a year of that appointment they’d gone from finishing 15th and 17th

To finishing 9th and sixth now as I’m sure you know D got slightly sick of hearing last season one of the main things behind Brighton’s success with this incredible model they had off the pitch where they had this fantastic scouting Network they had clear Pathways for these players to get into the first

Team they knew precisely how they were going to develop them and then they were excellent at selling them off for an absolutely enormous profit now it is a massive oversimplification to say this and I will unpack it better in a little bit but Dan Ashworth is the reason they

Ran that way he is one of the main reasons they had that success and in fact so successful was it that when Newcastle United were purchased by pif in Saudi Arabia and they had their choice of anybody in the world to come in and take over the footballing

Operations Dan Ashworth was their top and only target they paid quite the pretty penny to prize him away away from the seagulls paid a pretty a penny of still to get him off the gardening leave or notice as normal people would have to call it and he has been masterminding

The development of Newcastle ever since then that is until if report in the athletic last night from David Olstein ought to be believed now now as Manchester United fans will know s Jim rackliff is not buying the club outright he’s getting a 25% stake in it but with

That comes the burden of footballing operations he will be overseeing the football club from the perspective of the onfield results the recruitment the coaching the talent acquisition the physiotherapy basically all the stuff you’re allowed to do on football manager all the stuff that directly relates to

Football now of course while he will be setting out the vision for all this Jim rackliff is not going to go around the world and Scout players and sign them and tell Eric ten hog who should be playing Here There and Everywhere he is going to build a structure at the club

That will allow them to succeed in this way and just as happened with Newcastle after their takeover the man he really wants to do this is Dan Ashwood so what exactly is a sporting director right well in Dan ashworth’s own words every single footballing department at a club

Is a spoke on a wheel and the sporting director is uh I don’t I don’t I don’t know what the word for the middle of a wheel is the middle of the wheel the The Hub that’s not right is there even a word for this all right never mind that we’re

All visual Learners aren’t we so here is something I have really really badly made and it sort of represents all the departments at a football club and as you of course know the roller coaster of being a football club means that this wheel will rotate with different apartments being more important than

Others as different things are happening might have a really intense run of game so the manager is probably the most important person at the club it might be the summer transfer window so your recruitment Department of the most important people at the club you have loads of injuries so you want to make

Sure you’re well stocked in that you get you get how it works well the job of a sporting director and indeed what Dan Ashworth is considered the best in the country at is being here at the very center of it at all he is not physically

Doing any of these jobs that go around him but he is making sure the people in those positions are a the right people to be doing those jobs and B are sufficiently well supported that they can do them well and this is why I said the way he gets credited for what

Happened to Brighton is a little bit of an oversimplification right Dan Ashworth does not go out and Scout players he did not find CaRu matoma or Alexis mallister or Moises kaiso or any of these great bargains Brighton have turned into their entire business model he did not randomly stumble across them when

Watching a game of football one day he did not recommend to the club that they go and buy them he did not develop them as footballers or organize their loans or devise a pathway to get them into the first team he did not pick them for any

Matches or praise them when they did well and he did not even go out and sell them when they reached the peak of their value but what Dan Ashworth did do is build a structure at Brighton that enabled all of those things to happen every single person involved in those

Journeys he more or less handpicked and instructed and when he did that magic happened and while obviously the workings of the national side are very different to the workings of a club side the way he built the England DNA system from the youth levels right up to the

Senior team has a lot of the same principles after England built s George’s park there still wasn’t really much of a plan for how you identify players at the youngest and you coach them into being full Internationals for their country it was basically just a system of we’ll have different things in

Different places and the cream will always rise to the top and then we’ll have a elite level manager like a Capello or a Roy Hodson or somebody in place who will pick them and then we’ll go and win tournaments and then lo and behold not only did England not win any

Tournaments but they were just hopeless in all of them and getting worse so this whole England DNA structure which if you’ve got like half an hour spare the presentation is still available on the fa website for free you can just go and download it talks about how you then

Have consistency all the way through the national side so that when you do identify players at a young age there’s a clear pathway to developing them into Elite footballers and essentially the very core of this idea was sort of thinking right okay how is football

Going to be played not now but in 5 years 10 years 15 years and can we start to instill some of those core attributes in players from a young age now tactics and systems and formations they will change loads over time you haven’t got to worry about having them all play the

Exact same system but things like working hard off the ball being alert to Transitions basically breeding smarter footballers was what this was all about like case in point when as what I assume is a normal person was the first time you ever heard people really talk about

A press maybe like three or four years ago possibly like five six or seven if you’re a big nerd like me and you sort of follow this stuff well the word press is in Dan ashworth’s England DNA proposal from 2012 12 years ago so we came into England they made sure that

Coaches at every single level were all singing off the same Hy sheet and lo and behold within about 5 years something insane started to happen in 2014 England won the under 17 European championships only their second win of any tournament since about 1993 and then in the next

Cycle three years later they won both the under 19 European championship and the world youth cup for the under 20s and then the following summer they won the under 17 World Cup and then as you probably remember on the most recent cycle of tournaments they won the Under

19 UFA Championship again as well as the under 20 won Euros in the summer just gone just to clarify here right between 1993 and 2017 England won one tournament at Youth Level but then just a few short years after ashworth’s England DNA policy was brought in they won five in

Five years so why do my United won him so badly then well the easiest way of putting this is that while they still do get good results on the pitch and they do have good players and good things do occasionally happen in terms of their overall footballing operations they are

A show now if you are a man united fan or even if you’re not to be honest you probably caught the report at the end of last year about just what a circus it was behind the scenes at Old Trafford they had a deal to sign Frankie dong all

Sorted out but simply couldn’t get enough players off the books that identified Anthony at being worth about 25 million and then in a panic ended up paying 86 for him tenh Haren apparently green lit the transfer of casemiro on the understanding that it wouldn’t impact his ability to get a striker and

Then was told oh sorry that was all the money for the striker fundamentally not a single footballing department at Manchester United feels like it’s being particularly well-run at the minute and where still none of them appear to communicate with each other ever up until Chelsea spent all that money on

Lavia man united had the highest net spend in the Premier League over the last five years and had bought virtually zero success with it that they hadn’t looked like challenging either Liverpool or Manchester City for forever but the problem at man united is not the recruitment they do occasionally buy

Pretty well it’s they don’t often buy for the manager or the system he’s currently playing and likewise when the manager identifies players and that gets passed on to the recruitment department they often don’t do a particularly good job in getting good value for that player so to put it in its most simplest

Terms Manchester United want Dan Ashworth to come in sit at the very center of that wheel and fix every single spoke and of course what makes man united confident that they might actually get him is that firstly the club is a much bigger operation than Newcastle United currently is so under

The ffp Sr rules he’ll have his hands tied considerably less than he does at St James’s Park and also he’s really good mates with s David brailford Who’s involved in the operation there and the chance to just go and work we Pals even for millions of pounds is a bit of a

Draw so there you go that is who Dan Ashworth is why man united want him and why Newcastle desperately not want to lose him but I’m sure you have thoughts feelings things in your heart all your own on this so please do get them in the comment section below because we do like

To read them if you’ve enjoyed enjoyed this video please do consider subscribing to us here at 442 on YouTube it’s the one metric that really helps us grow the channel so whenever you click that button good things happen to me personally and that’s nice isn’t it

Let’s s with the mags on sale my God how pretty does that look all good retailers and the crap ones too and you can get me on Twitter at Adam Cy c l r y and no I will not stop calling it Twitter so until next time dear friends which is

Like tomorrow because we publish every day should have mentioned that before I’ll see you soon bye