The story of Tottenham Hotspur’s 2025-26 season has not only been one of struggles on the pitch. It has also been one of unprecedented senior staff churn.
It would take all day to list everything that has changed over the last year, the chain of events that started with Peter Charrington joining the board in March and then Vinai Venkatesham agreeing to join as the club’s first ever chief executive officer. If you are reading this story, you may well be familiar with the outline.
But there is still more to come. And one of the pressing considerations right now concerns the identity of the new sporting director that Tottenham are working to bring in. This is the search to find the candidate to replace Fabio Paratici, who was one of the club’s two sporting directors from 15 October last year until the end of the January transfer window, when he left to take over at Fiorentina.
For the last month or so, Tottenham have been reduced to just one sporting director, in the form of Johan Lange. He has spoken publicly about the events of this season, first to Tottenham’s in-house media after the January transfer window and then to journalists last month. The club want someone else alongside him to return to the twin-director model from earlier in the season.
To that end, Tottenham have enlisted the help of Excel (formerly Nolan Partners), a headhunting agency who specialise in placing candidates in sport executive roles. They are currently in the process of reaching out to candidates who fit the profile of the job, compiling a longlist of options to present to Spurs.
The rough idea for the job is to find someone who is used to working within a structure, not necessarily as the sole football decision-maker, but perhaps more like a No 2 in a system, arguably more akin to a technical director. The role would involve working with the players and the head coach, along with agent networking and transfer negotiations. The pitch is that this is a job to work alongside Lange, rather than replacing him.
With an executive search company leading the process at this stage, discussions with potential candidates can take place in the background before the club itself gets formally involved. Ultimately it is too early to say who will be on the long-list.
But what sort of executive might fit the role? The highest-profile name to be publicly linked elsewhere this week to the position was Paul Winstanley, one of Chelsea’s two sporting directors. Winstanley has been a key figure at Chelsea under the BlueCo ownership and, along with co-sporting director Laurence Stewart, he signed a new deal last year to secure his future at Chelsea until 2031. The strength of his position at Chelsea and his relationship with the ownership could well render a move unlikely.
Dougie Freedman was also mentioned in reports earlier this week, and the former Crystal Palace sporting director has the sort of experience that could appeal to Tottenham. He worked for eight years under Steve Parish, fitting into Palace’s structure and building a very competitive team on a budget. But Freedman now works for Al Diriyah in Saudi Arabia, whom he only joined last year.
Part of the challenge in this process will be the fact that many of the candidates will be in jobs with rival clubs, and if they have to serve a notice period or gardening leave, then Spurs may not get their chosen person in until the summer.
The other challenge for the club will be finding the right candidate to come and work in the very specific structures that now exist at Spurs.
The fact that Tottenham are recruiting for this position proves their commitment to a joint-director model, with two people in the job rather than just one. This is the case at Chelsea, where Winstanley and Stewart are in those roles, but it is not always common practice across the rest of the Premier League. It is more usual to invest the power in one person.
Anyone arriving at Tottenham as a new sporting director would find themselves working in a more collaborative environment than they might be used to. Paratici had only been in this role for two months when he decided — with personal reasons also a factor — to leave for a position of total control at Fiorentina.
So much has changed at Tottenham this year, but nothing more profoundly than the inversion of the decision-making dynamic. For not just years but decades, Tottenham was run by Daniel Levy and those close to him with a remarkable centralisation of power. It was a hands-on personal rule that felt like something from another era.
Now, six months after Levy’s shock departure, Tottenham is run in a very different way. Power is less concentrated. CEO Venkatesham has daily responsibility for running the club, with Lange overseeing the football side (along with, eventually, the new sporting director). Venkatesham is accountable to the board, while the owners, who are represented on the board but do not sit on it, are consulted on major decisions. The challenge, as within any football club, is to make sure that the decision-makers are aligned and there is clarity about roles.
Tottenham are very confident in their new structures and in their appeal to candidates. The question that those candidates may ask themselves is where they would fit within Spurs’ collaborative model, and how much individual power they might have.