- Jun 8, 2021
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The latest step in Tottenham Hotspur’s evolving football operations was to confirm last week that Scott Munn will be joining in a new chief football officer role.
Munn, who until accepting the Spurs job was the chief executive of City Football Group (CFG) China, will join the Tottenham board and take charge of all footballing departments on July 1, including the academy and the women’s team. He will effectively be Levy’s No 2, his “eyes and ears”, and will have managing director of football Fabio Paratici reporting into him should the Italian’s ban from all footballing activities by FIFA be overturned.
It’s a significant hire that, coupled with Paratici’s appointment in 2021, sees Levy taking much more of a backseat when it comes to Tottenham’s football operations.
For those reading and asking “Scott who?”, you’re not alone in reacting to the appointment with scepticism. Eyebrows were certainly raised by some in high-level football circles on Friday given that the Australian Munn has never worked in Europe and the scale of the job facing him. Spurs currently have no permanent men’s or women’s first-team head coach, their director of football is banned, and their talismanic top-scorer Harry Kanewill enter the final year of his contract on Munn’s first day in the job.
On the flipside, those who have worked with Munn — speaking to The Athleticanonymously to protect relationships — have been very complimentary and believe he can make the considerable step up.
This is a look at what his hire means for Spurs and the kind of person and operator they have appointed. A cycling fanatic whose generosity stood out while at Melbourne City, and someone who, as his employment history shows, is not afraid to throw himself in at the deep end. It’s a quality he’ll definitely need when he moves to north London…
As Spurs said when confirming Munn’s hire, this is an appointment that came about in part after “an ongoing review over the past six months of all of our footballing activities”. This review was led by Levy and involved Tottenham bringing in an external consultant to conduct interviews with employees about how all the club’s footballing activities were being run. Hiring someone to oversee the various footballing departments was a consequence of this review. It’s also an illustration that this has been an appointment in the works for months rather than a reaction to the Paratici ban, as some assumed.
Fabio Paratici, Daniel Levy and Tottenham Hotspur: What we know
Tottenham want to have an elite structure in place, and have looked at Manchester City as one example of best practice — it’s no coincidence then that Munn has almost a decade’s worth of experience working for CFG.
It’s also a reflection of the fact Paratici’s expertise is in the recruitment side of things, but the club also needed someone who could focus on the other footballing departments. The women’s team and the academy are two such important areas in which Munn has a proven track record.
Developing young players was a focus of his time at Melbourne City, where he was the CEO for 10 years (from the club’s foundation as Melbourne Heart in 2009) until moving to China in 2019. Under Munn and after the CFG takeover in 2014, City hoovered up much of the country’s best young talent and dominated youth competitions. In 2016, they signed a teenage Daniel Arzani from the Sydney FC academy; two years later he played all three of Australia’s 2018 World Cup games and was signed by Manchester City. Serious injuries have unfortunately hampered him since then. Aaron Mooywas another success story — rehabilitated at Melbourne City after a run of injuries with St Mirren before joining Manchester City and then being sold to Huddersfield Town for a fee of up to £10million in 2017.
A spell at Munn’s Melbourne City helped kickstart Aaron Mooy’s career
On the men’s side, Munn also made some adventurous hires to try and get the team playing exciting attacking football — something that Spurs fans have been crying out for. Most notably by appointing the former Dutch winger John van ‘t Schip as the club’s first ever manager in 2009 and then again four years later. Van ‘t Schip had spent the majority of his career playing or coaching at Ajax and was raised on the Johan Cruyff principles of how to play the game. Bringing him in was a big statement therefore and a significant departure from how football was being played in the rest of the A-League at the time.
The women’s team meanwhile, which Munn oversaw the creation of, achieved massive success. They won the W-League in their first three seasons after being formed in 2015 and have been credited with helping to transform women’s football in Australia. By contrast, Spurs Women are managerless and fourth from bottom of the Women’s Super League.
It is hoped Munn will drive forward these areas of the business at Tottenham, while his commercial background in his previous roles should also be valuable. The commercial side of the business will not be part of his remit, but he was valued highly at CFG for his skill in this area. Especially driving sponsorship deals with companies like Westpac, one of Australia’s big four banks. Signing Tim Cahill in 2016 meanwhile was a deal that was seen as a commercial coup if ultimately a mixed footballing success.
If comparing with City, the way that all the football departments will report into him makes Munn more like CFG’s chief operating officer Omar Berrada, with Paratici — or his replacement depending on how the next couple of months plays out — in the Txiki Begiristain director of football role.
That said, there’s also an expectation that Munn will have more of a CEO role once he officially joins Spurs on July 1 (he’s currently on gardening leave). This was the role he held at Melbourne City and then running CFG’s China operations. Either way, as a board member and in such a prominent role, he will have a voice in the discussions on the new head coach and, if it comes to it, managing director of football. The expectation is that Paratici would be replaced if he were to leave, but Spurs would not want to rush into that appointment, and the hope is that Munn can add another layer of expertise to the search.
Those who have worked with Munn make the point that while the lack of European experience could be an issue, the other way of framing it is that he has a global knowledge and expertise of emerging markets that very few possess. Australia and Asia are already important in a commercial sense — Spurs travelled to South Korea last summer and are heading to Perth in July — and with the potential to increase in a footballing one. One of CFG’s great strengths is how global it is in its outlook, with clubs all over the world, all feeding into a centralised hub that ensures Manchester City at the centre can hoover up the world’s best young talent. South Americans like Julian Alvarez and Gabriel Jesus, signed as youngsters thanks to CFG’s global expertise, exemplify this.
Speaking to those who know how CFG operates, it’s also apparent that Munn, given how senior a role he was in, would have had a lot of exposure to the group’s knowledge base, and the slick operational skill that makes it the envy of most clubs in the world.
As explained in detail here, communication between clubs and centralised CFG staff is constant, with regular meetings and almost daily contact.
The City Football Group and its South American power base
Even while in Melbourne, Munn visited the UK a few times a year to have meetings with senior CFG staff, such as Ferran Soriano, Begiristain and managing director of global football Brian Marwood. All major decisions — be that regarding infrastructure, signing players or changing managers — are co-ordinated with Manchester. So the idea that Munn has been working in footballing outposts and has no knowledge of European football might be a little deceptive.
Munn (right) reported to CFG’s managing director of global football Brian Marwood (Photo: Getty Images)
As ever, there is a question mark over how much autonomy Munn will have at Spurs under Levy. Even with Paratici in situ and supposedly in charge of managerial appointments, it was still Levy who drove and executed the hire of Antonio Conte in November 2021. That said, the last couple of years have seen not only Paratici brought in, but also Gretar Steinsson, Andy Scoulding and Leonardo Gabbanini into senior recruitment roles, with Levy less hands-on than previously.
All four will report into Munn, as Tottenham continue their attempts to boost their off-field staff and improve the structure of their football operations.
The feedback Spurs received on Munn was very positive, and his CV speaks of his ambition and willingness to try different things.
He started his career with the Sydney Organising Committee for the 2000 Olympic Games, then switched to the National Rugby League, before becoming the first person employed by Melbourne Heart when the club was formed in 2009. The club had no offices, training ground or infrastructure and Munn essentially had to build it up from nothing.
The CFG takeover in 2014 was transformational, and the rebranded Melbourne City won their first title with the 2016 FFA Cup (now the Australia Cup and the nation’s equivalent of the FA Cup), but they struggled to compete with the already established Melbourne Victory, and averaged attendances of less than 10,000.
Moving to China in 2019 was another big step into the unknown, uprooting his wife and three children to a country where none of them spoke the language. Those who saw Munn operating in China were impressed with his diplomacy and ability to navigate his way through a challenging market, while developing contacts and building relationships. Being entrusted with looking after CFG’s operations in China, where they have a club Sichuan Jiuniu in the second tier, was a sign of the group’s trust in him.
In general, former colleagues and contacts speak of someone who is straightforward, respectful and has a lot of integrity. A small, slight man, Munn is a keen cyclist, and in Melbourne would go on long bike rides with colleagues. In his late teens, he briefly moved to the UK to work in a school assisting the PE staff.
Munn knows there will be doubts about his ability to step up to the role, but that was the case in Melbourne and China. He is said to be a very good listener while confident without being overbearing was one description.
He also left his mark in Melbourne with his generosity. In 2016, he led the initiative that saw Melbourne City donate at least a dollar for every fan attending the derby against Melbourne Victory, as well as hosting a fundraising auction, to raise money for a young man needing lifesaving cancer treatment.
Spurs feel they have hired someone who can drive forward the various footballing departments and with his global outlook help modernise the operation. His low profile may make the appointment feel underwhelming to some, but going for big names has not exactly worked out brilliantly for Spurs in the last few years. And for those who have criticised Levy for being too hands-on when it comes to footballing matters, this is surely another step in the right direction.
Either way, Munn will have an enormous job on his hands when he gets started and begins attacking his dizzying to-do list.
Blah blah blah read it all before. Insert name of next victim blah blah blah.
