Scott Munn at Tottenham: Who is he, what is his role, and what will it mean for Paratici?
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 Kane will 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 Athletic anonymously 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.
Tottenham want to have an elite structure in place, and have looked at
Emirates Marketing Project 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 Emirates Marketing Project. Serious injuries have unfortunately hampered him since then.
Aaron Mooy was another success story — rehabilitated at Melbourne City after a run of injuries with St Mirren before joining Emirates Marketing Project and then being sold to
Huddersfield Town for a fee of up to £10million in 2017.
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 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.
