Nick Hammond: Leeds’ quiet man – with a master transfer plan — The Athletic 8/3/24
Phil Hay and Nancy Froston
It is January 2012 and Reading have a gentle bout of
promotion fever.
They are sixth in the Championship but form has found them
in the last few weeks of 2011. Their manager, Brian McDermott, thinks they can
do better than the play-offs. He asks his director of football, Nick Hammond,
for one big signing to up the ante: Jason Roberts from Blackburn Rovers.
Roberts, a physical forward, is on the market because
Blackburn will not play him. A clause in his contract means a certain number of
appearances would guarantee him an extension and Blackburn do not want him to
hit the threshold.
Reading will force a transfer through, Roberts will score
six times in six wins and McDermott’s squad will lift the title — but before
that happens, Roberts’ dispute at Ewood Park is a bit of a mess; potentially
too much for any interested club to unravel.
“It was complicated,” McDermott tells The Athletic. “I won’t
go into details but it was very difficult to do. I could see how Jason would
work for us. I could see how he’d fit in, and I felt he’d make a difference.
But I didn’t feel like the deal was going anywhere fast.
“I phoned Nick and said, ‘I need this one, mate. I really,
really need it’. I was putting the pressure on — which I tried not to do. But
he doesn’t get rattled, Nick. He said ‘OK’, he went away and got it done. You
know what happened next. The story tells you why Nick was so good for that
club.”
They have other stories about Hammond at Reading too: his
impact in 2006 when they won the Championship with a record points tally of
106; the way low-cost signings Dave Kitson, Shane Long, Kevin Doyle and Matt
Mills hit the sweet spot of improving the squad before generating significant
profits. But with Hammond, the transfer consultant Leeds United enlisted nine
months ago, the recurring theme about him is one of temperament.
“He deals in facts and gets things done,” McDermott says.
“He’s an incredibly clear thinker and isn’t driven by emotion. I was the
emotional one of the two of us at Reading. He never got distracted from the
process.”
He was the rational, safe-pair-of-hands Leeds needed for the
complex rebuild they embarked on last summer.
Directors of football, or variations on that title, are
everywhere in 21st-century football. They have become such valuable commodities
that Newcastle United believe Manchester United should pay £20million ($25.5m)
in compensation for the services of Dan Ashworth. So valuable that if Liverpool
succeed in tempting Michael Edwards, their ex-sporting director, back into the
role, they might have to offer him the precise job remit he wants and a small
stake in their ownership group. It is a new frontier in football: the battle to
recruit the people who recruit.
In that respect, Hammond and Reading were ahead of their
time. Hammond became Reading’s first director of football in 2002, a newly
created role at a time when the European game was only just giving credence to
that sort of position. Hammond, then 35, was a former Swindon Town goalkeeper
who had finished his career at the Madejski Stadium.
Reading had made him their goalkeeping coach and then gave
him control of their academy, a precursor to the more prominent role of
director of football he would hold for more than a decade. It coincided with
Reading reaching the Premier League for the first time.
To some at the Madejski, the decision to make him director
of football was odd at the outset. As one former player — who works for a
different English team and asked not to be named in this piece — puts it: “The
lads saw him going from goalkeeping coach to director of football. We didn’t
understand directors of football back then, and we didn’t see how that could
happen.
“It didn’t make sense to us because we weren’t familiar with
it. But everyone understands it now and the more you saw of Nicky in that job,
the more you saw how good he was at it.”
At the end of last season, Leeds were without a director of
football. In the wake of relegation, Leeds were without a rudder full stop.
Victor Orta, their former director of football, had resigned at the start of
May after objecting to the desperate move to appoint Sam Allardyce as head
coach for the final four games.
With Allardyce gone, they were without a manager and beset
by contractual clauses that gave many of their prominent players easy escape
routes out of Elland Road. There was nothing like the framework of staff needed
to manage a complex transfer window.
Within days of Leeds going down, it was suggested to their
chief executive, Angus Kinnear, that he bring Hammond on board. Scott Sellars,
the Wolverhampton Wanderers ex-technical director, was another name put
forward. Midway through June, Hammond came on board as a recruitment
consultant, responsible for cutting through bureaucracy and red tape and
getting transfers in and outdone. He had no big public profile or desire for
attention and, even now, there are swathes of Leeds’ fanbase who would not recognise
him in the street. He had been out of club football since providing consultancy
for Newcastle in late 2021.
Quietly and in the background, Hammond was an influential
presence in the process that turned a shambles of a relegated squad into one
that is 10 games from promotion from the Championship, matched United’s record
for successive league victories last month and is on course to set the club’s
best point tally in the second division.
The perception of Hammond is that he would not seek so much
as a footnote in the record of a club’s success — but his part in Leeds’ season
has not been spoken about enough.
Relegation saw the sands in the Elland Road boardroom shift,
with the 49ers Enterprises ownership group agreeing a deal to buy out former
chairman Andrea Radrizzani two weeks later. The 49ers have purposely moved from
a model in which Orta had overarching control over transfers to one that sees
recruitment operated more by committee. They have Gretar Steinsson as technical
director, an appointment made after Hammond’s arrival. Steinsson is largely
tasked with focusing on talent identification, and his team was strengthened
recently by Jordan Miles’ arrival from Aberdeen as head of recruitment.
Kinnear remained in situ as CEO, another means of getting
deals done, and in the summer window, different transfers relied on input from
different directions. Steinsson was key to talking Swansea City into selling
for Joel Piroe. Kinnear’s relationship with Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel
Levy made the loan signing of Joe Rodon possible. Sources at Leeds say Hammond
was highly influential in putting together the approach that landed Ethan
Ampadu from Chelsea, Leeds’ only ever-present player. The £7million purchase of
Ampadu was the first example of the 49ers flexing their muscles in the market,
almost an injection of optimism for a depressed fanbase.
In many ways, Hammond is a product of his playing career. An
aspiring goalkeeper who started as a trainee at Arsenal while McDermott was
there, injuries hindered him and eventually forced his retirement. It is said
that at Swindon, he gave up the No 13 shirt in search of a change in luck, and
whether or not that story is apocryphal, it is not in dispute that he suffered
a broken leg twice before leaving for Plymouth Argyle in 1995 and then Reading
in 1996.
His periods on the sidelines threw up unexpected
opportunities. At Swindon, due to his past connections, he was asked by
Arsenal’s chief scout, Steve Rowley, to do some scouting for the north London
club. Rowley had spotted Hammond as an 11-year-old. The work was done under the
radar, and his Swindon team-mates had little if any knowledge of it.
At Reading, where Hammond had slipped to third choice under
manager Tommy Burns, he was given permission by Burns to assist Arsenal again,
producing hand-written opposition match reports for Arsene Wenger via Wenger’s
assistant, Pat Rice. In a strange turn of events, one day Hammond was called
into Burns’ office for a conversation that Hammond thought would see him
restored to Reading’s starting line-up. Instead, Burns asked for his help in
recruiting a new ‘keeper. Hammond went to watch Phil Whitehead play for West
Bromwich Albion’s reserves and his recommendation set in motion the wheels of
Whitehead’s move to Reading in 1999.
Fitzroy Simpson, the former Manchester City and Portsmouth
midfielder, roomed with Hammond at Swindon and says he “hasn’t changed since
the day we first met”.
“Nick was in massive competition with our goalkeeper (Fraser
Digby) for the No 1 spot,” Simpson tells The Athletic. “They were always back
and forth in the team but you could see from those days that Nick was proactive
in planning for after his career — a lot of us weren’t. He’s an educated guy.
He was one of the more mature heads in a younger body, even then.
“He’s got a global network of trusted people and he’s open
and he’s known the industry off the field for a long time. You have to
reiterate that in a friendship or in business, you can always trust Nick. It’s
impossible to work at the levels Nick’s worked at (without those qualities).”
Alan Pardew was a mentor for Hammond at Reading, one of
several coaches he worked with after finishing as a player in 2000. The club’s
then-owner, Sir John Madejski, admired him enough to create the director of
football role for him, effectively giving Hammond the job of overseeing
everything and making Reading tick.
“He was always about the club,” McDermott says. “Everything
he did, every deal he did for Reading, came down to, ‘What’s best for
Reading?’. He didn’t have agendas and he didn’t make things personal in a
negative sense.” McDermott found that out when Reading, who had passed from
Madejski into the hands of Russian businessman Anton Zingarevich in 2012,
sacked him as manager in 2013.
“I didn’t see that coming,” McDermott says. “We’d lost four
games in a row and I knew how it was in management but they hadn’t given me an
inkling they’d had enough.
“I got to the hotel at the Madejski to see Anton in his
suite and when I went in, Nick tapped me on the shoulder. I wasn’t expecting
him to be there. He said, ‘Hi Brian’ and gave me a look that made me realise I
was getting sacked. I appreciated that because it was better to be forewarned.
“On the way out, he asked me if I still had my car so I
could get home. The club had given me one, as they do. I said to him, ‘I can
leave it here and get the bus if it’s easier’, and we stood on the stairs
laughing. I left Reading without a word to say against him or any bad blood
because he’d been nothing but good to me.”
It is possible that Hammond’s work rubbed off. McDermott is
now a director of football, with Hibernian in Scotland.
By the time he left the Madejski in 2016, Hammond had been
with Reading for 20 years. His exit came as a surprise and what followed after,
a similar role at West Bromwich Albion, was more trying. There were no major
errors, or not of his making, but no major successes either. Though he was
criticised for some of Albion’s recruitment, figures there say the first
manager he linked up with, Tony Pulis, had a tight grip on transfer policy. The
failed appointment of Pardew as manager after Pulis was sacked drew a negative
press too — that Pardew was Hammond’s mate from Reading and as a result, the
partnership was allowed to go on too long.
At that period, though, West Brom’s Chinese owners wanted a
coach with Premier League experience. Having failed to tempt anyone else,
Pardew was one of the few available options Hammond could turn to. West Brom
sacked Hammond in 2018 as part of an internal restructuring and he moved on to
Celtic and then Newcastle, who used him as a consultant before the first
transfer window in which Newcastle’s new Saudi Arabian owners could invest.
Newcastle were pre-Ashworth and without much of an executive structure. Hammond
advised on potential bids and contract offers, helping to scrutinise the
transfer plan. The players signed in that window, including Bruno Guimaraes,
helped Newcastle put relegation fears to bed.
Leeds were crying out for a transfer plan of their own as
they picked up the pieces from relegation last June. Nobody at Elland Road
would deny that the biggest influence behind the direction of recruitment there
is Daniel Farke, a manager who insists on the final say on targets, but Hammond
was part of the interview process that picked Farke out as the best available
option and he carried heavy responsibility for moving players out and bringing
players in.
Farke’s appointment did not happen until July 4. Leeds
failed to complete a signing until Ampadu came in on July 19, 18 days before
the Championship season started. In the last minutes of the window, they were
still scrambling to let Luis Sinisterra join Bournemouth on loan and ensure
Jaidon Anthony came the other way.
Somehow, the pieces fell into place, creating as strong a
dressing room as any other in the Championship. It is easy now, in light of
Leeds’ impetus under Farke, to think that a campaign so good was always in the
offing. In truth, it would have been far easier for last summer to go awry.
For Hammond, this period of his life could span little more
than 12 months. He extended his initial consultancy deal to cover the January
window and the summer window to come but United’s board are still strongly
considering expanding their football management structure again by recruiting
an out-and-out director of football. If that happens and Hammond goes, he is
sure to go quietly, but if Leeds are promoted, he would go with a debt of
thanks.
As one former colleague put it, Hammond’s straight-up style
works in his favour in negotiations. “He doesn’t f*** people and because of
that, he doesn’t get f***ed,” the colleague said. “He’s earned respect in the
game and that lets him get things done.” He leaves exposure to others, and
McDermott remembers him insisting on taking a back seat when Reading celebrated
promotion in 2012.
“He wouldn’t come on the bus or anything like that — I asked
him to,” McDermott says. “He’s not about taking credit, it’s not his style.”
What pushes his buttons then, if not the thrill of
achievement?
“You’d have to ask him,” McDermott says. “I don’t know. He
was purely in the business of doing what was best for the club he was working
for. That’s all it was ever about.”
And exactly the ethos Leeds were looking for as Premier
League status burned around them last summer.