Johan Lange: Who is Tottenham’s new technical director and what will his role entail?

[mawspurs]

With the appointment of Johan Lange as technical director, Tottenham Hotspur’s shake-up of its football operations is almost complete. For now, anyway.

Source: The Athletic

 

[AdamYoung]

Would like to read if anyone with an account is feeling copy and pastey.

 

[BorisLloris]

Johan Lange: Who is Tottenham’s new technical director and what will his role entail?​

By Charlie Eccleshare and Gregg Evans
5h ago
4

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With the appointment of Johan Lange as technical director, Tottenham Hotspur’s shake-up of its football operations is almost complete. For now, anyway.
It’s been a very busy few months, with the three most senior recruitment staff all leaving for various reasons. First, managing director of football Fabio Paratici resigned in April after being banned from football for two and a half years by FIFA (the scope of the ban was reduced on appeal), then performance director Gretar Steinsson left in June, before chief scout Leonardo Gabbanini moved on last month.
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In came Scott Munn in the newly created role of chief football officer, officially starting work on September 21, before Spurs confirmed on Monday that Lange would be joining from Aston Villa, with effect from November 1.
It’s been another year of change, after the summer of 2022 when Steinsson, Gabbanini and head of football strategy Andy Scoulding, who is still at the club, all arrived.
In the new set-up, Munn is in charge of all footballing departments and has joined the Tottenham board. Lange therefore will report to Munn, and so his scope of power will be reduced compared to Paratici, whose job title was managing director of football and reported to chairman Daniel Levy.
The roles of Paratici and Levy will be interesting in this new era. Starting with the former, Paratici has continued to work for Spurs in a consultancy capacity, including during the summer window when Spurs were without a technical director. Alejo Veliz was a signing Paratici was involved in for instance, while Guglielmo Vicario was a player he had admired and made enquiries about before he had left Spurs in April. Gabbanini himself was also a close ally of Paratici’s, though it’s worth pointing out that Gabbanini never stepped up to an interim director of football role in the summer even though he was the most senior member of the recruitment team with Paratici and Steinsson gone.
Now that Spurs do have a technical director, will Paratici still have a role? Given how well thought of he is by Levy, and the fact he’s been at Spurs’ last two home games, it’s hard to imagine the club no longer seeking his counsel. Especially given how impressively so many of his signings — Cristian Romero, Pape Matar Sarr and Destiny Udogie among them — have performed this season.
As for Levy, with no director of football and Munn yet to officially start, he was heavily involved in the summer transfer window just gone. The arrivals of Munn and now Lange should in theory change that, and while the proof is always in the pudding, it feels significant that, for a man accused of being too involved in the Spurs recruitment operation, he has made three major hires in the last few years in those two and Paratici.

Paratici was Spurs’ managing director of football (Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
And there will be another significant hire to come. Not at the same kind of level as Munn, Lange or Paratici, but Spurs are in the process of finding a new chief scout to replace Gabbanini. The new appointee will join a team that includes the head of emerging talent Sebastian Taghizadeh, head of academy recruitment Paul Lowe, lead recruitment analyst and data insights manager Nick Benett and Scoulding, the head of football strategy.
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Spurs are building a sophisticated, more data-led recruitment operation, and the appointment of a technical director will be welcomed by head coach Ange Postecoulou, another new hire this year. Postecoglou has spoken about how strange it was to be conducting a transfer window without a director of football, and although not directly involved in the hiring of Lange, has given the appointment his approval. It would have been a misstep not to bring in someone whose views are aligned with the head coach, especially as it was this disconnect between Paratici and Antonio Conte over the kind of players Spurs should be signing that contributed to the dysfunction that defined the end of the latter’s time at the club.
Postecoglou has also spoken about the importance of a two-way working relationship with his sporting director and the need for them to see eye-to-eye on the kind of players to bring in. Lange knows this too, having worked with Steven Gerrard, who sometimes found Villa’s data-led approach excessive.
Postecoglou, meanwhile, has also said that “we need to keep building the squad, it was never going to happen in one window”, so it will be interesting to see the kind of impact Lange can make in January.
On the surface, Lange should be a perfect fit for Spurs, given some of the qualities he has displayed in similar roles at FC Copenhagen and Aston Villa — namely his knack for developing young players and selling them on for big profits, his data-led approach and a deftness for managing up. At Villa, he was very happy to stay out of the limelight and get on with his work.
In general, Lange was seen as smart, conscientious and a good operator, and he leaves Villa very well thought of by his colleagues, including Christian Purslow, the club’s CEO until this summer. Purslow, similar to Levy, was much more visible, especially compared to Lange who didn’t conduct a single internal or external interview.
Lange was seen as a thoroughly decent person at Villa, which feels more important than it might be given how refreshing Postecoglou’s decency and empathy have been since joining Spurs.
Lange also holds friendly relationships with agents, many of whom like and respect him. That said, he would often do contract renewals with some of the younger players at Villa and was known for being a hard negotiator and someone able to deliver tough news when it was required.
His departure came about because head coach Unai Emery was promised that he could choose his own sporting director, eventually leading to the appointment of Monchi, after Mateu Alemany decided to stay at Barcelona.
Lange was moved from sporting director to director of youth development and international academies as he was still held in high regard by the Villa owners. He has not been based at Villa’s Bodymoor Heath training complex on a day-to-day basis this season, and the sense at Villa was that an attractive offer would soon come in for him — and once it did, Lange would be on his way.
And sure enough, here we are.
There’s a detailed profile of Lange in The Athleticalready, so that’s not necessary here, but looking at his past, especially the recent past at Villa, there are a few things that feel especially relevant to the job he’s taking on at Spurs.
His time as technical director at FC Copenhagen, for instance. Prior to that, Lange, a former schoolteacher, completed his coaching qualifications in his late twenties and started as an academy coach at Copenhagen before becoming a first-team assistant under Stale Solbakken. He then moved to Wolverhampton Wanderers as Solbakken’s No 2 in July 2012, but the pair were sacked six months later to end an entirely forgettable spell in the Black Country.
Lange then returned to his home country as the head coach of Danish top-flight side Lyngby Boldklub. His time at the club was probably most relevant from a Spurs point of view because it was here that he met and became close with Thomas Frank, who was an academy coach there at the time.

Lange during his time with FC Copenhagen (Photo: Jan Christensen / FrontzoneSport via Getty Images)
Frank has since become the figurehead of Brentford, who have become synonymous with a smart data-led approach to recruitment.
Lange has a similar outlook, and he started to demonstrate this back at FC Copenhagen, who he joined in 2014 as development director, before quickly being promoted to technical director.
At Copenhagen, Lange’s data-led methods, which saw live scouting start after target lists had been drawn up based largely on what the numbers were saying, earned the club big profits. Over the last few years, players such as Robert Skov (sold for £9.5m to Hoffenheim 18 months after joining for £900,000), Denis Vavro (£9m to Lazio after joining in summer 2017 for just over £1m) and Robin Olsen (£8.1m to Roma two years after arriving for £630,000) moved on for huge profits. This summer, Icelandic midfielder Hakon Haraldsson was sold to Lille for around £14.7m, having been brought in by Lange for next to nothing four years ago.
At Spurs, the model will be different. Lange will not be signing players to flip them at a profit, but the emphasis will still be on spotting young talent and signing players for under their market value.
During his spell as technical director, Copenhagen remained Denmark’s dominant club and had some notable European successes, including reaching the Europa League quarter-finals in Lange’s final season. Lange is very popular in Denmark, including with his compatriot Frank Arnesen, Spurs’ former director of football, and the pair are said to remain close.
At Copenhagen, Lange developed a reputation as a quiet, very clever operator, and his work caught the attention of Villa, who wanted someone to modernise their recruitment operation.
It’s always tricky to evaluate how a sporting director type has performed at a club since so much of it comes down to how well the players that are signed are coached. What we can say about Lange at Villa is that his brief when he joined in the summer of 2020 was to help build a squad capable of challenging for the top half of the Premier League within three years. By that standard, he was successful: Villa’s three league finishes when he was at the club were 11th, 14th and seventh (qualifying them for this season’s Europa Conference League).
His signings were initially excellent — Emiliano Martinez, Ollie Watkins and Matty Cash all came in during his first window, signed partly after Lange had pulled together multiple data reports on each player, and all have gone on to become regular internationals. Lange was also in regular contact with Martinez through FaceTime calls to remind him of Villa’s interest.
More recent signings Boubacar Kamara and Diego Carlos (fit again after a nightmare first season because of injury) are viewed as successes, while bringing in Jhon Duran was a deal Lange worked extremely hard on. And there are high hopes at Villa for the teenage Colombian forward, who scored a spectacular late goal against Crystal Palace last month.

Lange is credited with helping take Watkins and Kamara to Villa (Photo: Andrew Kearns via Getty Images)
There were plenty of less successful signings too, though. The general consensus is that Villa wasted the £100million they received for Jack Grealish by bringing in Danny Ings, Emiliano Buendia and Leon Bailey. Lange was heavily involved in those deals, and he was also prominent in the decision to bring in Gerrard as manager, which proved to be a big mistake (he only made a small contribution towards the hiring of Emery last year). Likewise, Philippe Coutinho, who was brought in for £17m — largely for Gerrard — was not a big hit, though that was a signing more driven by the manager.
Bertrand Traore, Morgan Sanson and Olsen were also disappointments.
Perhaps more significant than the individual signings though were the processes Lange brought in. He set up a data department that now includes researchers and scientists as he led Villa away from agent-led deals and towards a system where they could plan for the long term.
He brought in Rob Mackenzie, who had a hand in putting together a Premier League-winning squad at Leicester City (and once of Spurs), as head of recruitment, and Alex Fraser, the chief scout, from Brighton & Hove Albion. Frederik Leth joined as head of research in January 2021 and was tasked with implementing a data culture across all departments. Leth and Lange are so close that some in Denmark would not be surprised to see the former follow Lange to Tottenham. Back in 2021, Arjav Trivedi was another to join Lange’s team, moving from StatDNA at Arsenal to be Villa’s lead data scientist.
All four helped play a big part in the process of choosing Kamara last year and Duran in January, as well as modernising the way Villa recruit.
With Kamara, the data team identified the midfielder’s unique profile early on and decided that because he had played so much football for Marseille at an early age, he had a good chance of settling into the No 6 role in the Premier League quicker than others might. He has since gone on to become an important part of Emery’s very impressive Villa team and a France international.
The signing of Ashley Young on a free in 2021 was similarly data-driven. A data package, which included detailed running statistics from an 18-month period at Inter, was provided to show that, despite being 36, Young would still be at the required level.
Such a data-driven approach wasn’t to everyone’s tastes at the club, and some of Villa’s longer-term talent-spotters were moved on. The key is finding the right balance between using what the data and your eyes are telling you, and this will be the case at Spurs too. But Tottenham’s increasing use of analytics should mesh well with Lange’s way of operating.
Lange looked at loans and youth recruitment in a similar way while at Villa. With the former, Lange set up a loan department and gave Mile Jedinak, now a coach at Spurs, the job of loans manager. Choosing the right loans for young players will be another important job at Tottenham, and Villa had great success picking the right moves for players through detailed planning.
Cameron Archer went to Middlesbrough, for instance, because the numbers showed that Michael Carrick’s side created the most chances in the Championship. Archer then joined Sheffield United for £18million this summer, which included a buy-back option for Villa. The 20-year-old Aaron Ramsey was also at Middlesbrough last season, and did so well that he earned a move to Burnley for £14million plus add-ons, and with Villa again inserting a buy-back clause.
Developing young talent at Villa was important to Lange, who was involved in bringing in a number of young players aged between 12 and 17 to improve the club’s underperforming academy. Lange always took an interest in the development teams and led on some contract renewals.
He also created the player care team, fronted by Phil Roscoe (hired from Liverpool), which was credited with really helping new foreign signings settle in.
And like at Spurs, a big part of Lange’s remit, when working alongside Purslow, was moving players on. This wasn’t always easy given the wages of some players, and many went for cut-price deals or sat out their contracts. But Villa got good fees for players like Danny Ings (£12million) and Matt Targett (£15m), which was supplemented by the major amounts they received for academy graduates Archer, Ramsey, Carney Chukwuemeka (£18m) and Grealish (£100m).
We can’t say for certain what this all means for his time at Spurs but Tottenham will be hoping that, after getting their head coach appointment so right in the summer, they’ve done the same with Lange.

 

[AdamYoung]

Thanks. Good reading. Particularly pleased he built in some structure around loans, feels like a miss at Spurs over the last few years.

 

[littlewilly]

Have we decided how to pronounce his name yet? I’ve heard lanj , lang, and langee. I’ll throw another one in - a brilliant former NZ PM was David Lange, and his name was pronounced longee.

 

[Kushal]

Ange, Lange, Flange...

 

[WorcesterTHFC]

Have we decided how to pronounce his name yet? I’ve heard lanj , lang, and langee. I’ll throw another one in - a brilliant former NZ PM was David Lange, and his name was pronounced longee.

It might be 'Langer', as in Bernhard or Justin.

 

[AdamYoung]

I think I saw a Dane on Twitter say its Lang-er.

 

[Springerding]

Lots and lots of data

 

[Nynorsk]

I am Norwegian, you pronounce it Yo-han Lang-eh. For Lange, think of "anger", add an L at the start and take away the r at the end.

 

[littlewilly]

Have we decided how to pronounce his name yet? I’ve heard lanj , lang, and langee. I’ll throw another one in - a brilliant former NZ PM was David Lange, and his name was pronounced longee.

Any need for the dislike @Dwallace​