Resources build the squad. The sporting director is the residual.
The sporting director operates everything above a single squad: recruitment, squad planning, the loan and pathway system, and the manager appointment. This surface rates that decision-maker, the evaluate-the-evaluator lens the engine points at players turned on the executive. Every signing, every renewal, every sale is a bet on an unhappened future, and a track record of bets can be scored. It reads five pillars, each a residual above what the club's resources and level should have delivered, so a big club earns credit only for what it beats its own expectation by. It reads the signals a press release cannot hide, it separates the director's decisions from the owner's, and it never touches a player's rating.
Five pillars, each a residual above what the club should have delivered.
A sporting director is not graded on raw totals, because a big club should spend more and a selling club should trade well. Each pillar is a residual above an expectation baseline, z-scored against the distribution of sporting directors at that level, with 50 as average. The rating leads with recruitment and retention, the core skill and the thing that compounds.
This is the evaluate-the-evaluator capstone: the same honesty the engine turns on a player, turned on the executive who acquires and manages him. It does not read a trophy cabinet or a transfer-window headline; it reads whether the bets beat the baseline, pillar by pillar, and reports a confidence on each. A first-window director is provisional and reads as a wide band, not a false-precise number. Grade the residual above the resources, never the raw spend.
Illustrative engine read on the real Sporting Director rating (five pillars ACQ, RET, SPEND, CONDUCT, NAV, each a residual above an expectation-and-level baseline z-scored against sporting directors at the level, 50 = average, owner-forced decisions flagged to ownership). Composite director, demonstration figures.
The narrative is written by the club. The contract book is not.
Some parts of the job can be spun, and some cannot. A club can announce a marquee signing and frame a departure as a fresh chapter, but the transaction record tells the truth underneath, and the engine reads the un-fakeable signals: how players leave, what the trading actually returned, and who chooses to stay.
These are the reads a narrative cannot survive: a club whose valuable players run their contracts down and walk for nothing, or leave sideways to escape, is exposed regardless of the framing, and a director whose trading quietly compounds value is credited even when the headlines are modest. The engine builds the rating from revealed outcomes first and lets the story qualify nothing. Read the contract book, not the press release.
Illustrative engine read on the real un-fakeable retention and trading signals (free-transfer loss inverted, departure direction, trading profit and hidden-gem edge, trust capital read from revealed choices). Composite director, demonstration figures.
He builds the squad, hires the coach, and answers to the owner.
The sporting director sits in the middle of the football chain, managing down to the squad, up to the owner and board, and sideways to the manager. Two of those are the most football-specific parts of the job and the ones the rating weighs hardest to distinguish a real operator: appointing the manager, and aligning what he signs with what the manager will actually pick.
This is what separates the professional sporting director from a college roster-builder who is often his own coach: here the appointment and the alignment are the job, and a director can build a strong squad and still fail if the manager will not play it. The engine reads the whole chain, credits the operator for what he wins upward and aligns sideways, and refuses to reward a director for lowering the bar he was set. Grade the bets, the appointment, and the alignment, on the residual above what he was given.
Illustrative engine read on the real middle-of-the-chain reads (the manager appointment as an ACQ input via the manager rating, recruitment-to-coaching alignment and board navigation in NAV, the anti-gaming guard, Career versus Current regime attribution), read-only on the KR. Composite director, demonstration figures.
A club's money and level build most of the squad on their own, so the honest question is never the raw spend or the trophy cabinet, it is what the director did above the pull his resources should have produced, and the engine answers it as a residual, five pillars z-scored against sporting directors at the level with fifty as average. It reads the signals a press release cannot survive, the valuable players lost for nothing, the sideways exits to escape, the trading that quietly compounds, the players who choose to stay, and it builds the rating from those revealed outcomes rather than the narrative. It reads the whole chain, because the professional director does not just sign players, he hires the manager and aligns the squad to how the manager plays, and a director who signs a team the manager will not pick has failed at the core of the job. It flags the owner's bets to the owner, credits winning resources upward and never lowering the bar, attributes each decision to the regime that made it, and never lets any of it move a player's rating. Grade the residual above the resources.
Grade the residual. The bets, the appointment, the alignment.
Sporting Director Intelligence rates the operator on five expectation-adjusted pillars, reads the signals a press release cannot hide, weighs the manager appointment and the recruitment-to-coaching alignment, splits the owner's bets from his, and never touches a rating.