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.
McDermott, who was Leeds manager from 2013-14, worked with Hammond at Reading (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
“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.
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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.
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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.
Hammond, centre, celebrating Swindon’s play-off win in 1993 (Michael Cooper/Getty Images)
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.
Madejski, left, appointed Hammond as Reading’s first director of football (Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
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.
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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.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)
