Jason Wilcox and Darren Mowbray officially start their new roles at Southampton tomorrow (Saturday, July 1).
“Officially” should be a term used loosely, though, considering the groundwork has been laid for some time. Wilcox and Mowbray have already been influential voices at Southampton this summer and helped shape the future running of the club, despite the challenges that has posed logistically.
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Wilcox arrives from Manchester City as director of football. He is replacing Matt Crocker, who resigned in December and left at the end of the season. Mowbray joins from Aberdeen of the Scottish Premiership and succeeds short-lived head of recruitment Joe Shields, who left for Chelsea.
Mowbray and Wilcox have been spinning multiple plates over the past few months, involved in Southampton’s immediate and longer-term planning as they look ahead to life back in the EFL after 11 years in the top flight, while managing the transition away from their respective clubs.
“Jason is brilliant,” one source close to a senior player at Southampton, who wishes to remain anonymous to protect relationships, tells The Athletic. “He’s a good guy and knows what he is doing.”
Wilcox will be the key figure in Southampton’s “City-fication” rebuild. Owners Sport Republic have aimed to replicate as many components of the City Group model as possible, from staff, to players and now, under their incoming director of football and new manager Russell Martin, playing style.
Wilcox has a growing reputation in the game, with agents, coaches, scouts and recruitment specialists, all of whom The Athletic have spoken to, praising his expertise in developing an infrastructure and talent identification. The 51-year-old spent 11 years working within City’s youth academy, initially as a coach before becoming their under-18s manager and then, in 2017, academy director.
He had a close relationship with City’s director of football Txiki Begiristain and always pressed for improvements to be made in the academy, such as better funding and facilities. In addition, he advocated for youngsters to be blooded in the first team, insisting they were good enough to make the step up. In the cases of Rico Lewis and Phil Foden, his rationale was justified.
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Wilcox has studied to become a director of football. His knowledge from a 17-year playing career at Blackburn Rovers (who he helped win the 1994-95 Premier League title), Leeds United and Leicester City means coaching would be a more traditional path, but he intends to become a more well-rounded facilitator. Southampton are prepared to give him such autonomy — Wilcox will conduct a review of the football department when he starts work properly and feed his observations back to the owners.
“I spoke with Jason a couple of times in the last two months,” Southampton’s then-manager Ruben Selles said in May. “We were discussing the situation that we have right now. So not any influence, just good talks. He’s a good professional.”
With Sport Republic co-founder Rasmus Ankersen, Wilcox has led the search for Southampton’s next manager and helped establish what the club were looking for in candidates. As first revealed in May, Southampton wanted a significant gear change in playing philosophy from recent years, exchanging high-pressing virtues for on-ball dominance. Wilcox, through his City background, aligned with those principles.
He sounded out his top two targets — then-Manchester City assistant Enzo Maresca and Martin. Maresca was offered the Southampton job but opted to manage fellow relegated side Leicester. But Wilcox immediately endorsed Martin once they met.
The tearing-up of the existing structure at Southampton, resulting in a raft of staff departures, is to make way for what the club view as a modernised way of working. There will be clear guidelines to the new power structure, with Wilcox and Mowbray in charge of football-related decisions. Martin will answer to Wilcox. The club’s newly-formed board will manage the fiscal and business aspects.
Mowbray and Wilcox will lead recruitment as part of Southampton’s strand within Sport Republic’s centralised scouting system.
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Scouts across the multi-club model will work underneath the pair, identifying targets who fit positional player profiles. Reports will be fed to Mowbray, who will then watch the players live. The 45-year-old attends as many as eight games a week during the season, domestically and abroad. If Mowbray approves, he and Wilcox will run the data, perform the necessary due diligence and evaluate whether the player meets the criteria and suits Martin’s heavy-possession-based style.
Targets must match a list of attributes and fit a desired remit.
For example, Southampton may look for a left-footed central midfielder who averages a high number of ball receptions per game, is an adept counter-presser and has a knack for passing through the lines. Augmented by video analysis and scouting, data will indicate whether a potential signing shows up well on those specific metrics.
There is a wider reform going on than just different personnel or a tweaked recruitment system. The club’s satellite academies, which allow them to recruit and train players who do not live close to their Staplewood training ground just west of the city, are due to be shut down. Southampton had encountered pushback from other EFL clubs based in the south west of England, who were unhappy they were able to pick up the best talent from that area.
The closing down of these academies includes the one in Bath, which helped bring through Gareth Bale. The plan is for certain age groups, including the under-nines, under-10s and under-11s, to finish their early-phase programmes before the scheme is closed down fully. Some of the temporary staff at those satellite academies have been made redundant as part of wider cuts.
Yet pertinently, Wilcox has been given a blank canvas to make positive changes to the academy. This includes the possibility of reopening these satellite academies at some point in the future, providing they are viewed as directly benefiting the club.
Player agents have joked they will need to get used to Wilcox being the first point of contact, rather than Ankersen, who led January’s recruitment drive and has been a domineering figure on recent signings. However, there is now an expectation he will take a step back and allow Wilcox and Mowbray to be the recognised voices.
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Similarly to Shields last season, Wilcox’s arrival marks his first role in a first-team environment. Potential reservations — such as never having recruited a senior player before — are not being regarded as an issue. He won the title at Blackburn, played in the Champions League for Leeds and won three England caps. He knows what is required to operate at first-team level.
Helped by his work in City’s academy, Wilcox already has deep-seated knowledge of Southampton’s B team and under-18s. The under-18s are internally regarded as the club’s best youth crop in over a decade, since the days James Ward-Prowse, Harrison Reed and Luke Shaw broke through together.
Wilcox has already reached out to player agents, introducing himself and opening lines of communication. Early impressions of him have been highly favourable.
Mowbray, meanwhile, will spend most of his time on the road. This might be watching games domestically during the week before going abroad to take in more football in Denmark, Holland, Belgium or Spain on Saturdays and Sundays. He is likely to only have a handful of weekends off every year.
Younger brother of current Sunderland manager Tony, Mowbray was in Middlesbrough’s academy before playing in the lower-leagues for a string of clubs in the north of England in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
He then planned to become a PE teacher, completing a sports science degree at Teesside University and a master’s in multimedia. At the time of his studies, however, data and analytics were becoming increasingly prevalent in sports and chimed with the computer programming and presentations he was working on as part of his degree.
Mowbray was helped by his football background and his first job, directly after leaving university, was at Prozone, the sporting analysis company. He then worked at Leeds as head of performance analysis, Middlesbrough — technical recruitment — and at agency Key Sports Management.
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He was in charge of “football development” for the latter, which entailed travelling outside the UK and building networks with sporting directors. The purpose behind this was to move young players represented by the agency to teams abroad — this was before Jadon Sancho and the boom of rising English talents going to Germany — with his theory being that cross-nation coaching would enhance a youngster’s development and offer a more conducive pathway.
In 2016, Mowbray joined Burnley and began scouting players around the world as one of only a handful of senior scouts at the club. Recruitment at Turf Moor was largely restricted to a British-centric model, but Mowbray played a part in the signing of Ivory Coast international Maxwel Cornet from French club Lyon, as well as Josh Brownhill and Nathan Collins.
Mowbray moved on to Aberdeen in 2021 to head up their recruitment department and is widely credited for an astute 2022 summer window. Highly-rated talents Luis ‘Duk’ Lopez, Bojan Miovski and Leighton Clarkson were all signed and a year on are expected to make Aberdeen considerable profit when they are sold.
Following the appointment of chief executive Phil Parsons earlier in the week, Sport Republic has, finally, got its ducks in a row.
Southampton are being rebuilt in the image the owners intended. And Wilcox and Mowbray, responsible for their future on-pitch fortunes, are front and centre.
(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
