Matt Crocker, executive from Premier League’s Southampton, will be U.S. Soccer’s new sporting director
Crocker, 48, is a Wales native who has worked mostly in England. He has worked in men's and women's soccer, and knows one of the leading candidates to be the U.S. men's national team's next manager.
The U.S. Soccer Federation’s new sporting director will be Matt Crocker, director of football operations at the English Premier League’s Southampton, multiple sources told The Inquirer on Sunday.
Crocker, 48, is a Wales native who has spent much of his professional career in England. After starting out at Welsh club Cardiff City from 1999-2005, he moved to England’s Football League office, which oversees the nation’s lower divisions; then joined Southampton for the first of two stints there.
His work at Southampton has been multi-faceted, but has had a big emphasis on youth development. Notable products of the team’s youth academy during Crocker’s tenure who went on to stardom include England’s Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Theo Walcott (sold to Arsenal) and Wales’ Gareth Bale (sold to Tottenham).
Crocker’s new job will likely have him working with the Union’s academy, which has sent a conveyor belt’s worth of talent to the U.S. national team -- and likely won’t slow down soon.
» READ MORE: The Union have rarely had must-watch players. Jack McGlynn is one right now.
Though it’s not clear exactly when Crocker will start with U.S. Soccer, as many as four current or former Union players could be on the U.S. team at the under-20 World Cup that starts late next month. A further five Union academy alums will be in the mix for the Concacaf Nations League final four squad in mid-June, and any who don’t make the cut could go to the Gold Cup that starts soon after that.
Tanner knows one of Crocker’s former managers well. Before Ralph Hassenhüttl joined Southampton in late 2018, he spent two seasons at RB Leipzig, the top club in Red Bull’s global soccer empire. (MLS’s New York Red Bulls are also in the organization.)
In between Crocker’s Southampton stints, he worked for England’s Football Association, the nation’s soccer governing body, from late 2013 to early 2020. He oversaw all of the nation’s men’s and women’s youth teams, and his work paid off with four trophies: men’s under-17 and under-20 World Cup titles in 2017, the men’s European Championship that same year, and the senior women’s European Championship last summer.
Having experience with men’s and women’s soccer is a big deal for U.S. Soccer, because the sporting director oversees the men’s and women’s national teams. U.S. Soccer hired a consulting firm, Sportsology, to assist with the search, and the firm was rebuffed by multiple candidates who didn’t have experience or interest in the women’s game.
Tanner and Delran-born Sporting Kansas City manager Peter Vermes were among those candidates.
» READ MORE: Union sporting director Ernst Tanner turned down U.S. Soccer, but it wasn’t an insult
It seems the choice was ultimately made with input from not just the firm, but with a committee of voices from U.S. Soccer’s board and outside the governing body. A source confirmed Washington Spirit general manager Mark Krikorian was one of the outsiders, and ESPN reported that Los Angeles FC co-president John Thorrington was another.
U.S. Soccer insiders included the two at the very top, president Cindy Cone and CEO JT Batson.
The Athletic was first to report the news of Crocker’s hiring.
Crocker’s first big job will be hiring the U.S. senior men’s team’s next manager. If Jesse Marsch wasn’t already the leading candidate, he undoubtedly is now. Marsch nearly took the Southampton job in February, weeks after Leeds fired him and two months after Crocker announced he’d leave Southampton club at the end of the season.
Crocker was involved in the discussions to hire Marsch. Why there ended up being no deal remains a mystery, but the Saints have been in last place in the Premier League for months and seem destined for relegation. As appealing as managing in the Premier League can be, rescuing a doomed ship is a different story.
It seems that Crocker has escaped a decent amount of the blame for Southampton’s fall. The team changed owner just over a year ago, and the new ownership took the wheel on much of the soccer operations. The Athletic reported in December that Crocker was “not involved” in Southampton’s transfer deals last summer, a key sign.
This article has been corrected. It originally stated that Matt Crocker helped bring Sadio Mané and Virgil van Dijk to Southampton, but in fact Crocker was not at Southampton at the time.