Is Dan Ashworth a marquee signing that Dan Ashworth would recommend?

Newcastle United are demanding around £20m from Manchester United for their sporting director, Dan Ashworth. That’s a lot of money, and I wanted to know whether he could possibly be worth it, but it was hard to tell for sure.

I went on the popular search website Google and there were lots of articles saying that he definitely was, that Dan Ashworth is a genius who buys footballers for tiny amounts and sells them for hundreds of millions. 

And lots of articles saying that Newcastle wouldn’t miss him at all, that football is played on a pitch by actual players, and so in an ideal world you probably want to be spending your £20m on them, instead.

I wanted a definitive answer, the kind a sporting director would demand. And perhaps if I discovered it then I too could be a genius like Dan Ashworth one day: either that, or simply a man capable of securing a procession of lucrative employments in a wildly inefficient industry by burnishing the carefully curated myth of one’s own genius. 

Both good options, I told myself. Both good options. So I kept at it. I crunched data. I had to buy a laptop for that. I downloaded a copy of Football Manager, got a subscription to Wyscout, signed up for networking breakfasts and leadership summits. 

I watched lots of YouTube videos with titles like “DAN ASHWORTH SKILLS//WELCOME TO MANCHESTER UNITED 2024//SPREADSHEETS, RECRUITMENT MEETINGS, POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS [HD]”. I listened to every episode of The High Performance Podcast with Jake Humphrey.

But every new avenue seemed to blur the picture a little more. I read that Ashworth signed Moisés Caicedo and Leandro Trossard and Kaoru Mitoma at Brighton, how he hired Gareth Southgate at the FA and created the “England DNA” concept, how he