Resources build the squad. The director is the residual.
It rates the decision-maker above the squad on five pillars, each a residual above what the resources should deliver.
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. Each pillar is a residual above an expectation baseline, z-scored against directors at that level, with 50 as average, and it leads with recruitment and retention, the core skill and the thing that compounds.
This is the same honesty turned on a player, turned on the executive who acquires him. Not the trophy cabinet or the transfer-window headline, but whether the bets beat the baseline, pillar by pillar, each with its own confidence. A first-window director 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 frame a departure as a fresh chapter, but the transaction record tells the truth underneath: 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 walk for nothing, or leave sideways to escape, is exposed regardless of the framing, and a director whose trading quietly compounds is credited even when the headlines are modest. The rating is built from revealed outcomes; the story qualifies 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, answers to the owner.
The sporting director sits in the middle of the chain, managing down to the squad, up to the owner, and sideways to the manager. Two of those are the most football-specific parts of the job and the rating weighs them hardest: appointing the manager, and aligning what he signs with what the manager will actually pick.
This is what separates the professional 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. Credit for what he wins upward and aligns sideways, never 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.
The engine grades what he did above the pull his resources should have produced, read from revealed outcomes, not the narrative.
Grade the residual. The bets, the appointment, the alignment.
Sporting Director Intelligence rates the operator on five expectation-adjusted pillars, weighs the appointment and the recruitment-to-coaching alignment, and never touches a rating.