U.S. Soccer set to hire Matt Crocker as sporting director: Sources

By Pablo Maurer, Paul Tenorio and Dan Sheldon

Matt Crocker, Southampton’s director of football operations, is set to be appointed as the US Football Association’s athletic director, according to multiple sources familiar with the hiring process the athlete on Sunday. These sources requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly about the hiring.

A US Soccer representative declined to comment on Crocker’s appointment.

Crocker, who announced he would leave Southampton at the end of the season, will replace former sporting director Earnie Stewart, who left the USSF on February 15 to join PSV Eindhoven as director of football. US Soccer has been conducting a search since late January when it was announced that Stewart and former US men’s national team general manager Brian McBride were leaving the organization.

Crocker will have a daunting task ahead of him when he joins the association. US Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said the new athletic director will help find and ultimately hire the head coach for the US men’s national team. The US men have been without a permanent coach since the end of the season, when ex-coach Gregg Berhalter’s contract expired. Interim manager Anthony Hudson has guided the team through the last five games.

Crocker spent three seasons at Southampton overseeing the club’s men’s, women’s and youth programs. Prior to his appointment, the 48-year-old spent seven years with the Football Association of England, managing England’s U-15, U-17 and U-20 national teams at both men’s and women’s levels, including England’s men’s victories U-17 and U-20 World Cups in 2017 and their European Championship at U-19 level in the same year.

Crocker helped the FA establish the ‘England DNA’, the playing and coaching strategy within national team rosters.

“England DNA was a blank sheet of paper and there was an opportunity to find a path from the junior teams to the senior teams and work with the likes of Dan Ashworth and Gareth Southgate,” Crocker said in an interview with the athlete in 2020, shortly after the Southampton takeover.

At Southampton, Crocker worked with then-head coach Ralph Hasenhuttl to develop the club’s methodology, dubbed the ‘SFC Playbook’. Crocker was heavily involved in the club’s infrastructure. He also drafted a five-year schedule for the women’s team, which was promoted in consecutive seasons.

“We developed the SFC Playbook with a style of play, all the sessions we complete from a first-team perspective, and the position-specific profiles required for each of the six positions across the team, and we made sure we matched each other are coordinated with the B-Team,” said Crocker in this interview.

Sources who have worked with Crocker said he was a perfect match for the US because of his experience building sports infrastructure in high-profile settings – both at international federation and club levels.

Crocker’s tenure as sporting director was not his first stint at Southampton: he spent time as academy manager at the club from 2006 to 2013. During this time he oversaw the development of several key players including Welsh legend Gareth Bale and a host of others including Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Luke Shaw and James Ward-Prowse.

The Welshman holds Technical Director and Academy Director licenses from the Football Association, as well as a UEFA Pro licence.

Notably, Southampton have interviewed former Leeds United and Red Bull Salzburg head coach Jesse Marsch for his coaching job in February. Crocker was involved in the plan to get him. Marsch eventually turned down the offer, also turning down an offer from Leicester City earlier this month.

Marsch has often been discussed as a potential candidate for the position of USMNT head coach and is perhaps the most obvious contender to succeed Berhalter. Berhalter also remains in the mix to remain as national team manager after he was acquitted by independent investigators over an incident in which he kicked his then-girlfriend and now-wife Rosalind more than 30 years ago when the two were freshmen at the University of North were Carolina.

The saga of US winger Gio Reyna; his parents, former US internationals Claudio and Danielle Reyna; and Berhalter has been dominating the headlines about the US program since shortly after the Americans left the World Cup last November.

This appointment is seen as the first step forward since Stewart and McBride’s departures and the announcement of the investigation results last month.

“We’re entering this year with great momentum and will continue to build on that,” Cone told reporters in January. “As an organization we have grown and changed organically over the years, but now I think this is the opportunity for us to take a more holistic view and determine how we can most effectively and efficiently move forward. We certainly didn’t plan it that way, but it offers us a great opportunity.”

Cone said after US soccer’s recent annual general meeting that the athletic director’s role will focus on national team programs, from the A to youth levels. Stewart has also previously worked in other areas of the association, including referee and coach education.

In January, the USSF announced it was signing advisory group Sportsology to “lead the search for the organization’s next athletic director.” This included a review of the entire sports department. Sportsology, sources said earlier this week, is no longer involved in the hiring process after completing the initial screening of potential candidates. With Crocker filling his position as sporting director, the federation itself is now conducting the formal interview and hiring process for the remaining role of head coach.

required reading

(Photo: Matt Watson/Southampton FC via Getty Images)