Top scout set to quit in Arsenal’s revamp
ARSENAL chief scout Steve Rowley, who has worked for the club for over 35 years, is on the brink of leaving the Premier League outfit.
Rowley has contacted scouting colleagues at other clubs to tell them that he’s had enough.
A club spokesman said last night that his future still had to be finalised, but it seems Rowley — despite a long partnership with manager Arsene Wenger, who made him chief scout in 1996 — has been made the scapegoat for Arsenal’s recent poor record in the transfer market.
The upheaval in the Arsenal scouting system has seen chief executive Ivan Gazidis oversee the recruitment operation, sharing his time between offices at the club and at the training ground.
Arsenal, who bought German data firm StatDNA in 2012, will also be beefing up their analytics operation to have a bigger ‘Moneyball’ type influence on their transfer dealings. It seems that Wenger’s decision to stay for another two seasons prevented a makeover which Gazidis planned to introduce last summer.
But Rowley’s imminent departure, following the exit of chief transfer negotiator Dick Law and the arrival of Team Sky legal chief Huss Fahmy, suggests Gazidis is getting his way at last. BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew, whose lead presence at the Ashes for Test Match
Special was in doubt because wife Emma is fighting breast cancer, could now be in Brisbane and Adelaide for the opening two Tests of the series with Emma’s blessing as she has responded so well to initial treatment. THE renewal of the Six Nations’ sponsorship with NatWest, part of the RBS group, for just one year and for no more than the previous annual fee of £11m, doesn’t say much for their sponsorship agents, Creative Artists Agency. CAA were promising to deliver a £100m six-year deal by last June, not an £11m one-year contract in November.