Brighton's new technical director Dan Ashworth reveals why he was attracted to the club
Ashworth, 47, left his technical director role with The FA to take a similar position with the Seagulls and began work earlier this month after serving a notice period. He says he will now take stock to learn how the club operates and works until the end of the season.
Ashworth served Norwich, Peterborough United, Cambridge United and West Bromwich Albion in various coaching and development roles, before he left the Hawthorns in 2013 to take up the technical director role with The FA.
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Hide AdAshworth spoke to Johnny Cantor for Albion Unlimited on BBC Sussex this week and on taking the job with Brighton, he said: “I’m delighted that Tony has entrusted me to try and help him.
"He’s clearly an incredibly intelligent man. He’s very passionate about the football club and one of the things about English football now is there are fewer owners that are invested as emotionally as Tony is in their football club.
"He’s chairman because he cares passionately about the club, he passionately cares about the city, and that’s clear for everyone to see.
"That was one of the real attractions for it really. He wants this to be a sustainable Premier League club, the longer we can stay in the Premier League, maybe that can give us a springboard to try and get further up the league, maybe a cup run and who knows?
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Hide Ad"Maybe end in Europe or finishing high enough up the league. But every year is about retaining Premier League status.”
Asked what his first priority will be at Brighton, Ashworth said: “My first priority is to do very little. I don’t mean I’m going to have three months off!
"I think how I would work is clearly there are a lot of things going well at Brighton. They’ve grown so quickly over the last few years.
"It was only ten years ago when they didn’t have a stadium and look at the steps the club has made. There are obviously loads and loads of things that are going right.
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Hide Ad"It’s not for me to come in and judge. I need to understand how the club works. I need to understand how the academy works, the recruitment, medical department, first team and all those things, the culture of the club.
"It’s really just to look and learn over the next three months and find some areas where we’re under resourced in, some areas we can tweak a few things and join up a bit more maybe in some cases and try to support the people that have already done a very good job in trying to achieve the goals for Brighton.”
Ashworth added both The FA and Brighton have made the transition to his new job easy and said: “It has been a long time coming. I had a six month notice period to serve and The FA have been very good and have let me out of that a few weeks early. I think it would’ve been 25th March technically.
"They were very good in giving me a couple of days a week in January to give me a feel for the club, meet some people and hit the ground running this week. That’s been really good.
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Hide Ad"Notice periods are quite difficult aren’t they, because you have one eye on your future employer, but you want to make sure you leave right and do a good job for the person that’s paying your wages and given you a job for the previous five-and-a-half years.
"September and October and November was easier because we had games. We had the Nations League to qualify for and games with all of our junior teams as well.
"As soon as they finished from the beginning of December, it’s been a bit more difficult because it’s not been that engagement with the teams and everything that we were doing then from an FA point of view was planning, so planning for March, planning for the Nations League semi-finals and the Euros and I knew I wouldn’t be at any of those things, so they were quite difficult meetings for me to have.
"But I wanted to try and leave right and leave professionally with the respect of The FA and arrive correctly with Brighton. Both Brighton and The FA have been excellent with that transition and made it easy.”
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