Talking Transfers x Inside Recruitment: Adrian Bevington

Adrian Bevington is best known for his near 20-year tenure with the Football Association, where he served as director of communications and national team managing director among other roles.

He has also served in senior administrative roles at both Middlesbrough and Nottingham Forest, and had a short stint at Aston Villa in a role akin to that of a sporting director.

Fast forward to the modern day and Bevington is looking at football in a completely different way; heading up the UK operation of one of Germany's biggest recruitment agencies as they look to establish a wider foothold in the game.

"It has not been a traditional path and that hasn’t always helped me," Bevington tells 90min. "In football, you do tend to see people pigeonholed but I would not say that I am someone who can be pigeonholed.

"I was director of communications at 33 and if I had wanted to stick to that for the rest of my career I could probably have stayed within the game and if it hadn’t been football, I might have done that."

Bevington spent six years as the FA's communications chief but found himself so swept up by the increasing complexity of the footballing world that a change was needed, and so Bevington made a move which would ultimately help dictate the direction of modern English football.

"At the FA, in the 2000s, I had become the real constant in the whole organisation and I found that my role was rapidly becoming a million years away from just communications, but it had been going that way from my whole time within the FA," he continues.

"You spend time with managers, other people and you keep picking things up, but I love football – I played to a decent level as a kid, played for Middlesbrough schoolboys, I wasn’t good enough in the end but I have always had that burning desire in me and that also came from my father. He loved football and that fascination with the game obviously had an impact on me too.

"I remember having a conversation with one of the former chief executives and I said I was ready for something different and if there was nothing for me, I would like to move on and it was positive they were creating this new branch of England, Club England, although I always hated the name.

"So that took me into the football side, but still not technically part of it. Trevor Brooking was still in charge of that side, but I worked closely with him, a wonderful guy who in many ways was a visionary.

"During my time in Team England, a big part was getting Gareth Southgate into the FA. Yes, he may not be universally popular with every fan, but I will stand my ground with anyone and say that England has been better with him than any other manager. Culturally, he was what we needed. Trevor was a huge part of that along with Alex Horne, but we managed to get him in to that role early on. So, I think I do know what good looks like, but still, that doesn’t take me into the recruitment side but more CEO side."

After 17 years with the FA, Bevington decided another change was needed. He left the structure that had long been his home in favour of founding Adrian Bevington Sport & PR Ltd, a consultancy group which offered to support to clubs, owners, national teams and even UEFA.

It was in this role that Bevington entered the world of recruitment.

"I left in 2014 as I was completely worn out after 17 years," Bevington says. "I needed a break and I went off and did my own thing for three-and-a-half years, running a consultancy, but I learnt more in that time that any period before. I worked with Wales helping them ahead of Euro 2016 as a tournament advisor, and that was a great experience.

"I then worked with Nottingham Forest for nearly a year, and I saw a very different side of football. I worked in an advisory role to the owner. At this time it was my first experience of recruitment, and the first major deal was moving Michail Antonio to West Ham – a deal the club had to do. I did feel a bit exposed, as I had never been on that side of the table.

"That was an eye opener for me. I was in a position that I was getting calls about players, and chief executives asking the price of players and that is a strange position. As a fan, you think: 'Yeah I could do that', but when you get asked that question, the answer is so important – if you low-ball it, you are doing the club out of money, and you feel a different level of responsibility. There are people who work in recruitment now who have never been in that conversation. It is something so different.

“I then left Forest before that season finished around the March time, we did not announce my departure as the relationship with the owner was positive, but I had agreed to join Aston Villa with my former FA boss David Bernstein. I went there with a view to running the training ground as a type of sporting director role but unfortunately I left as David and Lord King resigned due to differences with Randy Lerner, so I was only there five minutes really, but I got to work with some good people.

“I then went into Middlesbrough. I do want to make clear that I have fantastic relationships with Steve Gibson and Neil Bausor, both of whom were really supportive, and I left for reasons of my own accord, no acrimony, so I wanted to get that across.

"I would say from my time at Middlesbrough I built an extremely strong network with the agents, and we identified a number of top young players along the way and improved the structure."

That brings us to his current role. Bevington is now the managing director of PRO Profil, a global footballing agency with clients based all around the world, but he only ended up in the position due to a chance meeting.

"I had talked to a few agencies; I enjoyed the relationships I had with most agents," he explains. "I had begun working in the financial services side and I had a meeting in Germany with some senior executives and a few others, and during this meeting, the owner of PRO Profil, Thomas Kroth, and lawyer Gregor Reiter were in the room. After that, they reached out to me, and they said they enjoyed meeting and how it had gone.

"They wanted to grow the business into the UK and they wanted a UK footprint. They had someone before but they wanted to make a go of it again."

Bevington takes great pride in the responsibility that comes with representing players. Tasked with directing the entire trajectory of another person's career, agents have attracted plenty of negative attention in the past but Bevington is determined to do things differently.

"At the end of it, we do want to do the right thing," he says of his approach to the role. "It doesn’t have to be, for instance, the biggest contract, but it might be the right deal, the right club with the right people around you – that is the important thing.

"Obviously, we want to do deals, but we are not in this purely for financial reasons. I don’t want anyone to turn around and say that he is in this just for the money. And I believe that is why PRO Profil is the right company.

"As a company, we will not sacrifice our beliefs or integrity. We want to work properly, and if we miss out on certain things, so be it. We don’t want an army of players, we want to be able to offer that service to them.

"I know that if a player works with me, and if it's a young player, they will be given good advice, not misleading, and I am not under pressure from the owners to make a quick buck, so we don’t have to chase it."

Now making waves in the agency world, Bevington has found himself linked with a return to club football, and while nothing is in the works just yet, he admits a sense of unfinished business could drive him back to the boardroom.

"I will never say never," he concedes.

"I am really delighted to be working for PRO Profil and I can’t speak highly enough of them, but in football and in life, you should never say never. Tou have to be flexible in how you approach things. We are building something very good, but I still have a few things I would like to achieve at some stage."

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