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

By Pablo Maurer, Paul Tenorio and Dan Sheldon

Southampton director of football operations Matt Crocker is set to be named the U.S. Soccer Federation’s sporting director, multiple sources familiar with the hiring process told The Athletic on Sunday. Those sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the hire.

A representative from U.S. Soccer declined to comment on Crocker’s appointment.

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

Crocker will have a massive job ahead of him upon starting with the federation. U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone has said the new sporting director will help lead the search for the U.S. men’s national team head coach and ultimately make the hire. The U.S. men have been without a permanent manager since the end of the season, when former coach Gregg Berhalter’s contract expired. Interim manager Anthony Hudson has led the team through its last five games.

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

Crocker helped the FA establish the “England DNA,” the playing and coaching strategy within the national team setups.

“England DNA was a blank sheet of paper, and there was an opportunity to align a pathway from the junior teams to the senior teams, working with people like Dan Ashworth and Gareth Southgate,” Crocker said in an interview with The Athletic in 2020, shortly after taking over at Southampton.

At Southampton, Crocker worked with then-head coach Ralph Hasenhuttl to develop the club’s methodology, which has been dubbed the “SFC Playbook.” Crocker was heavily involved in the infrastructure side of the club. He also devised a five-year plan for the women’s team, which has been promoted in back-to-back seasons.

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

Sources who have worked with Crocker said he was a “perfect fit” with the U.S. because of his experience in building up sporting infrastructure in high-profile environments — both at the…