Only Mikel Arteta left of brains trust that rebuilt Arsenal. Here’s how

Rethink, rebuild

Ellis joined Arsenal in the summer of 2021 to lead first-team UK scouting. He was headhunted from Fulham, where he was important to the integrated, data-driven recruitment department that propelled a return to the Premier League.

Arsenal were emerging from a dark age of transfers and performance. The club had failed for five consecutive seasons to qualify for the Champions League and just finished eighth in the Premier League twice in a row.

And player trading? The hyperactive January 2018 window is the best representation of their old approach. There they were, mid-season, swapping their biggest star, Alexis Sánchez, for Henrikh Mkhitaryan; offloading Theo Walcott, Francis Coquelin and Olivier Giroud, signing Konstantinos Mavropanos and Bernd Leno — and then paying a record free for Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang on deadline day. Measured, it was not.

Edu was first in a series of hires that changed the club’s course, arriving as technical director in July 2019. Five months later Mikel Arteta became manager. Next, in summer 2020, Tim Lewis, the corporate law whiz who facilitated Stan Kroenke’s purchase of Arsenal, joined the club’s board. Jason Ayto was promoted to chief scout, quickly followed by Ellis’s arrival and while Arteta began sorting Arsenal out on the pitch, the other new men grew in responsibility off it — Lewis going on to become chief executive, Edu the sporting director, Ayto his deputy, and Ellis the head of recruitment.

Arsenal pivoted towards signing younger talent with Premier League experience while promoting their own academy gems, including Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe. This was driven by Arteta’s philosophy and the acumen of the back office. Mark Curtis, who has a data background and rose from first-team analysis to first-team scout, was another key figure.

In Ellis’s first window Ben White became Arsenal’s first paid-for signing from an English club since Rob Holding in 2016 and Aaron Ramsdale followed. Over the next windows more talent arrived from Premier League rivals: Gabriel Jesus, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Leandro Trossard, Jorginho, David Raya, Kai Havertz, and in the summer of 2023, Declan Rice.

Transfers were a collaborative process between Arteta and his staff and the team under Edu, with Lewis a forceful ally to the key operators on both sides.

Declan Rice, signed for a British record £105million, was the major arrival of the first window under a new structure led by Edu as sporting director in which Ellis was head of recruitment. He also ensured Arsenal were in the picture when Jude Bellingham was deciding his next club after Borussia Dortmund. Ellis, 48, re-established a personal connection with Bellingham’s father and representative, Mark. They first encountered each other when Ellis — assistant manager for the likes of Kettering and Nuneaton — was coaching in Midlands non-League football where Mark, who scored more than 700 goals, was something of a legend.

Ellis then moved into the university sector, where he worked at Loughborough and Warwick before becoming head coach of English and British universities, whom he led to consecutive world finals. His assistants included Graham Potter and their relationship led to Ellis supporting and scouting for Potter at Ostersunds.

Centralised intelligence

Ellis’s experience of leading complex projects meant he was tasked by Edu to develop its Football Intelligence Unit. It involved increasing Arsenal’s scouting staff from 30 to 170 and a new approach where Arsenal became the first club in Britain to have an integrated recruitment system across their men’s, women’s and academy teams. With data to the fore, the unit was a hub where all Arsenal’s scouting information was gathered and stored systematically. Before that, “everything we knew was in someone’s head or in some WhatsApp group”.

The unit’s poster boy was Jurrien Timber. The challenge was finding players of elite quality who fitted the very specific requirements of Arteta’s positional, 4-3-3 game model with its inverted full backs. Ajax were one of the few teams playing a similar way and Ellis’s team watched Timber 30 to 40 times live, plus in another 30 to 40 games on video, while compiling a dossier of character checks.

It became a running joke between Ellis and Arteta — “Hey Mikel, when are we getting in the old three-wheeler and driving across to Holland to pick up Timber then?” — and eventually Arteta and Edu sanctioned the move. Arteta would now class Timber as his most tactically intelligent player.

A shift began happening when Edu left in November 2024 to head the multi-club group of the Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis. Ayto briefly stepped up but also departed — he is now Brighton & Hove Albion’s sporting director — after Andrea Berta arrived in March 2025 as Edu’s replacement. A former banker, the Italian’s forte is deals and he fitted with Arteta’s growing desire to execute big transfers for experienced players who he felt could take Arsenal those final steps past Manchester City and Liverpool.

Ellis was moved to technical director and not closely involved in the summer of 2025’s business where the Football Intelligence signings were Piero Hincapié and Cristhian Mosquera and the others were Arteta/Berta-led, including Viktor Gyokeres (Football Intelligence championed Benjamin Sesko).

In his new role Ellis was handed two new projects, one of which was working out what to do with StatDNA, the US analytics company, with a huge workforce in Cambodia and Laos, acquired by Arsenal in 2012. He promoted Curtis to head of football intelligence and asked him to lead. Back then, having their own in-house data provider seemed a piece of revolutionary thinking that would give Arsenal a competitive edge but football analytics went another way. With clubs buying raw data from independent providers such as Opta and Statsbomb, the real edge lay in how well analytics teams — such as Ian Graham’s famed research department at Liverpool — could use it to yield the insights needed by their coaches and recruitment teams.

The ability to collect your own data is not so important now and Curtis is rolling out Ellis’s proposal for the company to be absorbed by Football Intelligence, based at the training ground, and be more sharply focused on helping recruitment and first-team performance, with its high-quality data engineers folded into Curtis’s insights team.

Youth prospects

Ellis’s second, and biggest, project was reviewing Arsenal’s academy. Though it had produced some extraordinary gems — like Saka and Max Dowman — its overall output was patchy and it was not self-sustaining like those of certain rivals.

Despite a bumper 2017-18, when four products including Saka broke through, Arsenal’s average across eight years of 1.25 academy debuts (in the Premier League) per season was half the top-flight average. Since 2020-21, while Manchester City sold 28 players from their under-18 and under-21 teams for £145.3million and Chelsea 12 players for £62.7million, Arsenal sold nine for only £18.3million. Through selling first-team players who were graduates of their academies, Chelsea raised £327million in the period and Aston Villa £230million compared to Arsenal’s £118million.

Arsenal have become especially poor at selling talent. Their record sale remains £35million from Liverpool for Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain in 2017.

With Per Mertesacker announcing his departure at the end of the season, Ellis recommended a new academy director with senior experience from an elite Premier League academy. He advocated a “cultural reset” to sharpen Hale End’s focus on producing players ideally good enough to play for Arsenal but, if not, of a standard high enough to be sold and go on to have high-level careers.

He began a drive to sign top talents from other clubs, following a model used by Chelsea and City. The goalkeeper Tommy Setford, 19, who made his first-team debut against Wigan Athletic in the FA Cup last month, arrived in 2024 from Ajax. More recently Arsenal signed the 15-year-old midfielder Mishel Nduka from Charlton for £600,000, 18-year-old Stoke City defender Jaden Dixon for an initial fee of £300,000 and concluded a £1.7million deal to sign the 17-year-old Irish prodigy Victor Ozhianvuna from Shamrock Rovers.

In December Arsenal reached agreement to sign the twins Edwin and Holger Quintero from the Ecuadorian talent factory Independiente del Valle. The 16-year-olds will join on their 18th birthdays in August 2027 and the process involved forging a close relationship with their club and bringing the pair over for a trial with Arsenal under-18 last summer, where their skills and physical data blew people away. Over the next 15 months Arsenal will provide English lessons and send staff to Ecuador to help prepare the brothers for their transition.

That level of detailed thinking helped Ellis in his other main responsibility as technical director — the retention of talent. He forged strong relationships with Dowman and his father, Rob, a former footballer, club chairman and City insurance broker. The Dowmans and other families have expressed surprise and sorrow at seeing Ellis go.

New approach

Lewis departed abruptly last September after helping to execute the summer’s transfer business. An Arsenal fan, who did not take bonuses during his time at the club, he went in a boardroom rejig that appeared to bolster Josh Kroenke’s position within his father’s empire. In the new structure Richard Garlick was promoted to Arsenal CEO.

With Ellis now also leaving, the last of the key back-office figures who helped Arteta rebuild Arsenal has gone, with the club seemingly moving towards more of a “deals culture” built around the decisions of their manager and his transfer-maker, Berta, who extended his influence by hiring fellow Italian Maurizio Micheli as head of scouting in November.

Ellis’s departure — a shock to colleagues — came after it was indicated that the new academy director will report directly to Berta. Candidates are thought to include Jim Fraser, whose outstanding record when Chelsea academy manager qualifies him for the role, but around whom there might be some tricky optics given he works for the agency that represents Arteta. Dan Ashworth, a close ally of Garlick from their time together at West Bromwich Albion, was at Arsenal’s training ground on Tuesday, prompting internal speculation, but is understood to have been there visiting Arsenal Women’s technical director Jodie Taylor in his role as the FA’s chief football officer.

Arteta’s relentless drive to improve his squad shows no sign of slowing. The club inquired about Sandro Tonali in January, though cost mitigated against a bid.

In an internal email announcing his exit Ellis said: “I really enjoyed my time at Arsenal, working with some really special people, making a difference there. We have agreed that the time is right and I leave feeling confident that my contribution to recruitment at all levels and my transition in July 25 to player development have left the club in a better place. I wish the club every success moving forward.”

He, too, is a lifelong Arsenal fan, but the moment has probably come to oversee building projects elsewhere. A motto for him is the All Blacks’ one of: “Leave the jersey in a better place.”

Arsenal v Chelsea

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