It’s obvious that the Watford F.C. has progressed significantly
over the past 8 years since Gino Pozzo
took charge of the club, making an impressive comeback to the Premier League
and competing in a prestigious FA Cup Championship in 2019. Still, the club’s
follow-up performance in the current season has been lackluster and the club is
currently sitting in the 17th position at the Premier League Table.
From his history at Watford, Pozzo, who comes from a family
of football aficionados and a history of owning two other European football
clubs, is known to be a perfectionist who demands a great deal from his
players as well as managers. While he has been criticized for making what
appear to be rash decisions, and appointing an unprecedented number of managers
since he took over the club, Pozzo continues to run a tight ship at Vicarage
Road.
In September of 2019, Pozzo fired manager Javi Gracia, who had
successfully coached the team throughout the 2018-2019 season, leading the club
to an FA Cup Championship and finishing in 11th position at the
Premier League Table, when Pozzo noted that the team seemed to have “gone flat”
under Gracia’s management. Having won
not a single match in the season, Gracia was replaced with Quique Sánchez
Flores, who was reappointed after having also been dismissed some seasons
back. In December, Sánchez Flores was
replaced with Nigel Pearson, an Englishman who earned a solid reputation in English
Premier League football through a lengthy tenure as manager at Leicester F.C.
from 2008 through 2015.
While it may seem to some that Pozzo’s decision-making style
is a little reckless, many others consider Pozzo a visionary given his keen
foresight, as noted in his instinct for identifying Watford as a promising team
that could be successfully lifted from the down-in-the-dumps condition it was
in when Pozzo bought the club. His
straightforward handling of affairs coupled with his lifelong passion and
understanding of football have been instrumental to Watford’s dazzling resurrection
in the English Premier League.
Historically one of the poorest clubs in English football,
Watford enjoyed a brief heyday in the Premier League during the late 1970s and
80s, but the club had basically spent the better part of its history languishing
in the lower divisions. When Pozzo purchased the club from Laurence Bassini and
took over the Hornets in 2012, the club was not only in dire need of a
financial rescue, but was also hopelessly in need of a new direction and focused
leadership.
Pozzo not only managed to stabilize the Watford F.C. financially, alleviating
the club’s financial woes and making significant improvements to the stadium at
Vicarage Road, but his leadership also brought about a change in the club’s
scouting and recruitment policy.
The Pozzo family, who has owned the Udinese Football Club in
Italy since 1986, also once owned the Granada Football Club in Spain before
Gino Pozzo purchased the Watford F.C.
Their unique model of owning international sports clubs simultaneously
gave rise to a scouting and recruitment practice of trading and loaning players
between clubs, as well as recruiting young promising players from all over the
world.
One of the most influential characteristics of the
impressive resurgence of the Watford F.C. in the English Premier League can be
credited directly to Pozzo’s tenure at Watford, where he has set up an
extensive global scouting network that has allowed the club to supplement their
squad with top-quality players from around the world continuously. Pozzo’s
broad scouting network has ended the club’s over-reliance on higher-priced
English players, since the club now recruits players from all over the world at
lower prices.
With a capacity of only 21,000 Vicarage Road represents
little more than a quarter of the capacity at Manchester United’s Old
Trafford stadium. The club, among the most humble in the Premier League, cannot
afford to purchase renowned stars as their followers and supporters would wish.
At Watford, the Pozzo strategy is to recruit promising, up-and-coming players,
groom them, make them great, and then sell them to larger clubs for a profit.
Young players from developing countries are attracted to this
opportunity, as it not only benefits Watford but also grants them international
visibility, as well as a foot into one of Europe’s top leagues, an opportunity
to play with Premier League players, and a chance make a name for themselves.
It also provides a platform from which they can attract the attention of bigger
clubs who can pay better money for their skill and talent as their careers
develop. Essentially, it’s a win-win
formula for both the club and the players.
So much so that even up-and-coming English players, who could feasibly command
higher salaries at bigger clubs, are seeing the benefit of Gino Pozzo’s system.
Pozzo has established a three-headed
leaderships team at Watford F.C., consisting of himself, Filippo Giraldi, who
oversees the squad and managers, and Scott Duxbury who handles the more
administrative components of the business. But Pozzo remains closely involved
in every key decision made at the club, including recruitment and hiring of
players and managers. Even when Pozzo is not physically present at Vicarage
Road, he and his team remain in constant contact.