Steve Hitchen has resigned from his scouting and recruitment post at Tottenham and is under consideration for a similar role at Everton, who are restructuring under the new manager, Frank Lampard.
Hitchen had been marginalised on the recruitment side at Spurs since the appointment of Fabio Paratici as the managing director of football last summer and, having considered his position for a number of months, he has decided to move on. The 45-year-old met the chairman, Daniel Levy, on Tuesday to ask to be released from his contract.
Everton, who are in the throes of a chaotic season, have been operating without a director of football, head of recruitment and manager of scouting after the respective departures of Marcel Brands, Grétar Steinsson and Dan Purdy were announced in early December.
Newcastle also have an interest in Hitchen as they, too, look to reshape their recruitment operation.
Hitchen, a former player at Blackburn, Macclesfield and Bangor City, went to Spurs as the chief scout in February 2017, having worked at the club between 2005-2010, initially as a European scout based in France and then in a more international role.
Hitchen returned to Spurs as they regrouped after the resignation of the head of recruitment, Paul Mitchell, who was working a notice period. Hitchen would be promoted in September 2020 to the role of technical performance director, which the club said would have “responsibility for scouting, performance and recruitment analysis and youth recruitment”.
Despite being friends, Hitchen and Paratici felt like an odd combination in the sense that their most important job was the same – to buy and sell first-team players. The Guardian understands that Hitchen had little involvement in the transfer window last summer and again in January, and was focused more on overseeing departments such as sports science and medical.
Hitchen’s watch will show more misses than hits on the market, with the former headlined by Tanguy Ndombele and Giovani Lo Celso in the summer of 2019 at a combined and eventual cost of about £115m. They were loaned on Monday to Lyon and Villarreal respectively.
The midfielders were signed for the manager at the time, Mauricio Pochettino, but he would leave in November of that year. Neither Ndombele nor Lo Celso has been a fit for the subsequent managers and the churn from Pochettino to José Mourinho to Nuno Espírito Santo via Ryan Mason to Antonio Conte has been challenging for everybody at the club, including Hitchen.
The most successful signings of Hitchen’s time in charge of recruitment will go down as Lucas Moura from Paris Saint-Germain in January 2018 for £25m and Pierre-Emile Højbjerg from Southampton in the summer of 2020 for £15m.
Hitchen went to Liverpool after his first spell at Spurs, where he was instrumental in the signing of Luis Suárez in January 2011. He then worked in senior recruitment positions at Queens Park Rangers and Derby.