In mid-February I sat opposite Sean Longstaff at Newcastle United’s training ground and interviewed him for FourFourTwo. The club’s then Technical Director Dan Ashworth was just yards away in an adjacent meeting room.
The open-plan nature of Newcastle’s recently upgraded training ground, and the glass meeting rooms, meant Ashworth and his delegation were in plain sight. I alluded to this in a separate article last month, but the building's revamped layout could even be the brainchild of Ashworth himself.
Longstaff spoke openly, eloquently and maturely about his past, present and future, and towards the end of our one-hour chat, Dan Ashworth’s name came up. No-one in the room knew that Ashworth would be all over the media just 24 hours later when Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s investment into Manchester United was officially sanctioned by the Premier League and he announced his intention to appoint Ashworth as the club’s sporting director.
