Al-Ahli Saudi: Two Sporting Directors Gone in One Window, and a Job Description Still Unwritten

I keep a notebook for the non-verbal details: studs scraping along a corridor, a sigh after the final whistle, and empty seats. One page in that notebook belongs to Al-Ahli Saudi. It records the day Al-Riyadiah reported that Osama Hawsawi had resigned as sporting director. There was no noise. Just a short item, written the way Gulf newsrooms write when they want something to pass quietly. Directly beneath it, Okaz — a Jeddah-based daily, in the same city as Al-Ahli — added the line I have reread more than any other: Hawsawi left because he was not granted the full authority the job demands. What I underlined was a definition, not a name or a figure. Authority. A sporting director without the authority to decide is a signature on paper. When the second man in the same season leaves the same chair for the same stated reason, the story stopped being about personnel a long time ago. It became a harder question: who actually makes the decisions at Al-Ahli, and who carries the responsibility for them? If you follow Saudi football closely enough, you get used to this kind of item. A big club, a big job title, a short report, then silence. I have learned that short reports of this type often carry more information than long analyses, because they are written by people with a reason to keep them short. Al-Ahli is one of the biggest clubs in Jeddah and in Saudi football. Since 2026, majority stakes in the country's leading clubs were transferred to the Public Investment Fund as part of a national strategy to lift the Saudi Pro League onto the global map. The consequences of that model are concrete: resources surged, expectations surged, and patience shortened accordingly. In a league where several leading clubs are resourced at a similar level, the sporting gap between them compresses. What remains as a differentiator sits in the organisation. Roi Pedro left the sporting director's post amid media noise. Accusations targeted his administrative work and what reports described as some contractual files. He denied all of it, saying his relationship with Al-Ahli ended by mutual consent. Osama Hawsawi, a former Saudi international, came in as his successor and walked away after only a short spell, with Okaz reporting a distinct reason: the role was not granted the full authority it demands. Goal.com gathered all of it under a headline containing the word corruption. That is the entire factual base. There are no financial figures. No league table. No specific scoreline from any specific match. The only quasi-quantitative claim is a qualitative one: poor results and mounting fan discontent drove the decision to change personnel at the sporting-management layer. But poor results are asserted without an opponent, a competition, or a sample size. For someone who reads data tables every working day, that gap is more notable than the item itself. Based on my experience following matches and how clubs actually operate, the useful question here is not who left. It is why the second departure came so fast. A modern sporting director does not simply buy players. He builds the scouting file, shapes the wage structure, negotiates renewals, and acts as the buffer between the board and the head coach when their priorities diverge. That job only exists when decision rights are written down. Without them, every meeting becomes a fresh renegotiation of the same thing. Okaz reports that Hawsawi left because he was not granted the full authority the job demands. That detail has higher diagnostic value than any accusation in the piece, because it is not about a person. It is about design. A role with accountability but no authority produces exactly one outcome: whoever takes the seat recognises the problem almost immediately and leaves. The extremely short tenure is consistent with that. The conflict was identified before it could take the shape of a personal quarrel. At the same time, Al-Riyadiah reported that Hawsawi clashed with the management over a number of decisions concerning the first team. This is the closest the source comes to on-pitch substance, and it is also the blurriest. Those decisions could be selection, recruitment profile, or matchday-adjacent calls. None are specified. But the mere existence of a dispute at that layer says something important: the team is short of decisions at a moment when decisions are needed. The phrase some contractual files also deserves a pause. In Gulf football reporting, it tends to surface around agent commissions, side agreements that are not fully documented, or renewal terms negotiated without full board visibility. I raise it as an observed pattern, not as a finding about this specific case. What matters is the category of the suspicion. Poor results are a performance-management issue. Contractual files are a documentation-integrity issue. Those are not the same order of problem. Here a gap opens that prevents any assessment of scale. There is no official club statement anywhere in the source. Every adverse item comes from unnamed reports, from Al-Riyadiah, or from Okaz. The distance between a procedural disagreement and material misconduct is enormous, and the text is consistent with both ends of it. Readers deserve to know where they are standing inside that range. What can be assessed more firmly is process risk. A club that cannot retain a sporting director for a meaningful tenure is structurally prone to unforced transfer errors: inflated fees, wage-structure drift, and contract lengths shortened by short-term pressure. The sporting director exists partly to resist exactly those things. He is a cost-control institution. When the chair is empty, negotiating leverage shifts toward agents and selling clubs. At Al-Ahli there is an extra layer. The source states plainly that fan discontent was one of the drivers of the decision at the administrative level. A board under pressure to show something will lean toward a signing that looks convincing. The panic premium has not happened yet, but its conditions are in place. It does not require a striker who fits the sporting need. It requires a name that quiets the stands for a few weeks. I once followed a smaller English club through the empty-stadium months, when a season-ticket price rise was shelved simply because the board heard supporters through an online forum. The loudest applause does not come from the stands; it comes from the empty seats. At Al-Ahli, supporters carry real weight, and that weight is now a variable inside personnel decisions. That is transparent, but it also puts the club in a position of buying reassurance rather than buying need. There is a further consequence that gets less attention. In an upcoming registration window, the scouting file is normally the sporting director's output. With the position vacant, targets identified under the previous regime risk not being carried forward with the same sense of ownership. Nobody defends a list they did not write. That is especially true when the accusations touch contractual files, because incoming leadership tends to distrust what it inherits, and the safe instinct is to slow down or reopen live negotiations. Behind this story sits a labour market few people watch. Elite sporting directors track each other closely. A public authority dispute at a heavily invested club becomes a precedent question for the whole senior candidate pool. If you are good and you have options, you do not take a role the previous occupant just left over a lack of authority — unless the club publishes the remit in advance. That is why the most important information in the coming weeks will not be the name of the appointee, but whether a scope of authority is announced alongside it. One more detail is worth recording: nothing in the source involves a coaching change. Poor results are cited as a cause, yet the pressure was discharged at the administrative layer, not on the bench. For now, the coaching staff is more secure than the boardroom. That is an unusual equilibrium at a results-driven club, and it holds only as long as results hold. Once the administrative shield is gone, attention moves onto the pitch. I want to step away from the common reading here. The familiar reading is that Al-Ahli is in chaos and needs someone new. A second reading, closer to the evidence, is that the sporting director's role at Al-Ahli is under-powered by design, and the visible turmoil is a symptom rather than a cause. Two men leaving one chair inside a single reporting window usually says less about two individuals than about one job. When a position carries accountability while decision rights sit above it, you do not recruit strong people. You recruit people who tolerate it a little longer. The headline also warrants plain speaking. The word corruption sits at headline level, while the body supplies unnamed accusations, a categorical denial from the person targeted, and no investigating authority or formal proceeding of any kind. The headline's evidentiary weight exceeds the article's own. For anyone working in this trade, that is a reason to read the body and set the top aside. Al-Ahli is not the only club with an authority-delimitation problem. But in a league where rivals are resourced at comparable levels, and with competitions running continuously and offering no administrative quiet period, organisational instability becomes a genuine competitive disadvantage rather than merely bad public relations. The rhythm of a match is only audible when you put your ear to the grass. So is the rhythm of a club's operation, and it has been very audible in recent weeks. Between now and the next transfer window, the internal signal to watch is not a name. It is a document. If the next sporting director's appointment comes with a published scope of authority, Al-Ahli has diagnosed the illness correctly and is treating it. If only a name comes, the chair remains empty regardless of who is sitting in it. Every move begins with a bad touch. The question of this season is whether Al-Ahli has worked out where its bad touch happened, or whether it will simply keep changing the player.