Flemming Berg explains role of Sundowns sporting director

The Danish administrator arrived at Chloorkop in April 2022 and has really shaken things up, using his experience as a former scout for Chelsea and the football federation in his native country to good effect.

Speaking at the Business of Football network session over the weekend, Berg shared the Sundowns way.

"We have so many situations when I come to a club or when I was doing my FIFA work and coming to different federations or different clubs, I'd think but why are you doing it like that? Then [they'll say] well, we've always done it like that. There was not really a reason as to why it was done like that,” Berg said.

“We have a lot of examples and one of the things that happened a lot to me in Denmark as well was that, there were some fantastic structures in place but the background of the structures was not founded in the culture that we wanted.

“You have to define your culture first, what is it you want and then you do the structure after. If we want talent development and that is the most important for us. We have to do structures that build the culture we want."

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One of Berg’s biggest drives is developing the youth, and he discussed building a strategy to improve that at Sundowns.

"I tell you, we want to win with Sundowns, also in the youth categories, no doubt but we want to win because we have the best players. Not because we have the best team or because we have the most developed players or the physically strong players,” he added.

“We want to win because we have the best talent, that should be why we are winning and because of that, it means that when we are in under13, we don't have a chance in under13, we can't win that league.

“We become number two or number three but we can't win it because we are in general ahead of our opponents because we don't select players like that. We accept that because our culture is that we have to produce talent for teams later.

“Already in under15, they've grown up some of these players. When we have a very, very talented 2008 group as we have this year which is under16, we don't have one under17 player in our under17.

Not one, we only have under16 players because we have a very talented group. We knew we took a chance there because we could have mixed them up with some older players and we could have been sure of winning the league."