Ex-sporting director has officially moved on.
Angel City FC announced on Tuesday the departure of Eni Aluko, by mutual consent. The club’s release says she will be moving back to England full-time to pursue her broadcasting career and other opportunities.
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— Angel City FC (@weareangelcity) January 17, 2023
Aluko was hired as ACFC’s first sporting director in May 2021, and oversaw the construction of the NWSL expansion club’s inaugural roster in 2022. However, last August Angela Hucles Mangano was named Angel City general manager and Aluko was reassigned to a “director of recruitment” role.
To be fair, the writing looked on the wall for this for some time after the shake-up in the front office last year. While some of the new players to the NWSL were successful for Angel City, such as Jun Endo and Vanessa Gilles, others did not seem to have the trust of head coach Freya Coombe, such as Allyson Swaby and Stefany Ferrer Van Ginkel, the latter who was signed to great fanfare and barely played in 2022 despite Angel City having a small squad.
In the meantime, Aluko spent a good deal of time out of California last year, working in broadcast for the Euros in England and the World Cup in Qatar, and it looks like she’ll be getting plenty of work in front of the camera moving forward. Whether she will go to another club to work in a front office capacity remains to be seen, and we’ll see how Angel City’s roster comes together under Hucles Mangano for the 2023 season.
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